GOP’s reliance on white Christians has made its extinction inevitable: conservative

Demographic trends don't bode well for the Republican Party.

Writing in the Washington Post, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin points out that the GOP's reliance on old, white voters and Christians makes its eventual extinction inevitable. "After a while ... you run out of white evangelicals. That is precisely what is happening at an unexpectedly speedy pace," Rubin writes.

According to a recent Pew poll, there's been a 12 percent drop in the past decade of people who described themselves as Christian. "The ranks of the most progressive segment of the electorate, religiously unaffiliated ("atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular’ ") have risen to 26 percent, a nine-point bump since 2009," Rubin writes.

"The problem for Christian affiliation gets worse with each generation," she adds. The decline of Christianity in the U.S. dooms the GOP because of the electoral playbook they've pursued for decades.

"Republicans have created a zero-sum game wherein the increasingly racist and radical appeals to white Christians needed to drive high turnout alienates a substantial segment of the growing nonwhite and/or unaffiliated electorate," she writes.

"They are doubling down on a diminishing pool of voters as they crank up fierce opposition among the fastest-growing segments (millennials, nonwhites) of the electorate," she continues. "Soon, the math becomes impossible outside of highly gerrymandered congressional districts and rock-ribbed conservative states."