In the days immediately following the presidential election, Martin Mendez was in a blue funk.
A Latino Republican, he watched with dismay as poll after poll revealed that not only did President Barack Obama win a second term in office, but he did so with a sizable portion of the Hispanic vote.
The loss was especially painful for Mendez, who spent hours knocking on the doors of Hispanics around Denver in an effort to convince them to give the GOP a try.
"Out in the field in Denver, the comments I got ... the feedback was Mitt Romney's for the millionaires. We're these poor Hispanics, so we're going to vote for Obama because he's for the little guy," Mendez said, his voice full of exasperation.
"There is this class warfare game that Democrats play every single election cycle. We have to start now, reaching out now and not sit on the sidelines until the next cycle," he said.
The growing influence of Latinos, blacks, women and young people in America is not a new story. Demographers have known that at some point the country would become more non-white than white. Social scientists knew that the American landscape was changing, and that change would begin to have profound impact on the nation's shifting identity.
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Over the next several generations, the wave of minority voters -- who, according to U.S. Census figures released earlier this year, now represent more than half of the nation's population born in the past year -- will become more of a power base in places like Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. That hold will extend across the Southwest all the way to California, experts say.
The coming political revolution could result in a massive changing of the guard on nearly every level of government, potential cultural clashes from big cities to rural towns, and the type of political alliances that are now considered rare.
"I do think that the era that began with Ronald Regan where there was a conservative dominance powered by conservative voters and Southern whites. That era is over," said David Bositis, a senior political analyst, at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "Any candidate that wants to run a campaign [now] only at whites is going to lose."
Read more at CNN.
