No political party can prevail nationally on Anglo votes alone, so the long-term danger to Republicans is that their party is sending a message to Latinos that it doesn’t want us.
“There has been too much of an anti-immigration tone,” Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Belart, a South Florida Republican congressmen, told USA Today. “When people start to perceive that immigrants are being put in the same category as a threat to national security, it’s hard to get your message across.”
It’s part of the reason for the GOP’s stinging defeat in the 2006 elections and dims the prospect in 2008 for the party that deserted its own President’s immigration reform legislation and attempts to whip its base into frenzy on the backs of illegal aliens. Two June 2007 polls showed an overwhelming number of Hispanics now identify themselves as Democrats – 58 percent according to a USA Today/Gallup poll and 51 percent according to one conducted by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal. The same polls showed Hispanics identifying as Republican at 20 percent and 21 percent respectively.
The Republicans have put themselves on the wrong side of history and an inevitable demographic trend that could cost them dearly in future elections. What is surprising, given their usually superb political instincts in the Karl Rove era, is that the mistake was avoidable, because the statistics quoted above represent a sea change in the Hispanic community.
In 2004, Republicans, with nine million registered Hispanic voters, had a reasonable chance of becoming the permanent majority party in this country partly because of the strength of the President’s support among Latinos. George W. Bush was re-elected that year despite growing opposition to the war in Iraq. And Hispanics helped save his presidency even more than Republicans had hoped. A Los Angles Times exit poll showed that nationally, Bush got 45 percent of the total Hispanic vote, a gain of 7 percent over his take in 2000 and more than double the GOP Hispanic vote in 1996. As political analyst Dick Morris said the week after Bush’s 2004 triumph over John Kerry,
“Bush has worked incredibly hard for his Hispanic vote share. He reversed historic Republican Party positions on issues of importance to Hispanics and showed a willingness to listen to the needs of the Latino community.”
That respectful romance with Latinos ended abruptly in the lead up to the November 2006 elections, when extremists on immigration hijacked the GOP.
One of them, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, may wish he had taken a more moderate stance instead of essentially adopting the position of the Minutemen and similar radical anti-immigration groups. These groups promulgate their wildly exaggerated portrayal of a cascade of brown people overwhelming our southern borders, running loose to rape, steal and murder on the streets of our cities.
In August 2007, one of the top Hispanic Republicans in Texas announced he would back a Democrat instead of Senator Cornyn in the 2008 elections. Massey Villarreal, a prominent Houston-area businessman, served as Hispanic vice chairman of the Bush/Cheney campaign and deputy vice chairman of the Republican National Convention. Yet he’s thrown his support to State Representative Rick Noriega, a Democrat.
“Every time I saw a picture of John Cornyn speaking with Lou Dobbs or any of those talking heads, they show a picture of Mexicans jumping over the fence,” Villarreal told the Rio Grande Guardian, adding, “The only reason they have to jump the fence is because he [Cornyn] does not have the gall to have a program, or a process, or a legal system to have legal immigration.”
If the GOP is losing guys like Villarreal, the implications are grim for the party. As he departed the White House in August 2007, Karl Rove warned against alienating Hispanics on the issue of immigration, saying that the party should not put itself out of line with, “A vital part of the electorate that fundamentally shares our values and concerns.”
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How vital a part of the electorate? A record 8.6 percent of all eligible voters in 2006 were Hispanic, compared to 7.4 percent in 2004 and just 5.5 percent in 2000, and that number is expected to rise in November 2008. Census data shows that the number of Hispanic voters could reach 10 percent or more by then, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
In the elections of 2004, 40 percent of Hispanics voted for GOP congressional candidates. In 2006, that number was down to 26 percent. The effect of that seismic shift among the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group was the utter defeat of radical candidates like Arizona congressmen Randy Graf and J.D. Hayworth. Graf ran a scummy ad showing a little blonde-haired child walking by a slowly opening door as a doom-laden voiceover talked ominously about how the nation’s open-door policy was leading to crime and decay (and presumably Mexicans raping little blonde girls).
In his noxious ads, six-term Indiana congressman John Hostettler appeared with representatives of the Minutemen and campaigned against the “nightmare of immigrant amnesty.” None of it worked. “If running against illegal immigration were a winner, Arizona’s J.D. Hayworth would still be in Congress,” said the Wall Street Journal at the time.
The vote proved that most Hispanic-Americans, although personally unaffected by immigration policy, would not ignore the insult to others who are here illegally. As for me, a professed live-and let-live libertarian who has often voted for Republicans, I say here and now that I will never vote for any Republican (or Democrat) who opposes rational immigration reform and seeks to score votes on the backs of illegal aliens. Never. I don’t care if I know the candidate personally or even if I have voted for him or her before.
The big political mystery going into the 2008 election cycle is whether the Hispanic votes like mine, lost to Republicans because of their rabid stance on immigration, will be made up by an energized base among Anglo voters who have embraced anti-immigrationism as they once embraced gay marriage or abortion.
As nationally recognized pollster Sergio Bendixen, who has worked for Sen. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said in a New America Media piece following the 2006 election titled, “GOP Blew It: Latinos Are Moving toward the Democratic Party,”
“The immigration issue had a lot to do with energizing the Hispanic electorate, making them a lot more interested in politics and a lot more willing to come out to the polls and participate in the electoral process . . . many Hispanics have been offended by the tone of the debate in the congress, by reactionary solutions that have been proposed by many members of Congress. . . . I think they blame the Republican Party for the unfair way that the issue has been handled and the way it has hurt the image of the Hispanic community nationally.”
Mel Martinez, the Florida GOP senator, chairman of the Republican National Committee and the only Hispanic Republican in the Senate, told his colleagues in what The New York Times characterized as a “stern warning” that, “This is the first issue that, in my mind, has absolutely galvanized the Latino community in America like no other.”
When all the GOP presidential candidates except brave John McCain decided to skip an offered historic debate in Spanish sponsored by Univision, Martinez tried to be a good soldier, telling reporters, “I was hoping that there would be a good participation in the Univision forum. It’s a very busy primary calendar, and their schedules are such that this forum didn’t fit in. Now is this a rejection of Hispanic voters? Of course not. And I hope it’s not seen that way.”
Simon Rosenberg, who has studied the Latino electorate and runs the New Democrat Network which helped set-up the successful Democratic forum on Univision commented in the Washington Post, “To be frank, every day Martinez’s job is to put lipstick on a pig. It’s not a pretty job, but he took it, and now he’s got to live with it.”
Tellingly, the same week the GOP opted not to participate in the Univision forum, the Spanish-language network captured the No. 1 ranking nationally among all adults 18-34, not just Hispanics. In doing so it out-delivered ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and the CW network.
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How bad is the erosion of Hispanic voter support for the GOP? Even Miami-Dade’s famously Republican Hispanic voters are increasingly becoming independents. A Miami Herald survey found that less than half of the county’s Hispanic voters are registered Republicans, down from 59 percent less than a decade ago. “It’s a trend that I’ve seen happening, and obviously it concerns me,” Jose “Pepe” Riesco, vice-chairman of the Miami-Dade Republican Party told the paper. “It’s a problem we can’t run away from.”
The Herald’s survey found that statewide, where non-Cuban Hispanics constitute a much larger segment of the Latino community than they do in South Florida, about 37 percent of Hispanics are registered Republicans, compared with 33 percent registered as Democrats. “This is huge, because this is the state Republicans point to as a model of their Hispanic outreach,” Florida Democratic Party spokesman Mark Bubriski told the Herald. “Clearly, the Bush era is dead.”
“There may be some short-term gain from this,” Linda Chavez, formerly the director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under Reagan and now chairwoman of a conservative public policy group called the Center for Equal Opportunity told The New York Times. She was referring to the re-energized Republican social conservatives like Limbaugh and Dobbs, furious about illegal immigration.
“But in the long term, it is disastrous for the Republican Party,” said the no-nonsense columnist, adding, “The tone of the debate, and the way it was framed in sort of an ‘us against them’ way, has done great harm in wooing Hispanics to the party.”
Perhaps surprisingly from a commentator who consistently railed against bilingual education and criticized my Puerto Rican community for welfare dependency and illegitimacy, (and was punched in the nose when she showed up to speak at a community college in the Bronx), Ms. Chavez went further in a May 2007 column called, “Latino Fear and Loathing.” It had me cheering.
“They think Latinos are freeholders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English. They think Latinos have too many babies, and that Latino kids will dumb down our schools. They think Latinos are dirty, diseased, indolent, and more prone to criminal behavior. They think Latinos are just too different from us to become real Americans.”
You go girl! Ms. Chavez later apologized for perhaps overstating her case against her fellow conservatives and hurting some “erstwhile allies” in the GOP, but I think she got it exactly right. All most of the undocumented want is a fair shake and a chance to work hard and realize what we proudly call the “American Dream.” Give them the chance to regularize and legitimatize their status and watch, as they become another unique component of the national mosaic. Maybe they will even become Republicans. But the chances of that happening in the current toxic environment are almost zero.
More likely, Hispanics will gravitate increasingly to the Democratic side of the aisle. And if that tilt can affect even Florida’s Cuban American community, as the Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman Joe Garcia told the Herald, “There’s no math in the world that will give Republicans the White House in 2008.”
Excerpted from Rivera’s “HisPanic” (Penguin), out Tuesday.