Presidential elections are teaching moments for political junkies. 
 
 Video: Election Night highlights in two minutes. 
 
 We've been scouring the data for clues as to what we should learn from what happened tonight as President Obama relatively easily claimed a second term. Five of our initial lessons learned are below. Much more to come in the days and weeks ahead. 
 
 1. This wasn't JUST an economic referendum: Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney built his entire campaign around the idea that the only question for voters was "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The goal was to turn the entire election into a straight referendum on Obama's handling of the still struggling economy. It didn't work. Almost 6 in 10 voters said the economy was the the top issue for them and among that group Romney won 51 percent of the vote 47 percent for Obama. And yet Romney lost — and lost convincingly. Why? Obama turned the race effectively into a choice between someone who voters thought understood them and their concerns and someone who didn't. One in five voters said that a candidate who "cares about people like me" was a critical piece of their decision; Obama won them 82 percent to 17 percent. 
 
 2. Republicans have a huge Hispanic problem: Nationally, Latino voters comprised 10 percent of the total electorate. Obama won 69 percent of their votes while Romney won just 29 percent. In Florida, Latinos accounted for nearly one in every five voters and Obama won them by 21 points. As we have written before, the Republican party simply cannot lose 7 in 10 Hispanic voters in elections and expect to be a viable national party in 2016, 2020 and beyond. Growth in the Latino community probably makes Arizona a swing state in the next presidential election and Texas could even be a swing state by 2020 unless Republicans can find a way to make inroads in the Hispanic community. Our guess? A major figure in the GOP — former Florida governor Jeb Bush or Sen. Marco Rubio — puts his foot down and speaks the truth to his party about the effect their stances on immigration are having on their long-term political prospects. 
 
 3. Virginia and North Carolina are swing states: We waited four years to see whether Obama's victories in North Carolina and Virginia were flukes, whether the two states with long Republican traditions at the presidential level would return back to their GOP roots. They didn't. Obama won Virginia. And, while Romney won North Carolina, he did so very narrowly — less than 100,000 votes out of more than 4 million cast. Think of it this way: In 2008, Obama got 49.7 percent of the vote in North Carolina while he got 48.4 percent in 2012. Compare that to how the Democratic presidential nominee performed in 2004 (43.6) and 2000 (43.2) and you see how much North Carolina has changed. Both states are swing states in 2016 and beyond — an expansion of the map in Democrats' favor that Republicans were unable to match in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan or Minnesota in this election. 
 
 4. The youth vote is no longer dismissible: In 2008, then candidate Obama promised to energize the youth vote like no candidate had done before him. Eyes rolled — including ours. But Obama was right. Voters aged 18-29 comprised 18 percent of the electorate in 2008 and Obama won them by 34 points. Surely, skeptics insisted, that showing was a one-off — built around Obama's nonpartisan call for "hope" and "change." Or not. According to the latest national exit polling, 19 percent of the electorate was aged 18-29 and Obama won that group by 24 points. Once is an anomaly. Twice is a new political reality. The only question going forward is whether the youth vote is tied to President Obama uniquely or whether it is an advantage for Democrats more broadly. 
 
 5. Democrats electoral vote ceiling > Republican electoral vote ceiling: We strongly suspected going into this election that the electoral vote dominance that Republican presidential candidates enjoyed in the 1980s had switched over to Democrats. Obama's victory tonight affirmed that fact. Obama currently has 284 electoral votes and leads in Florida (29 electoral votes) and Virginia (13 electoral votes). Add those two — along with Nevada — to his total and total is 332 electoral votes, a sum well beyond what most people (and political types) thought he was capable of achieving. The problem for Republicans — and this is not at all unique to Romney — is that the best hope they currently have in terms of electoral math is the 286 electoral votes that George W. Bush won in 2004. (It would actually add up to 292 electoral votes under the current allocation.) A ceiling of 292 just leaves very little room for error — for any Republican candidate now or going forward. 
 
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 Full 2012 election results ||||| BOSTON — President Barack Obama’s thrashing of Mitt Romney exposed glaring structural weaknesses in the GOP that will shut the Republicans out of the White House until they find a way to appeal to a rapidly changing America. 
 
 Battling a wheezing economy and a deeply motivated opposition, Obama still managed to retain much of his 2008 map because of the GOP’s deficiencies with the voters who are changing the political face of once conservative-leaning Virginia, Florida, Colorado and Nevada. 
 
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 reset Rove: GOP needs minorities Huckabee slams GOP on minority outreach Romney concedes to Obama 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Obama’s grind-it-out win) 
 
 Republicans face a crisis: The country is growing less white, and their coalition has become more white in recent years. 
 
 In 2004, George W. Bush won 44 percent of Hispanics. Four years later, John McCain, the author of an immigration reform bill, took 31 percent of Hispanics. And this year, Romney captured only 27 percent of Hispanics. 
 
 “The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it, and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who will immediately be looked to as a potential 2016 presidential candidate. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Rubio: GOP must focus on minorities, immigrants) 
 
 But the GOP’s problem is more fundamental than one bloc of voters. For the second consecutive presidential election, the Republican got thumped among women and young voters in the states that decided the election. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Study: Youth vote was decisive) 
 
 “Our party needs to realize that it’s too old and too white and too male and it needs to figure out how to catch up with the demographics of the country before it’s too late,” said Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union and a longtime GOP leader. “Our party needs a lot of work to do if we expect to be competitive in the near future.” 
 
 Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), a prospective 2014 statewide candidate in a state moving sharply to the middle, was just as blunt: “After tonight, the GOP had better figure out that a big tent sounds good, but if there aren’t any seats in it, what good is it.” 
 
 The desperate straits Republicans find themselves in are structural. But Romney should not be completely absolved of responsibility for his party’s ebb. He galloped to the right on immigration and reproductive issues in the GOP primary and only awkwardly attempted to move to the middle on those issues in the fall. His 50s-era persona was almost comically far removed from Americans who are in their 20s and 30s. And he never attempted to distance himself from or truly challenge a Republican Party that still bears bruises left from the Bush years. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: 12 takeaways from Obama’s win) 
 
 But the rapidly growing population of minorities is something that looms larger than one flawed candidate. 
 
 Look no further than Florida, that reliable battleground that usually picks White House winners. Obama won there by only 2½ percentage points in 2008, but somehow found a way to eke out a narrow lead again in the face of 8.7 percent unemployment there. 
 
 Why? Partly because there are 190,000 more Hispanics and 50,000 more African-Americans in the state than there were in 2008. 
 
 Florida Republicans were staggered: Obama managed to actually increase a 20-point margin from 2008 in suburban Orlando’s Osceola County, home to thousands of Hispanic immigrants, to 25 points. 
 
 “Hispanics continue to grow in importance, and we need to embrace these voters for two reasons: It is simply the right thing to do, and it’s mandatory demographically if we are to avoid more presidential disappointments,” said former George W. Bush political director Matt Schlapp. “It’s about simple math and basic moral decency.” ||||| Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Mitt Romney’s loss to a Democratic president wounded by a weak economy is certain to spur an internecine struggle over the future of the Republican Party, but the strength of the party’s conservatives in Congress and the rightward tilt of the next generation of party leaders could limit any course correction. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 With their party on the verge of losing the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, Republicans across the political spectrum anticipate a prolonged and probably divisive period of self-examination. 
 
 The coming debate will be centered on whether the party should keep pursuing the antigovernment focus that grew out of resistance to the health care law and won them the House in 2010, or whether it should focus on a strategy that recognizes the demographic tide running strongly against it. 
 
 “There will be some kind of war,” predicted Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican Party consultant, suggesting it would pit “mathematicians” like him, who argue that the party cannot keep surrendering the votes of Hispanics, blacks, younger voters and college-educated women, against the party purists, or “priests,” as he puts it, who believe that basic conservative principles can ultimately triumph without much deviation. 
 
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 “We are in a situation where the Democrats are getting a massive amount of votes for free,” Mr. Murphy said. 
 
 But the debate will not just be about demographics. Ralph Reed, a veteran of the conservative movement, said that Mr. Romney’s loss would stir resentment among those who believe the party made a mistake in nominating a more centrist Republican who had to work to appeal to the party’s base. 
 
 “There’s definitely a feeling that it would be better to nominate a conservative of long-standing conviction,” he said. 
 
 As a party, Republicans continue to depend heavily on older working-class white voters in rural and suburban America — a shrinking percentage of the overall electorate — while Democrats rack up huge majorities among urban voters including blacks, Hispanics and other minorities. Not to mention younger Americans who are inclined to get their political news from Comedy Central and will not necessarily become more conservative as they age. The disparity means that Democrats can get well under 50 percent of the white vote and still win the presidency, a split that is only going to widen in the future. 
 
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 According to exit polls, about 7 in 10 Hispanics said they were voting for Mr. Obama. Mr. Romney won the support of nearly 6 in 10 whites. In urban areas, white voters were split over the two candidates, but about 6 in 10 white voters in the suburbs went for Mr. Romney, as did nearly two-thirds in rural areas. 
 
 Mr. Romney won a majority of voters 65 or older, while Mr. Obama was backed by 6 in 10 Americans under 30, and won a narrow majority of those under 44. 
 
 Even as they absorbed Mr. Romney’s defeat, the party’s top elected officials, strategists and activists said they believed that Republicans had offered a persuasive message of economic opportunism and fiscal restraint. While the messenger may have been flawed, they argued, Republicans should not stray from that approach in a moment of panic. 
 
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 “The party has to continually ask ourselves, what do we represent?” said Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican seen as a top White House contender in 2016. “But we have to remain the movement on behalf of upward mobility, the party people identify with their hopes and dreams. People want to have a chance.” 
 
 Matt Kibbe, the president of the Tea Party-aligned group FreedomWorks, acknowledged there would be a natural struggle for the identity of the party in the election’s aftermath. But he argued that in some respects the fight had already been waged and won by the energized grass-roots forces that have shaped the contours of Republican politics in recent elections. 
 
 “You are going to see a continuation of the fight between the old guard and all of the new blood that has come in since 2010, but I don’t know how dramatic it is going to be,” he said. “It is getting to point where you can’t reach back and pull another establishment Republican from the queue like we have done with Romney.” 
 
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 Besides Mr. Rubio, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the unsuccessful vice-presidential candidate, will now be seen as a chief party voice, as will Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. House Republicans particularly can be expected to gravitate to Mr. Ryan. Among others considered on the rise are Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and all can to some extent attribute their success to Tea Party-style politics with an emphasis on cutting spending and shrinking government. 
 
 As possible counterbalances, Republicans point to former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, who has shown an ability to connect with Hispanic voters, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has been able to win in a blue state. But the more conservative up-and-comers seem to have the upper hand for now, even in defeat. 
 
 And while Senate Republicans did not make the gains they anticipated — and some of their likely wins became losses in races where their candidates were deemed too extreme — they added internally to their conservative ranks, with victories by Ted Cruz in Texas and other Republicans expected to pick off Democratic seats. 
 
 With House Republicans easily holding on to their majority, Republicans will arguably be more conservative in the 113th Congress than they were in the 112th. 
 
 The first test of whether Republicans see any political need to be more conciliatory will come quickly in the lame duck session of Congress this month, when they will face pressure from the White House, Congressional Democrats and perhaps the Senate Republican leadership to strike a deal to avert the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the beginning of automatic across-the-board spending cuts. 
 
 If rank-and-file Republicans dig in, it will be a seen as strong indication that they remain unwilling to make the kind of concessions they fear could bring them primary election challenges or cost them in a future presidential primary. 
 
 To some in the centrist wing of the party, the need to move toward the middle could not have been more obvious as Republicans came into the 2012 election cycle with built-in advantages in both the presidential and Congressional contests. 
 
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 “We have to recognize the demographic changes in this country,” said Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who has watched as the number of her fellow moderate Republicans in the Senate declined. “Republicans cannot win with just rural, white voters.” 
 
 Democrats sense a parallel to their own recent history when an increasingly liberal party seen as losing touch with mainstream America was defeated in three consecutive presidential elections, in 1980, 1984 and 1988, before Bill Clinton, who practiced a centrist style of politics, won two terms. 
 
 “They need a Bill Clinton moment,” said Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago and former top aide to both Presidents Clinton and Obama. Though many Republicans still see no impetus for drastic change, there does seem to be a growing consensus that the party needs to somehow repair its relations with the nation’s Hispanics, a group that has socially and fiscally conservative tendencies and one in which Republicans enjoyed some success during the administration of former President George W. Bush. 
 
 But that support has deteriorated steadily since the 2004 election. Mr. Rubio, a Cuban-American, said his party has to begin by striking a different tone on immigration, pushing for improvements in the existing immigration system and talking more about the capacity to enter the United States legally.
– Mitt Romney's defeat is certain to lead to an extended period of Republican soul-searching, and most pundits agree that the party will have to do something to deal with its lack of Hispanic support. Romney captured just 27% of the Latino vote, a proportion that will have to improve if the GOP wants to remain a viable national party in 2016 and beyond, writes Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post. A major GOP figure like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio will have to put his foot down and speak "the truth to his party about the effect their stances on immigration are having on their long-term political prospects," he predicts. But the loss wasn't down to just the Hispanic vote, writes Jonathan Martin at Politico. For the second presidential election in a row, "the Republican got thumped among women and young voters in the states that decided the election," and the GOP won't recapture the White House "until they find a way to appeal to a rapidly changing America," he writes. The big debate in the party now will be about whether to maintain the anti-government stance that won in the House in 2010, writes Carl Hulse at the New York Times, predicting a clash between the party's old guard and conservative newcomers who "seem to have the upper hand for now, even in defeat." The big test will come this month, when House Republicans will come under pressure to forge a deal on the looming fiscal cliff, he writes.