The pundits busy divining the reasons Herman Cain won that Florida straw poll so handily can’t be blamed—it was a compelling spectacle and a distinctly satisfying one as straw poll results go. To have listened to the candidate’s prescriptions in his speech to the delegates Saturday was to see why. Everything he told the audience had been said, in one way or another, by most of the leading Republican candidates. The difference here was—is—Mr. Cain’s unfailing capacity to speak as though from a core of fire deep inside him. An irresistible strength—as is the mordant humor he brings to the battle.

So it happens that he can deliver a steely jibe about defense cuts (“You don’t put a bull’s-eye on the backs of our men and women in uniform”) or the way America’s wars must be fought (“The mission is victory. . . . If we are not in it to win it, we will not be in it”) and make audiences feel they’d never heard anything so bracing. . . .

An early response to the Florida poll results came from a friend, historian Alan C. Kors, who observed in mock puzzlement: “So, the ‘Tea Party racists’ in a Republican straw poll chose the self-made black Herman Cain—mathematician and successful businessman—son of a cleaning woman and a janitor, as their choice of nominee for the presidency of the United States. Well! What a bigoted group, what a caste society!”

It’s an observation whose point wouldn’t be lost on Herman Cain.

By ZOLTAN HAJNAL

Lost in the GOP’s euphoria over its landslide midterm victory is the fact that the Republican Party has almost become a whites-only party. Its strategy may win seats now, but it will lose over the long run.

Republicans won big in 2010 primarily because they won big among white voters. The 60% of the white vote that Republicans garnered last Tuesday is, by most estimates, the highest proportion of the white vote that the GOP has won in any national election since World War II.

Relying on white support is not a new strategy for the party. In 2008, 91% of the votes that John McCain received in his presidential bid came from white voters.

The problem for Republicans is two-fold. First, whites may currently be the majority but they are a declining demographic. The proportion of all voters who are white has already declined to 75% today from 94% in 1960. By 2050, whites are no longer expected to be a majority of the U.S. population. (more…)

Tim Scott at his office in Charleston. Scott will be the first black Republican congressman from the Deep South in more than a century Photo: AP