Republican commentators like to confidently forebode the future recognizing that demographic trends are bringing southern and plains states a larger and larger proportion of the Electoral College. This fact is used to forecast the Right's increasing dominance on federal affairs and in the election of the president.
In reality, it is not as wonderful of a happening for the Republican establishment as they imagine. Even though dozen of electors have been sent southbound, the same, old practical necessities are true in the federal election: Republicans may enjoy a stronger base, but it still is true that the voting of states like Ohio, Florida and others remain the only things that can bridge into a Republican presidential victory.
The current election demonstrates this. Although news outlets, looking to keep voters on the edge of their seats will publish daily stories on how Mitt Romney may finally be rivaling the president's level of brute potential popular voters, in order to actually take the White House, Republicans must win the typical Florida and Ohio, gain at least North Carolina or Virginia and make great strides in New Mexico and Colorado. All the Democrats need do is hold their ground in one or two of those states to keep the Oval Office.
More fundamentally, although Republicans seem to be gaining those electors in Southern states, one should not neglect the people they represent. The relatively higher population in the South is due nearly entirely to migration from the North, Latin immigrants, and of course young people; all three groups are well-known to be relatively consistent blue voting blocks. Red states may be becoming more politically powerful, but they are becoming less red at the same time.
The Republican platform continues to fail to cater to any of the bases that will be making up the median voter in years to come. Any (hypothetical) sane Republican should realize that a heavy swath of very conservative, family-value Catholics come to this country everyday, but they run directly into Democratic arms due to the palpable anti-immigrant sentiment of the Right. While these voters could otherwise be a consistent block for the Republican Party, Republicans are too busy passing draconian immigration charters to notice.
As a worthy aside, these kinds of laws burden every arreste or person engaged with the police to prove their legality or citizenship; it's a guilty-until-proven-innocent proposition for which every law-abiding white-bread American has to carry around their 'papers'. What is confusing is why Republican state legislatures continue to try to pass these laws when federal and state courts continue to rule them unconstitutional, especially given the federal government's constitutional power to provide for immigration policy.
In addition the queerness is that until very, very recently, the Republican and Democratic platforms toward immigration were essentially identical in the Bush period. Even then, similar policy was superseded by the awkward jingoism so common in Republican circles; the burden of conservative parties is that the racist elements of society tend to join their constituency, and until very recently, overtly racist people had to be placated nearly explicitly.
Additionally southern blacks might be far more ready than whites to vote for a pro-Israel, family values, anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion agenda, but blacks still understand the tangible link between Republicans' alleged concern for states' rights and de facto discrimination (this shouldn't be construed as saying that Republicans are racist, only that they parrot the previous generation's clandestine mechanism for allowing it and stifling the civil rights movement).
Republicans' other problem is they youth they refuse. This time, right now, not in ten years, is the best time for a rebirth of the New Right, and in a far more genuine way than it ever existed under the iron scepter of Reagan. The recent Republican National Convention demonstrated that, in their insistence of purveying the charade of unity under nominee Romney, Republicans don't mind violating or changing set rules to disqualify or bar minority delegates (most obviously those of Ron Paul) from the floor. Sooner or later however the party has to come to grips with the fact that the paleoconservative movement is in fact the endogenous outcome of a discontentment with the Republican establishment based firmly on the values and assumptions that all Republicans themselves hold. It seems like the Paul crowd will continue to make progress in the younger ranks, and it'd be best not to antagonize them.
Whether these young people can successfully take the reigns of the Republican party now is unforeseeable, but what seems inevitable is that the next generation of Republicans is firmly in the quasi-libertarian camp, even if they are nudged from the party itself.
Conservative parties are professing identity crises non-stop; they are always working against and criticizing the extremeness of any coming tide. What a conservative party adopts as its dogma symbolizes what has become the old values of the society at large. Strangely enough, the Republican Party seems to be on its own wavelength, actively reversing the clock.