Demographics

Republicans are drawing more and more of their support from an increasingly shrinking pool of White Males and Evangelical Christians.

This is why Rand Paul and his Libertarians (I really wish they had chosen a better self-identification like ‘Selfish Randian Nutjobs’ just as I wish Corporatist Democrats had used anything except ‘Liberal’ since they’re nothing but ‘Bootlicking Billionaire Courtiers’) are so important to the future of the Party because they’re the only ones in the room that don’t have a foot in the grave.

Likewise the impassioned debate about Immigration (where mainstream Business Republicans are eager to toady to their Masters who want cheap and easily exploitable Labor and which is being spun as ‘outreach’ to more socially conservative demographics)  and their Voter Suppression (about which there is hardly any debate).

They’re desperate and they know that they have a constantly declining ability to influence national policy before they literally die out.

Just so the NRA-

American gun ownership and hunting rates at record lows, survey says

Associated Press

Tuesday 10 March 2015 10.48 EDT

The number of Americans who live in a household with at least one gun is lower than it’s ever been, according to a major American trend survey that finds the decline in gun ownership is paralleled by a reduction in the number of Americans who hunt.

According to the latest General Social Survey, 32% of Americans either own a firearm themselves or live with someone who does, which ties a record low set in 2010. That’s a significant decline since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when about half of Americans told researchers there was a gun in their household.

The drop in the number of Americans who own a gun or live in a household with one is probably linked to a decline in the popularity of hunting, from 32% who said they lived in a household with at least one hunter in 1977 to less than half that number now.

…

(Guns) are concentrated in fewer hands than they were in the 1980s, the General Social Survey finds. The 2014 poll finds that 22% of Americans own a firearm, down from a high of 31% who said so in 1985.

…

The survey also finds a shrinking gender gap in personal firearm ownership as a result of a decline in the percentage of men who own one, from 50% in 1980 to 35% in 2014.

Maximalist Second Amendment advocacy is a failing ideology and as with Marriage Equality and Cannabis Prohibition you could see a rapid evolution in attitudes in a very short time.

And they know that this ground, once lost, will never be theirs again.