Barack Obama’s resounding victory in the 2008 presidential election reached every corner of this nation - and perhaps most striking in Indiana, a state that had not gone for a Democrat since 1964.

That was the year Lyndon B. Johnson carried the state in his landslide win over Republican Barry Goldwater. The notion that Obama - a candidate all the television talking heads said would have trouble gaining the support of working-class white voters - could carry deep Republican red Indiana would have seemed outlandish  in early 2008.

Obama would indeed carry Indiana,  just barely, by a slim 26,000-vote margin, and one prominent Republican operative knows why. Mike Murphy, a former key adviser to John McCain, writes in the current Time magazine article that “it was a huge shock to the GOP when Barack Obama won Republican Indiana last year.”

Even more shocking, Murphy said, is how Obama did it. Latino voters in Indiana,  he wrote, delivered the state for Obama. Exit polls showed that the 58,000-vote margin among Hispanic voters in Indiana gave the Democrat the edge he needed to defeat McCain, the Republican candidate.

“That’s right, GOP,”  Murphy writes, “you’ve entered a brave new world ruled by Latino Hoosiers, and you’re losing.”

Murphy’s magazine piece goes on to say what many in his party believe these days. Unless the Republican Party begins to pick up support among Hispanics in the U.S, it stands little chance of winning national elections again. By 2030, the changing demographics of America are such that Murphy says Latinos will make up about 20 percent of the national vote.

Murphy calls Texas “the crucial buckle for the GOP’s Electoral College belt,” and this state will become majority Hispanic in the coming decades, putting the GOP’s political hold here in doubt if current trends continue.

Given these basic facts, it will be interesting to see how this state’s two Republican senators vote on the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Prediction: John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison will both vote no on Sotomayor given their fear of alienating the GOP base, which in staunchily against her nomination.

And so, the overwhelming number of Republican senators that are likely to vote against the well-qualified Sotomayor will further move the party toward what Murphy calls the “GOP ice age.”

That’s too bad. Until the GOP calls off what Murphy calls “the Republican congressional jihad on immigration,” it’s likely to get little if anywhere with Latinos in the U.S.

In a changing world where Latino Hoosiers are deciding elections, Republicans will keep losing elections until the party thaws out.

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