What happens if President Obama gets another term? What about if the tax code changes so “job creators” are taxed like everyone else and the number of jobs don’t decrease? What if the Affordable Care Act improves our health and doesn’t bankrupt us? What if gay marriage is legalized at the federal level and has no ill effect whatsoever on society? What if women having access to free contraception actually improves our society?

What would those things mean? Is it permanently the end of 30 years of trickle-down economics? Is it the end of Reagan Republicanism? Is the time when the Right could exploit so-called value voters over? Thanks to shifting demographics, we may find out. From “2012 Or Never,” clear-eyed analysis of the political scene by New York‘s Jonathan Chait:

“‘America is approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course,’ announces the dark, old-timey preamble to Paul Ryan’s ‘The Roadmap Plan,’ a statement of fiscal principles that shaped the budget outline approved last spring by 98 percent of the House Republican caucus. Rick Santorum warns his audiences, ‘We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority.’ Even such a sober figure as Mitt Romney regularly says things like ‘We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy,’ and that this election ‘could be our last chance.’

The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that ‘freedom’ is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a ­natural-majority coalition for Democrats.”