U.S. voting demographics working against GOP

Republicans evidently believe voters are stupid. How else does one explain Idaho GOP's platform plank to repeal the 17th amendment that allows for the direct election of U.S. senators that was enacted since my grandma was born?

Maybe they're right. Maybe the GOP should also repeal the 19th amendment allowing women to vote too. After all, didn't women voters elect Obama 55 percent to Romney's 44 percent? Without the biggest voting block, i.e. women voters, number 44 isn't Obama. That much is clear.

Only Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama were voted on by women, none of which has a face on Mount Rushmore. And only TR and Lincoln's faces were directly voted on, while Washington's and Jefferson's weren't. Andrew Jackson was the first U.S. president voted on in a polling booth.

So maybe voting is overrated? After all, isn't that the whole idea behind red states (like Idaho) resisting mail-in voting or even permanent absentee voting? "Less is more" for the right, right? Didn't 42 million fewer vote in 2010 when Pelosi lost her gavel than in 2012? We all know how 2012 went. And didn't the GOP applaud the U.S. Supreme Court throwing out the key section of the Voting Rights Act further lowering voter turnout?

My point is this: Does the GOP want to survive or not? Idaho's GOP suffers from myopia. Idaho needs to take a peek at how the party is doing nationally and rethink voting entirely. Sixty-six percent of the country in 15 different polls by 6 different pollsters view the party unfavorably. Only 29 percent favor the GOP nationally. Why?

Because the GOP is now where paranoia has shifted from a mental illness into a political choice, fed by an angry white-male driven society in which extremists, armed with the Internet, radical radio editorializing, and cable news, easily find like-minded extremists, isolate themselves from those who disagree (in states like Idaho, Oklahoma or South Carolina maybe? ... I have lived in ALL THREE!) and convince themselves that they are the majority.

This year six Republican U.S. senators are facing challengers from the right this primary season. One such senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, would handily win in November. Yet he actually said in 2002 that unwed mothers had no business teaching children in school! That's how conservative he is, and he may lose to another political outlier.

And look at what is happening in Boise: Every Idaho college represented in Coeur d'Alene opposes carrying firearms on campus, but the boys in the Boise legislature know better than our college administrators or local police do? Really? Boise might be on another planet, instead of just another timezone. Isn't Salem, Olympia and Helena easier to reach from here geographically as well as politically?

Unless the Republican party is willing to change course from preventing voting blocks from voting, it should consider renaming itself the Caucasian Male Caucus, because that's what it is.

Nationally, 3 out of 4 Asian-Americans do not vote GOP. Ditto Latino Americans. These are the two fastest growing demographics. And it's the Asian and Latino demographics that have a higher rate of new entrepreneurs, too. They are the new job creators. White birth rates are in retreat in 43 states according to the 2010 census. Forty-three!

GOP survival solution? Open, non-partisan (non-presidential) primary elections where the top two vote getters, regardless of party, run-off in November. Isn't most everyone here in Red Idaho voting GOP anyway? Would a unified whacko-free GOP be so bad? Or shall we continue the circular firing squad approach with our in-party bickering perpetuated by the few?

Split the vote enough times in our current partisan primaries and the family dog wins at some point. But I doubt even Fido would regulate animal farm picture taking, or support guns at NIC, or support animal trapping on public land like Boise does.

Mike Reno is a Post Falls resident.