On Huff Post, Thomas B. Edsall spends a good bit of time breaking down just how demographically stuck in the mud the Republican Party is. Having turned off Latinos its beyond-hostile stance on immigration, it has missed a growth opportunity because of its bigoted base of blue collar, religious conservative voters (primarily in the South), a demographic that is their only growth area.

With Republican party leaders so constrained by ideological blinders that none of their positions is likely to produce gains among non-white minorities, especially Hispanics, the GOP is finding it has no real alternative but to revert to a “white voter” strategy.

To some extent, it’s working. The party’s opposition to President Obama’s agenda — particularly his cap-and-trade energy proposal and health care reform plan — is resonating strongly with disaffected white Democratic voters. Republican grievances about Obama, combined with race-baiting commentary from the far-right ideologues who have become some of the most dominant voices of the modern GOP, have led to a precipitous drop in the president’s approval ratings among whites.

Polling data shows that members of this group who took a chance on Obama  (most never really supporters of Barack Obama in the first place), are “coming home” to the party of last resort. The GOP and its unappointed leadership — Rush, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter — don’t believe in broadening the party, and the alienated sheeple have clung onto the race-baiting and sheer lunacy (the Birthers) that leaves the party looking even more extreme and desperate. Take a look at the photos in this post — taken by BlueNC’s Jerimee Richer last week of the teabagger crowd protesting the President’s town hall on health care in Raleigh . This is the Base the GOP has to expand.  

The appeal of the anti-Obama agenda has proven to be particularly strong among whites of low and moderate incomes. The Pew Center, tracking evaluations of Obama’s job performance, found in a July 30 report that there “has been essentially no shift in opinion among affluent whites [but] among whites with annual family incomes of less than $75,000, Obama’s approval ratings have declined substantially (from 57% in June to 47% today). Assessments of Obama’s performance remain high among African Americans (85%).”

…Republican pollster Bill McInturff notes that his party must make substantial gains among Hispanic voters or be relegated to minority status. But that just isn’t likely.

With a solid majority of Republican senators opposed to the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina nominee to the Supreme Court, and a solid phalanx of adamant Republican opposition to any immigration reform which provides a path to permanent residency of illegal immigrants, the GOP has no real chance of increasing its share of the Hispanic vote.