Politico reports:

The outgoing chair of the California GOP — the nation’s largest state Republican Party — has issued a dire warning that his state represents “the canary in the coal mine” for the party‘s national fortunes unless it confronts demographic shifts that have already turned California into a majority-minority state.

“We have not yet been able to figure out how to effectively communicate and get significant numbers of votes from non-whites,’’ said former state Sen. Jim Brulte, who’s held the job of state GOP chair since 2013 and will retire in February.

Despite trend lines that show the “the entire country will be majority minority by 2044,’’ he said, the GOP has failed to confront the reality of those changes — or recognize the possibility that the recent “blue tsunami” midterm election in California was a harbinger of what lies ahead for the national party.

Brulte said he‘s repeatedly warned that the party’s overwhelmingly white and male candidates must “figure out how we get votes from people who don’t look like you.’’

But he said those warnings about the changing political and ethnic landscape have gone unheeded.

“And that’s why I have said that I believe California is the canary in the coal mine — not an outlier,’’ for the GOP in the coming cycles, he told POLITICO. [Continue reading…]