Reality Check

   The Republican Party has been retrenching and refocusing its strategies, emphasizing its support among the white conservative middle class voters, and maintaining that Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were the result of low turnout from its preferred base, and an unusually high turnout from minorities.
   Therefore, the thinking goes, it's time to focus on the "missing white voters" and get them to show up at the polls, while the GOP strategy continues to slash away at social benefits which, they imply, go primarily to minorities and that members of the white working class don't need them.
   The past two presidential elections were an anomaly, the thinking continues, and that pattern won't continue in future elections.
   Reality check: Of jobless workers who collect unemployment benefits -- 60 percent are white. Many families on Medicaid are white, likewise many seniors on Medicare. Hispanics -- whether they consider themselves white, non-white or "other" are the fastest growing population segment in the country. Yet the GOP wants to pin its hopes on "downscale, rural, Northern whites," as political analyst Sean Trende put it, adding that Republican-sponsored immigration reforms "probably help" the party's "outreach efforts to Hispanics."
  
   Given the tone of the diatribes against newcomers generally and of Hispanic newcomers specifically, that hope has a hollow ring to it.
   Moreover, cutbacks in social benefits hurt everyone, regardless of ethnicity or status.
  
   By the way, the latest Nielsen TV ratings put Univision, the Spanish-language network, in first place, with more viewers than ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox.