The Obama campaign spent weeks playing up the contraception fight and pushing legislation to guarantee women equal pay for equal work — and then crowing about how women were fleeing the GOP. Obama got pushed into backing gay marriage more quickly than he wanted — but once he did, the campaign milked it for days to try to make Romney look like a throwback. The drumbeat on more affordable student loans has been constant. And now, the president is trying to drive a wedge between Romney and Hispanic voters with a sustained push to soften U.S. deportation policy. To many Republicans, the president’s strategy is very crass — and potentially very effective. The threat of being marginalized as an aging, almost all-white, mostly male party is real and worth fretting about, they say.

Republicans, meanwhile, are under no illusion they can keep up with Obama among these groups, or win a majority of gays, young people, women or Hispanics. But it’s the latter two groups that have them most unnerved — knowing that they likely hold the key to who wins the White House. Let’s start with Hispanics. The truth about politics is that Republicans — regardless of the nominee — are a mostly white party, and have been for decades. They get roughly 87 percent of their votes from whites — and rarely elect minority candidates at the national level.

Don't look now, but I hear tell that the Republican Party may be made up primarily of cranky old men. Even more surprising, the Obama campaign may be working to court groups other than "cranky old men" for November Yes, how very crass. Here the Republicans spend the last two years pushing an anti-birth-control, anti-brown-people, anti-gay-people, anti-worker-rights, anti-college-student agenda in every state and legislative body they control, and the Obama campaign may have the audacity to actually point that stuff out to the groups that have been hurt by it. How unfair! How gauche! That's not how we Republicans do things!So there you go. Republicans go out of their way to marginalize anyone who isn't a conservative white male, but then express dismay that all the folks they pick on just can't be convinced to vote GOP, and deem it uncouth for the other party to try to court those Americans themselves.

Not present in this particular story: a description of all the Republican response, which is to enact an unprecedented number of new hoops for Americans to jump through if they want to vote at all—new laws and purge efforts which just happen to target poor and minority voters. So yes, the Republicans do indeed have a plan for how to counter the fact that a majority of Americans who are not white male conservatives don't like them: keep them away from the polls.