The GOP must recalculate its focus to appeal towards minorities

It’s all over now.

President Obama has been reelected, Mitt Romney has been defeated and so the 2012 presidential election now belongs to history.

Naturally, many Democrats celebrated the Obama victory, clanking together glasses filled with organic red wine in celebration and jubilation. Meanwhile, the Republicans were left with dropped jaws in disbelief.

Fox News Republican strategist Karl Rove was so stunned on air that he refused to accept the news. Instead, he began frantically scribbling down his own statistics in a desperate attempt to find his own win for Romney, insisting that the election was not over yet, that Ohio was too early to call.

Rove carried on like this despite the fact that at the bottom of the screen, on the very same broadcast, Fox had flashed in bold patriotic letters, “Barack Obama is reelected as president.”

Poor Rove.

Even Fox News was forced to accept reality and actual numbers.

Taking a stance against empirical evidence is nothing new for the Republican Party.

In the past, we have seen countless conservative pundits and politicians deny everything from climate change to evolution, and insisting that the president was not born in Hawaii.

It should be no surprise then that this election season saw plenty of conservatives in the media and elsewhere ignoring mathematical data that pointed towards an

Obama victory, or at the very least a close race.

Former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, Fox News analyst Dick Morris, George Will and National Reviews Michael Barone were among many conservatives who were predicting not only a Romney win but a Romney landslide.

Romney himself was so confident of a win that he told the Boston Herald that he didn’t even write a concession speech.

Despite statistical impossibilities that the Republicans and Romney himself seemed to be convinced of, in the end the election was nothing even close to a landslide, or even a Romney win for that matter.

It was after the election that Gingrich, while licking his wounds, told opposingviews.com, “A whole group of us, frankly, misunderstood what was happening in the country.”

Bingo, Gingrich.

Gingrich and others misunderstood because the Republican “bubble” keeps them from seeing the cold hard facts, data and mathematical truths that disagree with Republican ideals.

Gingrich and the GOP have been residing in this bubble far too long, and it has blinded them from the reality of present-day America.

Minorities vote, minorities matter; they are not much of a “minority” anymore, and their concerns must be addressed.

According to exit polls taken on Election Day, Obama “won 93 percent of the African-American vote, 71 percent of the Hispanics and 73 percent of Asians.”

African-Americans compose the largest minority in the country, with Hispanic and Asian populations continually on the rise.

It is a fact that cannot be debated, nor can it be recalculated by Rove.

Presidential elections cannot be won any longer by just catering to the “ white male voter” that the likes of Gingrich and Rove seem to emulate so well.

As William Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution, told the Wall Street Journal, “We’re moving from a largely white and black population to one which is much more diverse and is a big contrast from what most baby boomers grew up with.”

It is time for the Republican Party to wake up to the changes in the electorate if they want to find any success in presidential politics in the future.

Americans of all backgrounds, faiths, colors and sexual orientations have families, and they all have lives with real issues they want addressed.

The Republican Party must address what is best for the collective good in this country and finally step out of their “bubble” into what the rest of us know as America.

Adam Collins is a senior political science major and a contributing writer for the Daily 49er.