Piggybacking on gjohnsit's excellent diary from earlier today, I'd like to make a few points.
People keep talking about how the Republican Party is doomed in the future because of "demographics," meaning, essentially, that groups that are favorable to the Republican Party are dying off and they're being replaced with groups that are favorable to the Democratic Party -- Hispanics, young people, Hispanic young people, what have you. The Republican solution to demographic change, right now, seems to be to slap minority faces on the same old terrible ideas (I'm looking at you, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) and maybe passing an immigration reform bill that, if it ever actually passes, will be so watered down as to be meaningless. In other words, Republicans aren't really going to do much of anything to appeal to people who they don't already appeal to. Any "solution" they have tends to be limited to this sort of pandering, or just plain making it more difficult for people who don't view the Republican Party favorably to vote.
Sound crazy? No, they know what they're doing.
Ever since the end of World War II, the Democratic Party has been interested solely in winning elections. The conservative movement -- which these days is synonymous with the Republican Party, but that certainly wasn't the case in the days of Eisenhower and Rockefeller -- has been primarily interested in moving the country to the right. Barry Goldwater was never going to win the election of 1964, but he succeeded in the conservative movement's goal. By 1980, Ronald Reagan, who basically ran on the same ideas as Goldwater, was by no means a moderate of any sort, but the country had shifted far enough to the right that Reagan's ideas were no longer considered so out there. And by 2000, George W. Bush could run on a platform similar to Reagan's and be considered very mainstream. By 2013, Reagan almost looks like a flaming liberal (at least, in terms of his actual record) compared to the Tea Party.
See what's going on? By focusing on winning elections, the Democratic Party has won a few elections -- but the continuous, conservative movement-guided push of the far right boundary of the Overton window has meant that the center has shifted. And so has the far left boundary. Because of this, even the Democrats who have won the White House have become considerably more conservative. As much as conservatives like to point to Jimmy Carter as an example of how liberal policies fail, Carter was well to the right of FDR or even LBJ. Bill Clinton, who agreed to gut the welfare state, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, capital gains tax cuts and free trade with China, was no liberal. And Barack Obama? By the time Obama entered office, the Overton window had moved so far to the right that the Democratic health care plan was the Heritage Foundation's alternative to the Clinton health care plan. Not only is Obama to the right of Clinton and Carter, and an archconservative compared to FDR, he's arguably even to the right of Eisenhower. Eisenhower, after all, signed the Interstate Highway system into law. Obama hasn't even proposed anything with that kind of a progressive vision.
So, how does this relate to the "demographic change" phenomenon? Those who focus on demographic change are only focused on which party wins elections. Sure, demographic change may produce more voters who are inclined to vote for the Democratic Party -- and fewer voters who are inclined to vote for the Republicans.
But that's not the conservative movement's (and, by extension, the Republican Party's) goal. They know what they're doing. If the Republican Party moves to the left, in order to appeal to more of these new voters, they might win more elections, but they're not all that interested in winning more elections if it means electing more liberal politicians.
If they stand hard on the right, and even move further to the right, the Democrats have to move even further to the right to find the political center. The conservative movement doesn't particularly care if they lose elections. If they shift the political center further to the right, well, all those new Democratic voters will be electing politicians who are the ideological equivalent of Ronald Reagan.
Is that what you want? Then, sure, keep telling yourselves that demographic change will save us all.