We are a people starkly divided over racial matters

It’s pretty amazing: Among non-Hispanic white voters in Georgia, Donald Trump enjoys a 46-point advantage over Hillary Clinton, says the latest Monmouth poll. Among everybody else in the state, Clinton enjoys a 70-point lead. In short, tell me your race and I’ll tell you how you’ll vote, with a depressing degree of accuracy. We are a people starkly divided, and that dividing line is race.

And it’s not just Georgia. Every single minority group of the size needed to generate national polling data has cast its lot with the Democratic Party. Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, African-Americans, Jewish Americans and gay Americans all vote overwhelming for the Democrat. The single exception has been Cuban Americans, but even they are now abandoning the GOP.

Each of those groups has a unique American story. Some are relatively new arrivals; others have been here since the beginning. Some boast high levels of educational and economic success; others still struggle to find a foothold. Yet by overwhelming margins, every single one has gravitated away from the Republican Party.

That does not happen by accident, not over and over and over again. But when those groups look at the Republican Party, they see a white party that very much wants to remain the white party, as proved emphatically by its nomination of Trump. So they gravitate to the party that feels welcoming, whatever its other faults might be.

And because demography is destiny, we know where this is headed. The changes transforming this country are irreversible no matter who gets elected president, and they won’t be stopped by any wall. As of 2012, the majority of babies in this country are being born to non-white parents, and that trend will accelerate. Non-Hispanic whites comprised 67 percent of the population in 2005 and 61 percent in 2015. They are projected to comprise just 47 percent by 2050.

And it’s ironic. Immigration debate has long focused on assimilation, on how quickly various ethnic groups are able to abandon being the “other” and become “American.” Today, you could argue, the ethnic group that is most stubbornly refusing assimilation into the modern United States and is instead asserting its “otherness” are white Americans. It is white Americans who are retreating in substantial numbers into their own enclaves, politically and culturally as well as physically, reluctant to make peace with their new country.

And as usual, it is young white Americans who are most at ease in their new country. They are “nativeborn” in ways that their parents are not, raised and educated in a multicultural setting where diversity is so accepted that it isn’t even noticed. That too shows up in the polling. Among Georgia voters 49 and younger, Clinton has a 10-point lead. Among those 50 and older, Trump has a 14-point lead.

These are not easy subjects to discuss, but they are real. And you don’t have to sympathize with Trump’s message to recognize that there’s a real sadness in so many people feeling alienated from the country of their birth, the country that had given them their identity and a great sense of pride. There’s pain there, and in Trump a hope that they can “take it back” to how it — and they — used to be.

They can’t. I don’t know what the answer is, but he isn’t it.