Midterm elections, which typically draw only one-third of the electorate, tend to be dominated by the most ideologically impassioned voters; traditionally, the NRA's constituents have been the most passionate about casting midterm ballots, whereas reformers generally have stayed home. But the recent Senate debacle may have sparked a sea change. According to a post-debacle poll sponsored by Fox News, 68 percent of Americans said they're more likely to support a candidate who wants to expand background checks; only 23 percent are more likely to back somebody who says No.

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Gee, what a surprise! Republicans are targeting Obamacare again, not only by staging yet another House repeal vote (the 37th, destined to fail like the other 36), but by invoking the dark specter of a runaway IRS. As we shall see shortly, the blatant lying has already begun.

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Shortly after his 1972 re-election victory, Richard Nixon plucked a chord of caution: "Second terms are almost inevitably downhill. The tendency is for an administration to run out of steam." He got that right. Midway through his second term, he waved bye bye on the South Lawn and flew off in disgrace.

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Republicans would be well advised to take a break from Benghazi and ponder their long-term status on the home front. A new U.S. Census report, having crunched the electoral numbers, warns that the future does not look grand for a diversity-challenged party that owes its very existence to white people.

The Census statisticians announced Wednesday that the 2012 presidential election was an historic watershed; for the first time, whites voted at a lower rate than black voters - 64.1 percent of eligible whites, 66.2 percent of eligible blacks. This happened partly because roughly two million whites who voted in 2008 opted to stay home in 2012, and partly because blacks (particularly black women) upped their participation.

Care to guess why black turnout spiked? It's party because blacks were ticked off at the GOP's vote suppression strategy. The party's varied attempts to keep blacks from voting in battleground states wound up backfiring. The Census report didn't make that specific connection, but the stats tell the story. Turnout jumped in key states like Ohio and Florida, where Republicans officials narrowed the early voting hours - a move that prompted even more blacks to show up and weather the long lines, to ensure that their votes would be cast.

Republicans might be tempted to argue that the last two elections were outliers, given the fact that a black guy headed the Democratic ticket. But the Census report looks at the big picture, and therein lies the GOP's abiding problem. Since 1996, the white share of the electorate has dropped by nine percentage points. The black share has risen by three points.

And, perhaps most importantly, the Hispanic share has risen by four points since 1996 (with the potential to go far higher, if the much-vaunted "sleeping electoral giant" ever fully awakens). Only 48 percent of eligible Hispanics voted in 2012 - far lower than the white and black participation rates - but their burgeoning population gives them a larger electoral share. Because of Hispanics, Republicans in the last two presidential elections lost states that were once GOP bastions - Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Florida. A growing Hispanic electoral share is irreversible.

The sane wing of the GOP already knows what the Census just confirmed - that the party is way too dependent on white voters (who are losing, and will continue to lose, electoral share); and that, going forward, the party is potentially at the mercy of minority voters (who are gaining share, and who generally detest Republicans).

"Biological differences"

Clearly the white party needs to become more diverse. The problem is, it doesn't have a clue how to do it. Just check out what happened this week on the immigration reform issue.

It's bad enough that Republicans are fighting among themselves on how or whether to craft a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants - as evidenced, for instance, by the conservative National Review's cover story, which eviscerated GOP Senator Marco Rubio for working so assidulously on his reform bill (cover headline: "Rubio's Folly"; editorial headline: "Rubio's Amnesty"). Worse yet (or, from the Democrats' perspective, better yet), a prominent conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, has arguably turned back the clock on GOP minority outreach by roughly 100 years.

Maybe that's too strong. Suffice it to say that Jim DeMint's policy shop has turned back the clock by reviving white-supremacist racial theories that date back 100 years.

As you may know already, it's been quite the sorry spectacle. For starters, Heritage - which helped kill immigration reform six years ago (thus souring Hispanic voters even further on the GOP), and which is now helmed by ex-GOP senator DeMint - put out a report claiming that a reform law would taxpayers trillions of bucks. Rubio and other pro-reform Republicans said the report was tantamount to junk science, because it omitted all the economic benefits of bringing those immigrants into the economy.

But the real fun commenced when one of the report's co-authors, Jason Richwine, was outed as a practitioner of crackpot racial theories. To wit, from his doctoral dissertation: "The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations....No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against."

His message in a nutshell: Whites inherently smart, minorities inherently stupid. As he himself wrote in a 2009 book review, "Biological differences cannot be wished away."

Way to go, Heritage - which late this week has been busy trying to distance itself from the same guy that it hired to be a Senior Policy Analyst in Empirical Studies. (A flak for DeMint said that Richwine's doctoral dissertation is "not a work product of the Heritage Foundation." Fine. But didn't Heritage check his credentials before it brought him aboard to work on immigration reform?)

Conservatives who understand the need to woo Hispanics have gone ballistic. Jennifer Korn, who runs the conservative (and pro-reform) Hispanic Leadership Network, said yesterday: "Richwine’s comments are bigoted and ignorant. America is a nation of immigrants; to impugn the intelligence of immigrants is to offend each and every American and the foundation of our country."

Hispanics are surely offended. And if the white party continues to offend vrtually every voter who isn't white, the next Census electoral roundup is sure to be even grimmer.

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House Republicans: "Benghazi-Benghazi-Benghazi!" Translation: "Our party needs to start slashing Hillary Clinton's sky-high high poll approval ratings, or else we'll be toast in 2016."

The get-Hillary political campaign debuted yesterday on Capitol Hill, where Republicans desperately sought to pump air into a flat tire. Led by Darrell Issa, the car alarm magnate who chairs the House Oversight Committee, the GOP's congressional arm had promised that its hearing would be a breathless expose of how Clinton (and her boss) failed to provide adequate security at the embattled U.S. consulate in Libya, thus making her (and him) complicit in the deaths of four Americans.

Their promise was not fulfilled. Hey, what a surprise.

I get what they're trying to do. Clinton is viewed favorably by 67 percent of Americans, and the GOP is no longer viewed as the party best suited to conduct foreign policy. The GOP owned that "brand" for four decades - but in the 2012 exit polls, Barack Obama topped Mitt Romney by a whopping 56-33 percent among voters who listed foreign policy as their top priority. So naturally the Republicans need to slime Clinton specifically and the Democrats generally.

If only the Republicans who seem to hear "Benghazi" in their tooth fillings would've been remotely as vigilant when George W. Bush was marching us into the wrong war on specious WMD evidence, or when Bush was dragging his feet on the 9/11 Commission probe, then perhaps they would deserve to be accorded some respect on issues of national security. But that's all in the past. Here's where they are now:

They've been hyping Benghazi as bigger than Watergate, in the belief that then-Secretary of State Clinton refused to saddle up the U.S. cavalry in time for it to ride to the rescue. They promised that yesterday's "whistle blowers" would make that failure abundantly clear. Didn't happen.

"Pulitzer Prize fiction"

Star witness Gregory Hicks, the number-two diplomat in Libya on that tragic night last September, admitted in his testimony that the closest U.S. fighter jets were situated at our base in Aviano, Italy - too far away to help: "It would take two or three hours for them to get on-site." He also declined to dispute the judgment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, who has long insisted that the jets could never have arrived in time. He also declined to dispute the judgments of ex-Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen and career envoy Thomas Pickering, both of whom said much the same thing in their independent report on Benghazi.

By the way, Thomas Pickering - a three-time ambassador under Ronald Reagan - had sought to testify at the House hearing, but Issa refused to let him. Instead, Pickering went on TV yesterday: "The notion of a quote 'coverup' has all the elements of Pulitzer Prize fiction....The aircraft at Aviano were two to three hours away, and there was no refueling aircraft available....I think that speaks for itself....There should be no controversy over that."

It's understandable that Issa wanted to freeze out dissenting witnesses. After all, someone might've pointed out that House Republicans during the past two years have cut the State Department's requested embassy security budget by $361 million. In 2011, Hillary Clinton even warned House Republicans that their security cuts would be "detrimental to America's national security." Issa certainly didn't want the public to hear any of that.

Worse yet for Issa, it appears that some Republicans just haven't gotten the memo that Benghazi is a top-tier national scandal. On TV yesterday, here was Tennessee Senator Bob Corker: "I've been able to read all the cables. I've seen the films. I feel like I know what happened in Benghazi. I'm satisfied."

Goodbye, gotcha

But I've saved the best for last. On the hilarity scale, it outweighs anything from Louis C. K. I advise you not to read the few paragraphs while drinking coffee, unless you relish the sensation of hot liquid surging through your nose.

In advance of the hearing, chairman Issa said he had the smoking gun: Clinton's signature on an April 19, 2012 cable that acknowledged a request by the embassy in Libya for more security - but that the request would not be granted. Issa touted this on Fox News (natch), declaring that Clinton had personally screwed the embassy, that she "outright denied security, in her signature in a cable."

Um, hello? According to the State Department's foreign affairs protocol manual, it is standard practice for the State communications center to "place the name of the secretary on all telegrams to post."

Clinton "signed" hundreds of thousands of cables, yet personally saw (much less personally signed) only a miniscule fraction of them. She "signed" a cable that advised State e-mailers to "AVOID USING ALL CAPITAL LETTERS - IT IS PERCEIVED AS SHOUTING!!!" She "signed" a cable that listed the new phone numbers for embassy employes in the Republic of the Congo. And she "signed" the Libya security cable that would've been handled - as a matter of longstanding policy, under presidents of both parties - far below her pay grade.

So much for Issa's "gotcha." He did try to raise the issue yesterday with his star witness, but Hicks shot it down. Hicks confirmed that the secretary of state's signature appears on every State Department cable.

Of course, if you looked at Fox News yesterday, you learned that Hillary Clinton is dead meat in 2016, thanks to Benghazi. Talking head Andrea Tantoros, for instance: "Republicans are going to use this against her...She should be blown out of the water, any chance of her to run!" Yeah whatever.

I can't help but recall Geraldo Rivera's infamous TV documentary about Al Capone. This was in 1986. Geraldo said he'd found the gangster's secret vault, and promised to open it on live TV. He intimated for weeks that the vault would be stuffed with cash and other forms of lucre, maybe even the remains of bodies. Geraldo hired a medical examiner, in case there were bodies. He alerted IRS agents, in case there was money. The big night finally arrived. On live TV, Geraldo opened the door. The big revelation: a few empty bottles.

I assume you get the metaphor.

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Mark Sanford banked on that happening, and he cashed in.

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You've heard of the movies Bad Teacher and Bad Santa? Someone should make a flick about Terry McAuliffe and call it Bad Candidate.

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So I was surfing cable TV the other night, when perchance I spied a screen logo that sent me into a tailspin: "Road to the White House." There it was, on C-SPAN. Yes, folks, we're only seven months removed from the 2012 election, but I guess it's game on for 2016.

Friday night's "Road to the White House" set the record for earliest episode ever, but it's probably not worth ruminating about how insane that is. To paraphrase David Axelrod, this is how we roll. The next crop of White House wannabes are jockeying already - as most vividly evidenced by Ted Cruz, the tea-partying Senate freshman from Texas whose rightward demagoguery conjures memories of Joe McCarthy.

It was Cruz who prompted C-SPAN to retool the old logo for 2016, because on Friday night he had the coveted speaking slot at South Carolina's Silver Elephant Dinner. Ever since the era of Ronald Reagan, this GOP dinner - in a state that typically makes or breaks Republican candidates - has been a first step on the long primary trail. And Cruz's dinner gig capped three days of buzz. The buzz was triggered by a National Review story - a trial balloon about Cruz's aspirations, floated by his "friends and confidants." Cruz himself characterized the buzz as "wild speculation," a Washington dodge akin to a non-denial denial. Meanwhile, he's going to a fat-cat fundraiser on May 29. This is how the game is played.

This is also the happiest news that Democrats have received since they learned last August that right-wing-ideologue Paul Ryan was joining the 2012 Republican ticket. If they were smart, they'd start boosting Cruz at every opportunity...but wait, they're doing it already. Here was James Carville yesterday, on ABC News:

"I think he is the most talented and fearless Republican I've seen in the last 30 years...He just keeps plowing ahead. He's going to be something to watch."

Paul Ryan, who last November couldn't even carry his own home town, at least has one foot in reality. Cruz, on the other hand, dwells in the realm of paranoid fantasy. For starters, he claims that the United Nations has a plot to ban golf courses (he has assailed a non-binding U.N. treaty that, in his words, would "abolish 'unsustainable' environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads"). No wonder Carville is so bullish.

Cruz also claims that "Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government" have infiltrated the Harvard Law School faculty (he has never named any), he claims that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel took money from America's enemies (he has never document this), he says that "I don't think what Washington needs is more compromise," he says that his Senate Republican colleagues are "a bunch of squishes" because they permitted gun reform to be debated on the Senate floor, and on and on.

Goldwater and Edsel

Imagine how this guy would do in a presidential election, which requires winning tens of millions of votes beyond the lunatic fringe...but wait, his "friends and confidants" have an answer for that. From the National Review story:

"His supporters argue that he’d be a Barry Goldwater type - a nominee who would rattle the Republican establishment and reconnect the party with its base - but with better electoral results." Really, a "Barry Goldwater" type? Do they remember what happened to the purist conservative candidate in 1964? He lost 44 states and 61.1 percent of the popular vote.

That's like a car company ballyhooing its new sedan as a Ford Edsel type, only with better sales.

Cruz is the purest incarnation (thus far) of conservative Republican extremism, an election disaster waiting to happen - as most Republicans with an ounce of sense surely recognize. When asked the other night about Cruz, Senate colleague Lindsey Graham replied: "Where is America? It's in the right-center. It's not in the right ditch."

Cruz would have plenty of competition, of course. Fellow Senate tea-partyers Rand Paul and Marco Rubio are also in early jockeying mode - personally, I look forward to the debates, when Cruz attacks Rubio for pushing immigration reform, and bathes in the applause from the usual 99 percent white audience - and we can surely expect to hear the hapless Republican establishment plead for at least a scintilla of mainstream moderation. Indeed, the prospect of Cruz condescendingly lecturing Chris Christie on his refusal to endorse 100 percent gun rights, on Christie's alleged squishiness, and Christie lashing back by going all Jersey on Cruz, to the accompaniment of boos....

Hey, it's never too early to stock up on popcorn. Maybe C-SPAN should call it "Road to the Right Ditch."

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Follow me on Twitter, @dickpolman1