Ominously, although national presidential polls show a neck-and-neck race for the Presidency, or even a slight lead for GOP presidential nominee-presumptive Mitt Romney, the Electoral College maps tell a much grimmer story. According to the CNN electoral map projections, Obama leads the race by 247 to 206, with 270 delegates needed to win. Karl Rove’s electoral map shows Obama up 194 to 101 for Romney.

The fact that formerly deep red states like North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado are now up for grabs indicates that Romney has an uphill battle ahead of him.

But how can this be? Unemployment has been over 8 percent for 41 straight months and stands at 8.2%. The economy is growing at an anemic 1.5 percent. Deficits and debt are at an all time high with no end in sight. The price of gas routinely hits over $4 a gallon.

By any fair measure, Obama has been a failure on the economy. And don’t Americans vote primarily on the basis of the economy?

This simplistic argument gives hope to conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. He expects (or perhaps just hopes for) a 1980-like scenario where Reagan vaulted ahead of Carter in the final days of what had been a close race.

But the American electorate has changed quite a bit in the last 32 years.

Some pundits still don’t realize how much. Thus National Review’s Jim Geraghty starts off his 1980 vs. 2012 column (July 25, 2012) promisingly by noting “It’s a demographically different country.”

But he then informs us that the country was 79.5 percent white in 1980 while it is 72 percent white today. He concludes: “So if the racial demographic change amounts to only a small shift in favor of the Democrats, what societal trend has helped them?”

From there it is all downhill, as Geraghty [Email him] stresses the lack of a foreign policy crisis and the spread of early voting in sealing Romney’s doom.

Of course, non-Hispanic whites were actually down to 63.7% in the 2010 Census and are certainly less in 2012.

I went through the bother of registering for NRO’s online comments section and sent in a polite correction on Geraghty’s elementary error. Of course, it was never posted.

Far from causing a “small shift” to the Democrats, the racial transformation of the U.S. caused by over-immigration is the only major reason why the GOP is sailing into oblivion.

In 2008, McCain won 55 percent of the white vote and lost by a near-landslide. In 2000, Bush won 55 percent of the white vote and squeaked by with a win. Shouldn’t that tell Geraghty and other Conservatism Inc. operatives that something is going on?

The racial breakdown of the 2008 presidential race was as follows:

Whites 55% to 43% for McCain

Blacks 95% to 5% for Obama

Hispanics 67% to 31% for Obama

Asians 62% to 35% for Obama

The most recent polls show the same fatal trend in 2012: only whites support Romney in great numbers. Almost 90 percent of Republican votes come from whites. And Romney has yet to crack the 61% support of whites he likely needs to win. (It’s eminently doable—the GOP got 60% in its Congressional sweep in 2010).

Geraghty’s ignorance of the impact of demographics is unforgiveable, given that the magazine for which he writes once (pre-purge!) published a cover story that accurately predicted what would happen to Republican electoral prospects given unchecked immigration:

Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein presented the facts about the declining GOP majority in a National Review cover story in June 1997 [Electing a New People]. They crunched the numbers and predicted that 2008 would be the first year in which the demographic wave would catch up with Republicans. After that the prospects for electing Republican presidents would just get worse. They wrote:

Demography is destiny in American politics. This point was made brilliantly almost exactly thirty years ago, by Kevin Phillips in The Emerging Republican Majority (1968). In the shadow of the Democrats' long-dominant "Roosevelt coalition," and amid the wreckage and recrimination of the disastrous Goldwater defeat, Phillips boldly predicted a generation of Republican victories based on the persistent but dynamic pattern of ethnic politics. He has been triumphantly vindicated. But the Republican hour is rapidly drawing to a close. Not because the "Phillips Coalition" of the West and the South, of the middle class and urban blue-collar voters, is breaking up in the traditional manner. Instead, it is being drowned—as a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Act, which ironically became effective in the year Phillips's book was published. Nine-tenths of the immigrant influx is from groups with significant—sometimes overwhelming—Democratic propensities. After thirty years, their numbers are reaching critical mass. And there is no end in sight.

The fact that so few conservative and Republican pundits even know the facts of the demographic revolution is remarkable, given how thoroughly VDARE.com and others have documented this issue for over a decade.

The conservative rank and file seem to be even worse. Comments to Geraghty’s article hardly mentioned demographics. Most responders just bickered back and forth about whether Romney could be another Reagan.

But the blinders may be lifting. Last week, Rush Limbaugh approvingly read Pat Buchanan’s entire column to his audience on how immigration has swept away the GOP in California and promises to do the same thing nationwide.

Buchanan was as incisive as ever. He wrote:

Race, age and ethnicity are at the heart of the problem. And they portend not only the party's death in California, but perhaps its destiny in the rest of America. Consider. Almost 90 percent of all Republican voters in presidential elections are white. Almost 90 percent are Christians. But whites fell to 74 percent of the electorate in 2008 and were only 64 percent of the population. Christians are down to 75 percent of the population from 85 in 1990. The falloff continues and is greatest among the young. Consider ethnicity. Hispanics were 15 percent of the U.S. population in 2008 and 7.4 percent of the electorate. Both percentages will inexorably rise. Yet in their best years, like 2004, Republicans lose the Hispanic vote 3-to-2. In bad years, like 2008, they lose it 2-to-1. Whites are already a minority in California, and Hispanics will eventually become the majority. Say goodbye to the Golden Land.

The only serious counter to the demographic deluge facing Republicans: the Sailer Strategy—which is basically that the GOP should rally to its white base by appealing to its interests. Central to the Sailer Strategy: a time-out on immigration to stop the demographic displacement of whites.

Of course, the GOP elite has ignored this advice. It continues blindly pandering to Hispanics and others—who will not vote for it in significant numbers no matter what it does.

In a 2008 article for VDARE.com called “End of the Party?” I wrote:

Here is a scary thought: even if Obama turns out be as inept as Jimmy Carter, we might be stuck with him for 8 years.

Obama has indeed turned out to be inept, but he may be reelected anyway. If he gets a second term, Republicans, Conservatism Inc. and conservatives (not the same thing) will finally have to confront the demographic tidal wave that demoralized (if not destroyed) them in California and is now is spreading nationwide.

The only alternative will be partisan (and national) extinction.

Peter Bradley (email him) writes from Washington D.C.