Posted on 07/22/2015 4:59:36 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Latinos may decide a presidential election one day. But it won’t be in 2016.
Is Donald Trump a better a campaign tactician than people think? To hear most political strategists tell it, Hispanics are the most important voting bloc in America. But The Donald has called them rapists, drug dealers and violent criminals. And his visit Thursday to the U.S.-Mexico border promises to produce a new batch of anti-immigration sound bites. It’s hard to see any Hispanic ever voting for Trump. But that doesn’t necessarily mean his strategy will doom him.
By viciously and repeatedly attacking immigration, he’s exploiting one of the biggest challenges facing the Republican Party—the need to balance the short-term tactics of winning the next election with the long-term strategy of building a sustainable national coalition. And, from looking at the national landscape, the numbers are so daunting that it’s not at all clear that the GOP could pick up enough Hispanic votes by embracing immigration reform to make it worth alienating the roughly 20 percent of their base in swing states that are hard-core immigration opponents.
Maybe the Latino vote will prove pivotal in 2020, maybe in 2024, but this time around, it is very unlikely to decide who wins the White House. The reason immigration will not be a big issue in 2016 is fairly simple. The states that have a big Hispanic population and have big Electoral College vote numbers—California, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Illinois—will not be in play in the 2016 presidential election. And the swing states—where campaign spending and message building will be the strongest—have relatively small Hispanic populations and no border fence issues in their backyards. On top of all that, immigration is not the primary concern for most Hispanic voters.
Deep thinkers in the Republican Party constantly say that the future of the party is based on outreach to groups like Hispanics. But wooing Hispanics isn’t currently a major concern for Republicans on the campaign trail. “I have heard many of the conservative policy people talk about what we need to do to win elections in 2020 and 2024, how the Latino vote is an important part of that, but the [GOP presidential] candidates and the campaigns aren’t thinking about future elections right now for obvious reasons,” says one Republican consultant who didn’t want his name used. “They aren’t even thinking about next year right now. They are thinking about next week.”
In order for Hispanics to have made the difference in the 2012 election, they would have had to flip from 70 percent supporting Obama to 70 percent supporting Romney, a move that would have given the Republican enough Electoral College votes to win. The swing in the Hispanic vote needed in 2016 is likely to be similarly large.
Given those realities, it is not hard to see why Donald Trump calling undocumented Mexicans “rapists” faded away without much angst from the GOP. While South Carolina Senator and Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham said Trump’s comments about Mexican undocumented immigrants will “kill my party,” there was relative silence from the rest of the field. It is a sign that the GOP will try to stay quiet during the primaries and general election on immigration issues: there is not much to gain, and a lot that could be lost by going out on that limb.
“It is true, that the numbers making the Latino vote very important for just one election aren’t really there,” says Nicole McCleskey, a partner with Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies.
“But I don’t think the effort for the Republicans to make greater inroads into the Latino voter support is limited to just one election,” McCleskey continues. “The effort is that you want to win the big prize, but we have a future ahead of us where every election is important. Congress, the U.S. Senate, state house. It’s about how do we compete with demographic shifts in the years ahead.”
That is very true: there is a “not important now, but in the future it will be” argument to be made about outreach to the Latino community. The growing Latino population (expected to double to about 100 million by 2050) will make the Latino community more of an electoral force, especially in congressional districts where demographic changes are felt more quickly. But the primary goal of Republicans right now is to win the current election and weigh the risks and rewards of going after the Latino vote in 2016.
And when you look at the immediate future, it becomes clear why most of the dozen-plus Republican candidates are staying quiet about immigration after Trump’s controversial comments. Defending immigrants simply doesn’t have much of an upside. Not much of a downside either. And that makes staying mum on immigration the most viable option.
“Certainly the GOP shouldn’t be antagonistic to Hispanics, but the big question is how much outreach should they do before they start to turn off working-class white voters,” Sean Trende, a senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, says in an interview. “Because from an Electoral College numbers perspective, the net gain in embracing some form of immigration reform just isn’t there.”
This point is reinforced by the fact that the Hispanic population is not monolithic in terms of issues, and immigration isn’t of utmost importance to them. In a Pew Research poll done with Hispanic voters just before the 2014 midterm election, education ranked as the number one issue (92 percent said it was “extremely important” or “very important”), next came the economy and jobs (91 percent) and third was health care (86 percent). Immigration was viewed as important by 73 percent of the Hispanic electorate, making it closer to “Conflicts in the Middle East” (66 percent) than the three top issues.
“In the big picture, I think what motivates Hispanic voters isn’t all that different from what motivates white votes,” wrote Trende in a piece about Hispanic voters and the GOP, adding that “at the end of the day, Hispanics tend to vote more Democratic than whites because they tend to be poorer than whites.”
Katie Packer Gage, a former Mitt Romney deputy campaign manager for the 2012 presidential race—when Romney took just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally—said recent research by her Burning Glass Consulting firm shows that 20 percent or less of Republican voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are hardline voters who want mass deportations of undocumented aliens (a number that is surprisingly close to Donald Trump’s support in the latest round of polls).
“What we found is that GOP nominees chasing the relatively small group of anti-immigration primary voters—and giving opponents ammunition to portray them as anti-immigrant—risk alienating 24 percent more voters in a general election than they attract,” Gage wrote in Politico last month.
So playing to the base on immigration carries political danger, as does not playing to the base. The messages of Gage and Trende, when taken together, suggest that less is more when it comes to Republicans talking about immigration. An anti-immigration reform message risks repelling independent voters in the middle the GOP needs, especially in tight swings states. But embracing a path-to-citizenship pisses off the more conservative Republican voter base. And with that comes less financial and volunteer support.
“The GOP has backed themselves into a corner of an alley with no exit,” says Fernando Espuelas, host and managing editor of a radio show on the Univision Radio Network and a research fellow at the Aspen Institute. “The problem they have is they cannot pick and choose their message on this depending on the state.”
“So of the three options—being for immigration reform, against it, or saying nothing—maybe the third one does the least damage,” says Espuelas, a native of Uruguay and U.S. citizen. “But they’ll be paying for that silence for years to come.”
***
The fact that immigration will have limited impact in 2016 becomes much clearer when one runs the numbers on the Hispanic vote in swing states.
In California (where 26.9 percent of eligible voters are Hispanic according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey), and Texas (27.4 percent), an immigration reform message—whether pro or con—would make a big difference in the outcome were those states in play. But they’re not.
In the 12 likely swing states, only three—Florida (17.1 percent), Nevada (15.9 percent) and Colorado (14.2 percent)—have numbers above the national Latino eligible voter average (10.6 percent). The remaining nine swing states—Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire and Georgia—all have eligible Hispanic voters of less than five percent of their eligible voter population.
Those numbers can be taken down even further when you factor in only about half of eligible Hispanics are registered voters, and less than a third of those registered actually turn out (31.2 percent for the 2012 race), far less than white (48.6 percent) or African-American voters (44 percent).
Even if Hispanic voters end up being a major force in these states, the three swing states with higher Hispanic populations have only 44 total electoral votes combined. George W. Bush won the 2000 and 2004 election by 5 and 35 electoral votes respectively, so the 44 total electoral votes held by Nevada, Colorado and Florida could be important, but whether the GOP will go after the Hispanic vote aggressively to win those states is debatable. As Trende said, “Electoral models show this might be a close election, but often times campaigns take less chances in close races.”
Not only that, but it’s hard to see how the GOP could win over enough Hispanic voters to make the risks worthwhile. Because Hispanics have relatively small voting populations in most of the swings states, the GOP would need an almost impossible percentage of the Hispanic vote to flip those states. According to exit polls by Edison Research, if Romney had taken every Hispanic vote in Wisconsin in 2012, he still would have lost that state. In Ohio, Obama took 54 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, but he still would have won if he only took 22 percent. The numbers are similar in Virginia and North Carolina.
Even in swing states with bigger Hispanic populations, like Nevada and Colorado, Republicans would have to make monumental, perhaps unachievable gains. In Colorado and Nevada, Republicans would have to win 17 percentage points more of the Hispanic vote than they did in 2012 to turn those states red in 2016. Only Florida shows the sort of numbers where the Hispanic vote could swing the state, but the Hispanics in Florida are very different in terms of issues that move them either way.
Florida’s Hispanic voter population is big (17.1 percent of eligible voters), but those with a Mexican nationality make up only 15 percent of the entire Florida Latino population. Cubans and Puerto Ricans are the dominant groups, and only a small percentage of those voters are recent arrivals. Hence, Trump’s secure-the-border message does not play as big in Florida as Cuban diplomacy and increased numbers of visas for Caribbean islanders. In effect, immigration issues in Florida (with its 29 electoral votes) are tinged with foreign policy, not border security.
In the key swing state of Ohio (with 18 electoral votes and just 2.1 percent Hispanic voters) even Democrats have to walk a fine line on immigration reform. African-American voters in Cleveland and Youngtown, a mainstay of the Democratic voter base in the state, have been wary of policies that bring in more immigrants because they feel their people should be taken care of first. Other swing states will small Latino populations have comparable political fault lines.
But isn’t it still possible to cherry-pick the message, given the micro-targeting that is available through social media and Spanish language TV networks like Univision? “I don’t think the Republicans are going to be completely silent and let Trump go on with his message without opposition,” says Matt Barreto, a political science professor and UCLA and co-founder and managing partner of the polling and research firm, Latino Decisions.
Barreto argues that the Hispanic vote will be key, despite the Electoral College numbers and the small Hispanic populations in swings states. His argument is familiar: that close elections make voters more important, and that the GOP cannot mortgage its future by ignoring the Hispanic vote this time around.
“The super extreme tea party voters are locked up for the Republicans and aren’t going anywhere if they move a little to the center on immigration,” he says. “[George W.] Bush did well with a moderate view on immigration.” Barreto also said both parties have rarely used mainstream media to target Hispanic voters, so the Anglo voters in those swings states will not likely be aware of targeted messages on Spanish language stations.
Barreto cited Florida as a perfect example where Republicans and Democrats are going to have to deal with immigration issues, and deal with them in varied parts of the states and with different ethnicities. “The messages in Orlando and Miami and Tallahassee will all be very different,” he says. “And the Cuban and Puerto Rican communities are different.
That might be easier said than done, though. As Daniel Garza, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and now executive director of the Libre Initiative, a Hispanic economic advocacy group, says, “The problem is that the Republicans can’t have different messages in Las Vegas and Denver and Columbus and Charlotte, because we live in an age where we have access to all those messages.”
Micro-targeting aside, the main question remains how much effort is going to be made by the Republicans to court the Hispanic vote if the numbers indicate efforts are better made with other voters on other issues. When this bigger picture is taken into account, it’s clear the argument that winning the Hispanic vote is the key to winning the White House is way overblown.
Again, if California and Texas were in play—along with the 93 electoral votes those states have between them—then both parties would be all in on debating immigration reform. But that is not the case, no matter how much the media wants to make immigration a general election issue.
So don’t expect the GOP’s silence to change much. It is a hard and fast rule of politics that it is easier to be consistent if you say nothing, than if you say something.
ILLEGAL Hispanic Immigrants, yes. Trump is completely right to announce and deride their lawbreaking lifestyle.
The propagandist made it two whole sentences before telling a vicious lie. Didn’t bother reading after that.
As always, the premise is wrong. Get lost politico. Truth only counts when it fits your agenda.
Latinos may decide a presidential election one day.
Rush completely obliviated this today.
“There go the racists at Politico again, assuming that if you’re hispanic, well then, you must approve of illegal immigration. “
And you must identify with the criminal element of your ethnic group and therefore be alienated when rapists and murderers are condemned.
all’hispanics arent mexican. nor are they all illegal aliens breaking our immigration laws amd believing they have every right to do so because they want to be here and work.
what if the tables were turned and mexico was a better job country and all these white black and yellow americans were violating mexican immigration laws to work down there? would the damn libtards be on the side of the americans, finally, or would they say mexico had a right to enforce their immigration laws.
you know damn well what the libtards would say.
Politico are all racists
Why would legal Hispanic immigrants and Citizens of Hispanic descent support ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION any more than any other American? They wouldn’t and Trump didn’t insult them.
I’m pretty sure the poll in Nevada showed 34% of the Hispanics approve of Trump. He did say they like him and I believe he’s right.
He is not alienating hispanics. He is alienating the open borders crowd.
The article actually says the opposite:"immigration is not the primary concern for most Hispanic voters."
Wake me when they have to press “1” for Spanish in Mexico.
Anyway, the assumption that all hispanics are pro illegal alien is pretty much set in stone on both sides of the aisle.
BINGO!!
If citizens of hispanic descent are pro-illegal immigration, I personally don’t care what they think about Trump or any other candidate.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.