FOR the second time in as many years, immigra tion has fizzled as a wedge issue at the polls.
In 2006, Republicans hoped to use anger over illegal immigration to maintain control of Congress, but failed miserably, losing races even in states like Arizona and Colorado that have seen large influxes of illegals.
This year, Virginia Republicans tried the same maneuver in state races, with the same results. The Virginia GOP lost control of the state Senate on Tuesday, with Democrats winning four new Senate seats and netting three in the House of Delegates, despite efforts to rile up voters on the illegal-immigration front.
In both cases, other issues dominated the election, and there simply weren’t enough voters for whom immigration was the No. 1 issue to roll back an increasingly Democratic electoral tide.
Loudoun County, where I live, ousted four out of six incumbent Republicans on its nine-member governing board of supervisors on Tuesday. The big issue wasn’t immigration but whether GOP supervisors were simply handmaidens of developers, who were building homes far faster than the county’s infrastructure could support.
Immigration was a non-starter, despite an earlier move by the GOP-controlled board to pass a resolution aimed at illegal aliens. The sponsor of the resolution retained his seat, but he won by barely 200 votes with very low turnout, despite spending more money than any other candidate for the board.
The one race in the county where a challenger tried to make illegal immigration the big issue was for county sheriff. The incumbent, who’d run in the past as a Republican, failed to get an endorsement from the state party this time because he was viewed as insufficiently tough on illegal aliens. He ran as an independent. His GOP challenger harped continuously on the illegal immigrant threat, but apparently few people cared.
The Republican came in third. It didn’t help matters that he admitted that as deputy sheriff he routinely fixed friends’ speeding tickets, leading at least this voter to wonder: What part of illegal didn’t he understand?
Even in Prince William County – which gained national attention this summer for passing one of the toughest local anti-illegal alien measures in the country – immigration wasn’t decisive. Two of the most outspoken anti-illegal members of the board of supervisors won re-election, but so did the incumbent Democratic state senator in the race, whom his opponent had tried to paint as soft on illegal immigration.
What the Virginia GOP failed to appreciate is the difference between intensity and salience in voter behavior. Some voters are intensely angry about illegal immigration; they tend to dominate talk-show airwaves and show up at candidate gatherings. But this is the single biggest voting issue for relatively few voters.
A larger group of voters may worry about the effect of illegal immigration – but when they go to the polls, other concerns trump the issue.
The GOP’s tough stand on immigration is a big loser with Hispanic voters, a growing share of the electorate. Illegal-bashing also appears not to have the broad appeal to other voters that some Republican strategists thought it would. If they’re smart, GOP candidates will find a new issue to tie their hopes to next year.