The GOP has become the PWP (Party of White People)

Honestly, both major parties were White People's Parties back in the '50s. Then the Democrats grew a spine and stood up to their Southern flank, and Nixon with his Southern Strategy took them in...and than they took over the GOP. Getting the Southern white racist vote had corrupted the Democrats for many decades. Now it's done the same to the Republicans.

One of the more entertaining symptoms has been how the members of the infected Party who are not racist (but are willing to get in bed with them) turn themselves inside out to describe their party's racist policies as not that at all, nossir. Anything but.

The Democrats did it. Now the Republicans do it.

And they often fool themselves that they're just supporting perfectly reasonable color-blind policies--such as promoting strict laws aimed at preventing anyone who might not be qualified to vote from voting, in the interests of preventing voter fraud.

Guess who isn't fooled?

Most Americans who aren't White. Along with White Americans who arent' ideologically hogtied.

About a quarter of Hispanic Americans and around 5% of Blacks are so religiously conservative that they'll hold their noses and vote Republican.

The rest know better.

They've read the signs:

1. The personal hostility towards President Obama, a moderate centrist and devoted compromiser who's also a professed Christian and devoted family man with a far better record of personal conduct than many of the Republican leadership.

This is not to put Obama above criticism, and I certainly don't. But what I've seen even in the college town I live in, from many of the Republicans I know, is something more intense than policy disagreements can justify.

The Democrats dislike Romney for what he does. The Republicans hate Obama for what he is.

2. The hostility towards illegal immigrants--not to be confused with opposition to illegal immigration. The real culprits are the political patrons who want illegal immigration so they can bust unions and pay workers less, and the politicians who exploit ethnic tribalism. The illegal immigrants themselves are pawns, but they bear the brunt of GOP hostility, and to legal Hispanic immigrants and their offspring this hostility looks like hostility towards Hispanics in general.

3. A criminal justice system carefully crafted to deny Black men the vote, through differential prosecution and, in many GOP-dominated states, lifelong disenfranchisement for felons.

4. The national GOP campaign to prevent voter fraud, which to Blacks and many others looks like nothing more or less than a continuation to the South's century-long disenfranchisement system for blacks. Poll taxes have been rerplaced by reckless voter purges, efforts to make voter registration campaigns criminal offenses, poll "watchers" who confront Blacks and Hispanics trying to vote, and more.

5. The GOP convention: a rainbow of Blacks, Hispanics, Whites and other on the podium, speaking to a lily-white convention hall full of delegates, with few exceptions. Surprise--Blacks, Hispanics and ideologically-unimpaired Whites noticed the extreme disparity. The Democratic convention speakers looked the delegates on the floor. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians etc. noticed this as well.

6. Support for English as the official American language coupled with opposition to polyglot ballots.

7. Overtly racist stuff around the edges, always denied by the GOP leadership--T shirts showing Obama with a monkey body at rallies, hand-drawn placards saying bluntly racist things.

8. Constant use of dogwhistle code words and phrases, such as talk about welfare queens and moochers who just want to live on the government dole--no racist words; just racist vectors which American Blacks in particular have been hearing from whites in suits and ties all their lives.

I'm not saying all of this is wrong. I'm against illegal immigration myself, and for official English and English-only ballots, for that matter. Heck, I'm even for the "self-deportation" Obama ridiculed Romney for proposing.

I am saying that the aggregate effect of all this, taken together, is that the Republican Party has morphed into the Party of White People. In a country where Whites will be a minority in a few decades. Republican strategists know this and are sweating bullets about it. But they're trapped. Their tactics became their strategy, whether they wanted that to happen or not.