Posted on 11/23/2012 9:33:08 AM PST by SeekAndFind
After moments of panic in the immediate aftermath of Mitt Romney's defeat, some Republicans and conservatives are regaining their equilibrium on the issue of what the GOP should do about immigration and the Hispanic vote.
They're looking at key questions from the campaign, like how much of Barack Obama's victory was attributable to Hispanic support. They're also looking at the Hispanic electorate itself to see how big a role immigration, versus a wide range of other issues, played in voting decisions. The goal, of course, is to win a larger portion of the Hispanic vote, but first to take a clear-eyed look at what actually happened on Nov. 6.
And the lesson for Republicans is: Take your time. Calmly reassess your positions. Don't pander.
The first question is whether Hispanic voters gave Obama his margin of victory. In a recent analysis, the New York Times' Allison Kopicki and Will Irving looked at vote totals in each state, plus the percentage of the vote cast by Hispanics, to see what the outcome would have been had Hispanics voted differently.
For example, they looked at Wisconsin, a state the Romney-Ryan team hoped to win. Hispanics weren't a huge part of the total vote -- about 4 percent, according to the exit polls -- and Obama won big among them, 65 percent to 31 percent. But going through the totals, Kopicki and Irving concluded that even if every single Hispanic voter in Wisconsin had cast a ballot for Romney, Obama still would have won.
They found the same result for New Hampshire and Iowa, two other swing states Romney looked to win.
Then there was Ohio. According to the exit polls, Obama won 53 percent of the Hispanic vote there. But given how decisively Obama won other voting groups, Kopicki and Irving found that the president would have prevailed in Ohio even if he had won just 22 percent of the Hispanic vote. Put another way, even if Romney had won a stratospheric 78 percent of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost Ohio.
In Virginia, Obama won the Latino vote 65 percent to 33 percent. Kopicki and Irving found that if those numbers had been reversed -- if Romney had won an unprecedented 65 percent of the Latino vote -- Obama still would have won Virginia.
Even in states where the Hispanic vote played a bigger role, Romney could have made significant gains among Hispanics and still lost. In Colorado, for example, the president won Hispanics by a huge margin, 75 percent to 23 percent. Kopicki and Irving found that Romney could have increased his margin to 42 percent -- a major improvement for a Republican -- and still come up short in Colorado.
The bottom line is that even if Romney had made historic gains among Hispanic voters, he still would have lost the election. That means Romney underperformed among more than just Hispanic voters. And that means winning more Hispanic votes is far from the GOP's only challenge.
Then there is the question of what motivates Hispanic voters. "They should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example)," columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote Nov. 8. "The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants." Krauthammer urged Republicans to accept amnesty for illegals, accompanied by a completed border fence.
Some other conservatives echoed Krauthammer's sentiments. But social scientist Charles Murray looked across a broad range of data and found little to support the notion that Hispanics are natural Republicans. Hispanics "aren't more religious than everyone else ... aren't married more than everyone else ... aren't more conservative than everyone else," Murray wrote. In addition, Hispanics don't work harder than other groups and are only slightly more pro-life than the rest of the population.
The available data, Murray concluded, "paint a portrait that gives no reason to think that Republicans have an untapped pool of social conservatives to help them win elections."
In addition, exit poll information suggests Hispanics voted on a number of issues beyond illegal immigration -- and those issues favored Democrats. A majority of Hispanics who voted Nov. 6 favored keeping Obamacare. A majority favored higher taxes for higher earners. A majority -- two-thirds, in fact -- said abortion should be legal.
None of this is to say the GOP shouldn't seek more Hispanic votes. There are opportunities; for example, Romney made significant inroads among Hispanic voters with college degrees. But the fact is, Republicans had a serious problem with lots of voters, as well as potential voters who didn't go to the polls. The Hispanic vote was just part of it.
-- Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent,
If the hispanic vote didn't swing the election, why should this be considered?
Besides, we've been down this road before. Fool me twice...
They sure think that they did. I didn’t see one Obama bumper sticker here in this town BEFORE the election. As soon as the Kenyan’s unions stole the election for him, all of the Hispanics went out and got Obama 2012 bumper stickers and put them on their old “Rent-A-Wrecks”. It’s an “In Your Face America!” thing.
All I want is to have the same laws for illegals that Mexico has, what is wrong with that?
Hey GOP!!! When you throw the Tea Party under the bus, you lose! It’s that frikin’ simple!!!
I’ll have to look at this more thoroughly, but my impression is that almost all the population growth in the US is minorities, who are highly biased toward Dem voting.
And of course the folks dying off are largely white Republicans.
So the long term trend of demographics is not good.
No they did not, neither did Blacks. What happened was self hating Whites souls their douls again for various freebies. Just like 2008.
True if you look at percentages but in raw numbers minority turnout in places like Fla, Co, and Ohio increased well beyond the margin of Obama’s victories. Had Obama’s minority vote in battleground states stayed the same as ‘08 Romney likely wins the EC.But Obama got his base to the polls in those states in much greater numbers than anticipated. The raw numbers, if projected 4,8,12 years down the road do not bode well for conservatives. Minorities seem willing to remain Dems and their numbers are increasing, The millenials semm comfortable with dem social positions and not worried about the economic side and their numbers while not increasing will gather greater importance as the older cohort of conservatives pass from the scene. Given the shrinking conservative base and the grudging acceptance of Romney by conservatives it’s difficult to see conservatives backing a more moderate candidate and yet winning a national election with a candidate who personifies current conservative ideas.
There is probably a lot of truth to this article, but you nailed it. Long term demographics will overcome. Amnesty will just accellerate our demise.
Good article that tries to debunk the Amnesty Liberal myth of “Illegal Alien Amnesty brings in Hispanic Voters”
Simple math debunks any “Hispanic Voter Myth” being floated out there....Hispanics still make up a small percentage of voters...and...go to the polls in the same low pct that blacks do
In fact, white voters still outnumber Hispanic voters 8 to 1. It is suicidal to adjust election strategy for a small pct of the vote
Republicans can’t handle the Establishment in their own party, nevermind hoping to defeat the Democrat/Marxist party. Socialist Republicans pick our nominee and silently fund against and crush the cabal of conservatives who dare to run the race.
Our time would be better spent, at this juncture, in re-evangelizing the US. Godless people increasingly vote for Godless rule, in a rush to tyranny, bringing poverty to all.
We are assuredly a post-Christian nation and the reason for that needs to be contemplated. How did that come about, but for our own apathy and unfaithfulness?
Read this for what happened to America
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960.
In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.”
Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
OMG, I thought I was the only one who was noticing that.
Next to no Obama bumper stickers leading up to the election but now they are everywhere!
More evidence that we were sandbagged. They carefully constructed an image of Obama voters being de-motivated.
If the demographics were the same as 1980, Romney won by a bigger landslide than Reagan did.
The overall premise of the article is likely correct. The deciding factor wasn`t the hispanic vote... it was the sharp national turn to the political left. Under no realistic notion can we consider America a center-right country ever again. The bridge too far has been crossed.
You forget that most aborted babies are victims of women who are not conservatives. Democrats need immigrants to vote in place of the millions lost to the abortionists.
Until we eliminate (or at the minimum reduce) election fraud, the left will/can count more votes than what we get to steal the elections!
Enough with the Latino votes, the messiah kind of candidate, the super-duper messaging that reaches all the voters......
It is not who votes that matters, it is who counts the votes that matters!
the elephant in the room nobody is talking about is Obama got 39% of the white vote. If whites voted for Romney in the same percentage as blacks or hispanics voted for Obama...
oh never-mind
re: When you throw the Tea Party under the bus, you lose! It’s that frikin’ simple!!!
Now you’re telling us that Tea Party supporters boycotted the elections en masse... enough to have given Romney the over 3 million votes he needed to defeat Obama in the popular vote?
Where’s the evidence of that?
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