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Next year should be a banner year for the GOP, and may yet be.

Obamacare, a “train wreck” about to happen, says Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, goes into full effect Jan. 1, with the popular IRS as enforcer.

The Obama media feel betrayed by the secret intrusions on First Amendment rights. Libertarians see the National Security Agency’s data mining as a massive violation of Fourth Amendment rights.

The White House is bedeviled by scandals, the second-term curse has caught up with the Obama presidency, and prospects for the U.S. economy seem dicier than a few months ago.

History is also on the GOP’s side. In the second midterm elections, Presidents Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK-LBJ, Nixon-Ford, Reagan and Bush II all suffered big losses. It has become a tradition.

But if the GOP is favored to hold the House and make gains in the Senate, the long-term prognosis for the party remains grim.

First, libertarianism is breaking up that old gang of mine.

Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham call for air strikes on Syria. But no echo is heard, as the Republican Party becomes anti-interventionist.

Yet the acid test comes after Friday’s Iranian election, as the neocon war drums begin to beat.

Libertarian Republicans believe the National Security Agency is Big Brother and the Brave New World at hand. National security Republicans back the agency’s right to access private data banks to protect us from terrorism.

On how to deal with 12 million illegal aliens—send them home or grant them amnesty and a “path to citizenship”—the party’s rancorous division will be starkly visible when the bill reaches the House.

But the existential crisis of the GOP, from which it has turned its eyes away since George H.W. Bush, is demography.

Yet the matter cannot be avoided now, for it is on page one.

“White Numbers Shrink,” was the headline on the lead story in USA Today. “More Whites Dying Than Being Born,” blared The Wall Street Journal. What does this mean?

In demographic terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before—not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s—has this happened.

In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe—the European tribes of North America—have begun to die.

The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe.