Is the Republican Party due for a dramatic platform shift?

I know very few people that claim to vote Republican or Democratic tickets, since they sharply disagree with some parts of each party's platform. For example, lots of people are fiscally conservative, but socially liberal, so they don't fit well within either party's platform. I wonder if one of the next elections will be a realigning election, where the platform of one or both of the parties shifts dramatically, or lots of voters switch sides.

There's more than my anecdotal evidence to support a coming shift--look at the trend of people turning independent since 2008:

Source: Gallop Polls

If we look at the numbers to 2013 October, the trend continues, with a record 47% of people identifying themselves as independent, and only 20% as Republican.

What's driving this shift, and what will the new coalitions look like?

How Much YouTube Paid me for 4 Million Views, Alternate Ways to Earn Money from Videos

$5,675.51 for 4,054,755 views over 6 years

I'm writing this to share my experience with others wanting to make money off YouTube, and hopefully get some advice. At least for my videos, a minimum wage job would have been a higher paid use of my time, but as people continue to watch old videos, the ROI will continue to increase, so it may eventually pay off.

My CuriousInventor youtube channel mostly has videos on electronics soldering, but also a bit of head phone wrapping and recently Bitcoin.

Some caveats
YouTube didn't used to pay people, and not all my videos are monetized (most are), and I didn't have monetization turned on for all the time. My first revenue came around June 2009, at which point I already had 1.5M views. So a rough lower bound on my total CPM ($ / 1k views) is $5,675 / 3.5 = $1.62 CPM.

If you look at the past 30 days (September 2013), I got 70k views (a typical month is 50k) and $264, or $3.77 CPM.

You're probably better off getting paid taking online surveys than making youtube vids...