A sea of white at GOP convention

CLEVELAND: After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, Republican Party heavyweights uniformly agreed that white voters alone do not hold the keys to

CLEVELAND: After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, Republican Party heavyweights uniformly agreed that white voters alone do not hold the keys to winning the White House.

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Yet in 2016, another overwhelmingly white gathering of Republican convention delegates —the makeup clear on television images — has nominated an all-white male ticket: businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence.

Trump leaned almost exclusively on white voters to win the nomination and, in the process, alienated swaths of minorities with his push for a border wall to stop illegal immigration, calls for a “deportation force” and proposals to ban non-citizen Muslims from entering the country.

At the ballot box, simple math is at play as the country becomes less white with each presidential cycle. The more Trump struggles with non-whites, the more pressure there is for him to reach levels of white support no candidate has managed since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide.

Pence may shore up support among white conservatives, but he may not easily connect with non-white voters, and many of the elected Republicans who could play that role aren’ t Trump allies .

South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, the child of Indian immigrants, skipped the convention. Erstwhile Trump primary rival and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, thes on of Cuban immigrants, is tepidly backing Trump, as is New Mexico governor Susana Martinez, the first Latina to lead an American state. Butt hey aren’t addressing the Cleveland gathering from the podium.