President Obama’s victory is unlikely to lead to any great surprises in American policy. Attention will therefore focus more on the losers, on Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. They have to digest the lesson that a more moderate  campaign of opposition to the Democratic incumbent might have handed them the White House. But the difficulty for the Republicans of appealing to the middle  ground will get harder over time, because the middle  ground is shifting. There  are  many  ways  of  seeing  America  as  a  divided society: black versus white, liberal versus conservative, religious versus  secular,   even  Protestant versus  Catholic.  But  the analysis that portrays it as split between the past and the future is perhaps the most useful. That is largely because of demography. The fastest-growing section of the population is Latin American, including Mexicans and Cubans as well as Brazilians and Argentinians, but who are mainly from the north of the southern American continent and south of the northern one. President Obama’s  campaign deftly  wooed  the  Latin American vote, not least with promises of immigration law reform but also on issues that appealed to the poorer sections of society such as health care and welfare. As the Latin American population continues to grow, both through further immigration and due to its higher  birth  rate, it becomes  clear that  a new America is emerging. It is a coalition  of ethnicities that does not look like the old, more monolithic America that many Republicans continue to imagine as the norm.