Why Whip Steve Scalise should step aside: Our view Speech to a white supremacist group in 2002 certainly does not help GOP survive and prosper.

The Editorial Board | USA Today

To be politically viable, Republicans desperately need to attract a more minority voters. Their troubles doing so explain why they lost the popular vote for president in five of the past six elections, why they start the 2016 cycle at a disadvantage, and why many state races will get a lot tougher for them in the future as the nation continues to diversify.

Yet their push to make the necessary changes has been halting at best. They spent much of the past five years attacking President Obama with a ferocity that has turned off many ethnic voters. And they spent much of the past two years squabbling over, and ultimately rejecting, comprehensive immigration reform, a measure that could have helped them make inroads with Latino voters.

And as a new Congress and a new election cycle begin, the party has something else to contend with. Incoming House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., now admits to having spoken to a white supremacist group in 2002 while serving in the Louisiana Legislature.

Needless to say, this will not be good for the GOP. If Scalise had a sense for what is in the best interest of his party, he would step aside before formally assuming his position in January.

That might be unlikely to happen, however. Scalise responded by asserting that he was unaware of the nature of the group, a claim that stretches credulity for any savvy politician working his home turf. The group was founded by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as a former candidate for governor of Louisiana..

Scalise is an apt symbol for the GOP's problem with minority voters, and its own internal struggles for direction. He is a staunch conservative with a voting record utterly lacking in centrist or pragmatic positions. He is also a man hand-picked for leadership by the more mainstream speaker, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio. In that sense, he represents both the uncompromising right's efforts to infiltrate leadership and leadership's efforts to control its extremists.

The Scalise wing of the party, which includes many who identify themselves with the Tea Party movement, as well as other social conservatives, is a potent voting bloc. But it is also a major problem for the GOP going forward. Relatively quiescent during most of George W. Bush's administration, it rose up in anger when the former president tried to sell his party on comprehensive immigration reform, and then exploded into a full-fledged movement after the election of America's first African-American president.

Its positions on matters such as budgets and defense tend to shift with the political moment. But its desire to confront President Obama at every step and its opposition to immigration reform are seemingly immutable.

Make no mistake, the GOP will be hampered in its effort to appeal to non-white voters if one of its top officials has a connection to a racist group, even a tenuous one from 12 years ago.But the party's bigger problem is that it has legions of voters and office holders who push policies on a daily basis that are antithetical to the interests of minority voters.

All it takes to see the demise of the GOP is to follow the demographic trend lines as millions of immigrants become U.S. citizens, or turn 18 if they are already citizens. In 2012, Mitt Romney took only 27% of Hispanic voters, 26% of Asian-American voters and 6% of African-American voters. A 2016 candidate who does the same would need 64% of white voters to win the popular vote. No non-incumbent president has done that at least since the 1920s.

And it only gets harder from there on. The party's advantage in state and local offices will erode. Its ability to win key governorships in big states will wane.

Republicans would do well to look at Scalise's troubles not as a typical scandal like the recent indictment of Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., who resigned Tuesday, nor as a minor bump in the road. They should use the moment to reflect on how they need to position their party to survive and prosper. If not, where a Louisiana congressman spoke in 2002 will be the least of their problems.

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