Republican politicians and strategists continue to sift through the election results to figure out just what happened in an election where they thought they could win the White House and Senate and wound up with neither.
We've written lots about this process of self evaluation -- and we'll write plenty more about it in the days to come. (You should also check out Jonathan Martin's piece over at Politico on how the closed loop of conservative media complicates GOP efforts to regroup.)
In the meantime, there's a single chart that we keep coming back to -- we noted it in a post last week -- because it seems to perfectly illustrate the Republicans' political problems heading into the 2014 midterm elections as well as the 2016 and even 2020 presidential campaigns.
Here it is:
That only 11 percent of Republicans' total vote came from non-whites tells you everything you need to know about the large-scale demographic challenges that Republicans must confront. (The fact that 44 percent of all Democratic votes came from non-whites paints the Republican challenge in even starker terms.) That the white vote as a total of the overall votes has declined in every election since 1992 and dropped to just 72 percent in 2012 just adds to Republicans' problems.
Those data points suggest that Republicans cutting a deal with President Obama on immigration reform seems -- politically speaking -- like a total no-brainer. But can they make it happen?