The election of Ted Cruz to the Senate Seat vacated by retiring Senator Kay Hutchison of Texas was no surprise, as he carried a 15-point margin over his Democratic challenger, Paul Sadler. But in the wake of his election, he brings bad tidings for the Republican Party, which has counted on Texas for many years to be the lynchpin of their electoral map.

The New Yorker sat down with a number of people to discuss the changing demographics of the United States, including Senator-elect Cruz, who had this to say:

“If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community, in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state.”

With the support for Republican presidential candidates slipping from 44% in 2004 to under 30% in this election, Cruz is on target, especially with the rapidly growing Hispanic population of Texas, now 38%. When combined with other minorities (12% African-American, 1% Native American, 4% Asian American, 2% mixed), that makes Texas a majority-minority state, with the traditional Republican base since Nixon, white voters at the exclusion of all others, at only 45% in 2010, according to the latest US Census. At the current pace of growth, Hispanics will outnumber white voters by 2020. And this bodes poorly for the future of the Republican party, as Cruz continues: