[sheikdetailfeather]

I remember Romney had an interview on tv a while back and they asked him what his biggest regret was about the election he lost. “That I did not reach out to Hispanics more.” So there you have it. Many conservatives sat home and he lost but there is no way he would have pursued them then and there won’t be any pursuit of us in the future with the GOPe.

[Wallace T.]

The GOP-e has a tendency to pursue chimera such as the minority voter. Immigrant groups have, with few exceptions, leaned to the party that offered more government goodies. The big city Northern Democrat political machines, such as those run by the Prendergasts in Kansas City or by Curley in Boston, knew this and offered jobs and other benefits from city and county coffers. The only way Republicans remained competitive was to emulate these tactics and elicit support one ethnic group like Italian-Americans, who resented the Irish-Americans who dominated the Democrat Party and the Catholic Church in the Northeast. This tactic worked in certain places like Philadelphia and Connecticut for a few decades. However, the numerical decline of the British/German/Dutch descended Protestant base of the GOP in this region, combined with rising liberalism among the old money, Ivy League elite (e.g., the great great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt is an Obama supporter and a environmental wacko) doomed this strategy.

There is no reason to suppose that the Latin Americans coming into this country will vote for a party which, even in its RINO form, supports fewer welfare benefits. It is also foolhardy to think that Republicans can play off inter-minority hostility as their Northeastern forbears did in playing the Italian Americans against the Irish Americans. Neither the current Latin nor African American cultures have as intense a family and religious orientation the first and second generation Italians had.

On the other hand, had Romney, a Northerner, a moderate, and a member of a minority religion, chosen a Southerner with strong conservative credentials and an evangelical, he might have ginned up enough votes in Florida, Virginia, and Ohio to have won the 2012 election. Keep in mind that no winning Presidential candidate since 1992 has won with more than 54% of the popular vote.