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From all indications, the face of the electorate will look very different in 2010 from the way it did in 2008. That prospect presents an immediate danger for Democrats. But it also represents a more subtle, long-term threat for Republicans.

Small shifts in who votes can have big consequences on Election Day. And Democrats face the disquieting likelihood that the groups that most favor President Obama (particularly young people and minorities) will decline as a share of the vote next year while the voters who are most disaffected from him (white seniors) will increase their share.

If seniors stampede from Democrats, several endangered lawmakers probably won't survive.

In midterm elections, the electorate tends to be whiter and older than in presidential elections. ABC polling director Gary Langer has calculated that since 1992 seniors have cast 19 percent of the vote in midterm elections, compared with just 15 percent in presidential years. That difference contributed to the 1994 landslide that swept the GOP into control of both the House and Senate. Seniors had cast just 13 percent of the vote in Bill Clinton's 1992 victory, but that figure spiked to nearly 19 percent two years later, with voting by the young people who had bolstered Clinton falling off sharply.

For minorities, the pattern isn't as consistent. They actually cast a slightly larger share of the vote in 1994 and 1998 than in the immediately preceding presidential elections. But, more recently, in both the 2002 and 2006 midterms, minorities represented a slightly smaller share of the vote than they had in the previous presidential elections.

These trends may be especially troublesome for Democrats next year. In 2008, Obama assembled what I've called a "coalition of the ascendant" that revolved around minorities and rapidly growing groups, such as the Millennial Generation of young people. Those voting blocs still provide him his strongest approval ratings. But if historical patterns persist, they will turn out at lower rates next year -- possibly declining even more than usual because Obama inspired such an elevated turnout among them last year.

Their place will likely be filled by white voters, especially seniors. And that possibility looms as a huge gray cloud over Democrats. In 2008, Obama won the votes of just 40 percent of whites over age 65 (compared with 54 percent of whites under 30). All surveys show that white seniors remain the most resistant to Obama's health care agenda and the most skeptical of him overall. In the nonpartisan Pew Research Center's most recent poll, Obama's approval rating among elderly whites stood at just 39 percent. Surveying all of these numbers, veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres says that the Republican margin among white seniors could "easily expand to 25 points" in 2010.

That's ominous for Democrats. As David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report notes, House Democrats hold 56 districts where seniors constitute at least one-fourth of the voting-age population. Nearly two dozen of those Democrats are among the party's most vulnerable incumbents. If seniors stampede from Democrats, several of those endangered lawmakers probably won't survive. Seniors could also trample Democrats' Senate prospects in Pennsylvania and Florida.

But that dynamic also means that Republicans could do very well in 2010 without solving their fundamental demographic challenges. In the 2012 presidential election, the young and minority voters central to Obama's coalition are likely to return in large numbers. The risk to the GOP is that a strong 2010 showing based on a conservative appeal to apprehensive older whites will discourage it from reconsidering whether its message is too narrow to attract those rapidly growing groups. "It can't be the same formula in 2012," Ayres warns.

Even in 2010, the electorate's increasing diversity could constrain Republicans.

Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz says that although minorities next year probably won't equal the one-quarter share of the vote they represented in 2008, they are still likely to account for more than one-fifth of the ballots cast. That figure dwarfs their one-seventh share in 1994. To retake the House, he calculates, Republicans would probably need to win three-fifths of the white vote, slightly more than they did even in 1994.

That's conceivable, given Obama's erosion among whites -- but quite a strenuous climb. And in 2012, when population growth will almost certainly lift the minority share of the vote closer to 30 percent, the hill for Republicans will grow even steeper, unless they can broaden their appeal beyond the older whites leading their current revival.