By Earl Ofari Hutchinson | Guest Columnist

There were two eyecatching things buried in the new Census Bureau projection that America will no longer be a White man’s country in 2042. One is that Blacks also will fade in numbers or at least their numbers won’t get much bigger.

The other is that the number of Hispanics will soar. They will make up about thirty percent of the country’s population then. That means that not only will America not be a White majority country, it will almost certainly be a bilingual nation.

Major changes occurring now
In 2000, the 23 million Blacks eligible to vote dwarfed the 13 million eligible Latino voters, even though Latinos had by then virtually reached parity with Blacks in the population. More than one-third of the Latino population was less than 18 years old. Forty percent of Latinos who were of eligible voting age were noncitizens. Only 5 percent of Blacks that were of voting age were non-citizens.

Those numbers have radically changed. There are now an estimated 15 million Latino registered voters. There were 15 million Black voters in the 2004 election.

In the next few months, Barack Obama and John McCain will dump millions into Spanish language ads, pitches, and pleas for votes on Spanish language stations. When, not if, Democrats and Republicans cut an immigration reform deal, one of its features almost certainly will include some form of legalization plan that within a few years will turn thousands more Latino immigrants into vote-casting American citizens.

Parties will romance Latinos
The potential political gain from a massive outreach effort to Latinos is far greater than putting the same resource

s into courting Black voters. That effort worked for Republicans in 2004, when Bush got nearly 40 percent of the Latino vote. The Democrats, meanwhile, maintain a solid lock on the Black vote. In every election since 1964, Blacks have given more than 80 to 90 percent of their votes to the Democrats. They will give even more of their vote to Obama this election.

With the prospect of a small but important segment of newly enfranchised Latinos voting Republican, there’s no incentive for the GOP to do more to get the Black vote. That includes its pursuit of the Black evangelicals. Hispanic evangelical churches have about 20 million members and those numbers grow yearly. A survey by the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life shows the majority of Latino evangelicals are conservative, pro-family, anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage.

The leap in Latino voting strength and the likely prospect that Democrats and Republicans can bump up the number of voters from the rising number of legal and illegal immigrants comes at a bad time for Black politicians.

Though the number of Black elected officials has held steady in state offices and in Congress, their spectacular growth of prior years has flattened out.

What about the Black community?
There is some evidence that mainstream Democrats are already de-emphasizing traditional Black issues. Obama and McCain have been virtually mute on miserably failing inner city schools, soaring Black unemployment, prison incarceration, and the HIV/AIDS crisis that has torn Black communities.

Whites may be fading fast as the majority. The great fear is that Blacks could fade just as fast in numbers and more importantly, political clout too.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is “The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House.”