Gee, so much for the freeper theory that we'll magically get a higher percentage of the "hispanic" vote just by putting someone with a spanish sounding last name on the ballot, regardless of his whether he has anything in common with "hispanic" voters in the area he's running.
In other shocking news, John Edwards, a white southerner, didn't win over other white southerners in his Presidential bids. How can that be!?
why is that a freeper theory and not a RINO theory???
Just a wild guess, but I’ll bet if the MA GOP had run a non-Communist Hispanic, they would’ve performed better. Probably a non-Communist of any skin color would’ve performed better. Too bad the state AND national party establishment has a disdain for non-leftists.
Gomez got 7% lower than Brown statewide, and 6% lower than Brown in Holyoke. So did the Spanish surname help Gomez underperform Brown by 1% less? We have no idea how each of Brown and Gomez did among Hispanic voters in Holyoke (or in Springfield, Lawrence, Chelsea, etc.), and it is possible that Brown’s margin over Gomez was even higher among Hispanics than it was among Anglos, but there certainly is no evidence of that.
If a FReeper actually had a theory that if a GOP candidate has a Spanish last name it will convince Hispanics to vote for him, that’s a pretty silly theory if you ask me. As I said to those who thought that having Romney pick Rubio as his runningmate would help us carry NM, CO and NV, there is no way that having a Cuban-American VP candidate is going to convince more than a small percentage of Mexican-Americans to vote GOP (although, sure, running ads in Spanish and appearing on Spanish-language TV might get more Hispanics to listen to the GOP pitch).
That does not mean, though, that it isn’t a good idea to run a Mexican-American military veteran in heavily Hispanic South Texas CDs, or a Cuban-American in South Florida CDs, or a Puerto Rican in the new heavily Hispanic CD in Central Florida.
And I still think that when Andy Vidak lost by less than 1% to the Democrat Costa in that Hispanic-majority Central Valley district in 2010, that he would have won had his last name ended in an L instead of a K. A Spanish surname might be worth 1% of the vote in a Hispanic-majority district, although, clearly, it is no substitute for being a good candidate.