I apologize to America’s young people, whose dashed dreams and dim employment prospects I had laughed at, believing these to be a direct result of their voting for Obama.

On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones.

According to Pew Research, 54 percent of white voters under 30 voted for Romney and only 41 percent voted for Obama. That’s the same percentage Reagan got from the entire white population in 1980. Even the Lena Dunham demographic — white women under 30 — slightly favored Romney.

Reagan got just 43 percent of young voters in 1980 — and that was when whites were 88 percent of the electorate. Only 58 percent of today’s under-30 vote is white and it’s shrinking daily.

What the youth vote shows is not that young people are nitwits who deserve lives of misery and joblessness, as I had previously believed, but that America is hitting the tipping point on our immigration policy.

The youth vote is a snapshot of elections to come if nothing is done to reverse the deluge of unskilled immigrants pouring into the country as a result of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act. Eighty-five percent of legal immigrants since 1968 have come from the Third World. A majority of them are in need of government assistance.

Whites are 76 percent of the electorate over the age of 30 and only 58 percent of the electorate under 30. Obama won the “youth vote” because it is the knife’s edge of a demographic shift, not because he offered the kids free tuition and contraception (which they don’t need because it’s hard to have sex when you’re living with your parents at 27).

In 1980, Hispanics were only 2 percent of the population, and they tended to be educated, skilled workers who got married, raised their children in two-parent families and sent their kids to college before they, too, got married and had kids. (In that order.)

That profile has nothing to do with recent Hispanic immigrants, who — because of phony “family reunification” rules — are the poorest of the world’s poor.

More than half of all babies born to Hispanic women today are illegitimate. As Heather MacDonald has shown, the birthrate of Hispanic women is twice that of the rest of the population, and their unwed birthrate is one and a half times that of blacks.

That’s a lot of government dependents coming down the pike. No amount of “reaching out” to the Hispanic community, effective “messaging” or Reagan’s “optimism” is going to turn Mexico’s underclass into Republicans.

Any election analysis that doesn’t deal with the implacable fact of America’s changing demographics is bound to be wrong.

Perhaps the reason elections maven Michael Barone was so shockingly off in his election prediction this year was that, in the biggest mistake of his career, Barone has been assuring us for years that most of these Third World immigrants pouring into the country would go the way of Italian immigrants and become Republicans. They’re hard-working! They have family values!

Maybe at first, but not after coming here, having illegitimate children and going on welfare.

Charles Murray recently pointed out that — contrary to stereotype — Hispanics are less likely to be married, less likely to go to church, more supportive of gay marriage and less likely to call themselves “conservative” than other Americans.

Rather than being more hard-working than Americans, Hispanics actually work about the same as others, or, in the case of Hispanic women, less.

It seems otherwise, Murray says, because the only Hispanics we see are the ones who are working — in our homes, neighborhoods and businesses. “That’s the way that almost all Anglos in the political chattering class come in contact with Latinos,” he notes. “Of course they look like model Americans.”

(Black males would apparently like to work more. Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.)

An article by Nate Cohn in the current New Republic argues, as the title puts it: “The GOP Has Problems with White Voters, Too.” As proof, Cohn cites Jefferson County, Colo.; Loudoun County, Va.; Wake County, N.C.; and Somerset County, N.J., all of which went Republican in presidential elections from 1968 through 2004, but which Romney lost in 2012.

Smelling a rat, I checked the demographic shifts in these counties from the 2000 to the 2010 census. In each one, there has been a noticeable influx of Hispanics (and Asians, who also vote Democrat), diminishing “the white vote” that Cohn claims Republicans are losing.

Between the 2000 and 2010 census, for example, the white population of Jefferson County declined from more than 90 percent to less than 80 percent, while the Hispanic population more than doubled, from 6 percent to 14 percent.

In Loudoun County, the Asian population tripled from 5 percent to 15 percent and the Hispanic population doubled from 6 percent to 12 percent. Meanwhile, whites plummeted from 83 percent to 69 percent of the population.

Similarly, Wake County shifted from 74 percent white to 66 percent white in the past decade, while the Hispanic population doubled, from 5 percent to 10 percent, and the black population stayed even at about 20 percent.

In Somerset County, the Hispanic population grew by 63 percent and the Asian population grew by 83 percent since 2000. The number of whites has remained steady, resulting in a population that is now just 62 percent white.

These were the counties chosen by Cohn, not me, to show that Republicans are losing “the white vote.” Except they’re not so white, anymore. With blacks, Asians and Hispanics voting 93 percent, 73 percent and 71 percent for Obama, Republicans have to do more than just win the white vote. They have to run the table.

Romney got a larger percentage of the white vote than Reagan did in 1980. That’s just not enough anymore.

Ironically, Romney was the first Republican presidential candidate in a long time not conspiring with the elites to make America a dumping ground for the world’s welfare cases. Conservatives who denounced Romney as a “RINO” were the ones doing the bidding of the real establishment: business, which wants cheap labor and couldn’t care less if America ceases to be the land of opportunity that everyone wanted to immigrate to in the first place.

Ann Coulter is an author and political commentator.