Why the current GOP can't win Latinos

Charles Krauthammer, last seen predicting a Mitt Romney victory:

[Hispanics] should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example).

The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants. In securing the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney made the strategic error of (unnecessarily) going to the right of Rick Perry. Romney could never successfully tack back.

Republicans have reason to be freaked out. They continue to lose ground with Latinos, getting blown out 71-27 with one of the few groups to increase their raw vote and their share of the electorate this year. And there is little respite on the horizon'the median age of native-born Latinos is 18. Eighteen! Among all Latinos, including immigrants, it's just 27. That compares with 42 years old among non-Hispanic whites. In fact, Pew estimates that Latinos will double their share of the electorate by 2030, based strictly on birth and death rates.

Or put another way, nearly 67,000 Latinos turn 18 every month according to Pew, with 93 percent of them U.S. citizens and eligible to vote. Couple that with the over 100,000 elderly (and predominantly conservative) whites who die each month, and you're looking at over 3 million new potential Latino voters, and nearly 5 million fewer white voters. In just four years.

Or put yet another way: Texas will be a swing state by 2024.

So yeah, the Right has suddenly rediscovered math, and they have every reason to be freaked out. Panicked, really. Yet it remains amazing how incapable the Right is of properly and accurately evaluating data. Follow me below the fold as I disassemble Krauthammer's attempt to argue that conservatives can totally compete with Latinos.