Chris Cillizza, Washington Post
- Quick — think of the three faces of the Republican party: Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich immediately come to mind.
What do these men all have in common? They are over 50 years old, male, white and staunchly conservative.
That — in a nutshell — is the problem facing Republicans today, an imbroglio cast in sharp relief by a new analysis by Gallup of more than 26,000 interviews conducted in May.
Nearly nine in ten (89 percent) Republicans are white with the vast majority of those people describing themselves as “conservative” (63 percent). Just seven percent of Republicans are either Hispanic (five percent) or black (two percent).
Compare that to the composition of those who call themselves Democrats — 65 percent white, 19 percent black and 11 percent Hispanic — in the Gallup data and you quickly have a sense of the enormity of the problem for Republicans as they try to re-brand (and re-imagine) themselves.
