We never will win the minority vote - but, it's not about winning it, it's about shaving a few points off. Karl Rove understood this (Karl Rove haters hold you comments) and was quite effective in denting the black and Hispanic voting margins held for years by the Dummies.
The country is browning at a significant pace. If Republicans can't find a way to reach out and connect with African Americans and Latinos, we will never win the Presidency again. And, we may never have a majority in the Senate or House again either.
What a laugh. Republicans participated in the dem plan to change America with a flood of illegal immigrants and legal immigration that favors minorities. Then you think these minorities are going to magically vote republican and that republicans will remain a conservative party.
I’m laughing so hard I’m crying or maybe crying till I laugh.
Democrats get almost 100% of the black vote and a super majority of hispanics, but republicans wouldn’;t dare appeal to white voters that would be racist. Oy.
I don’t relaly know how effective Rove was. Bush got 9 and 11% of the black vote respectively. And that was without a black guy as an opponent. If Obama, or some other black guy was running in 2000 or 2004, I doubt Bush would have done any better than McCain did with blacks. Conversely, if there was a white guy or Hillary running against McCain, he would have done the same as Bush did with blacks.
It was the black guy at the top that pumoed the numbers, not anything McCain or the GOP did.
As for Latinos, McCain is as pro-hispanic as you can get. It was the economy and the backlash over immigration that led to the drop, combined with the fact that Bush probably gained a bit from his time in TX and Jeb’s connections in FL. McCain actually did 8 pts better than Bush among Hispanics in CO for instance, and still lost because he did worse among whites.
also, keep in mind that both of Rove’s elections were before Katrina in 2005. That really hurt things with minorities and with blacks especially. Combine the effects of Katrina with a black candidate in Obama(who also played the race card very effectively) and I don’t think anyone would have done any better than the 5% or so that McCain ended up getting.
I mean the GOP hasn’t topped 10% or so of the black vote in 50 years or thereabouts.
The difference is the white vote vote is shrinking to its lowest level ever and our margins there aren’t enough to make it up.
Even if McCain had done as well as W did among whites he still would have lost because of the decline in the white vote. W got 58% of the white vote and McCain got 55%. He needed 62% to win based on the white share of the total vote, which given the economy, the iraq war and W’s overall unpopularity was pretty much impossible.