by
Benjy Sarlin, Hardball
- reposted from NBC Latino
If the 2012 election was a wakeup call for Republicans to address
their relationship to Latino voters, the 2013 immigration debate is
starting to resemble a chloroform-soaked rag.
After November’s stunning loss, an array of influential Republicans
argued that immigration reform was the party’s best chance to claim
Latino voters before they become permanent Democrats. But in a mere
eight months, a counter-narrative has taken hold in conservative
circles, nurtured by a shrewd group of anti-immigration lobbyists and
Tea Party enthusiasts. The new argument sees immigration reform at best
as a divisive distraction from the GOP’s real problem of countering
“white flight” from the polls. At worst, they view it as an electoral
apocalypse, a seventh seal behind which lies an unbroken line of future
Democratic presidents.
As the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill moves to the House, whose
members are overwhelmingly planted in safe GOP districts, the stakes
couldn’t be higher for comprehensive reform. Whether it passes will be
determined in large part by which of the two narratives can win over the
conservative mainstream.
At the moment, the anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining
converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the
“demographic” threat posed by Latino voters
“absolutely real” and
suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to
blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument
“baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”
Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a
similar journey since the fall. He announced the day after President
Obama’s re-election that he had
“evolved” on
immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order
to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard
against the Senate’s bill.
“Not only do I doubt the current legislation will solve the immigration problem,” he wrote in a June
column, “but it also won’t help the GOP in future elections.”
Hannity and Hume didn’t arrive at their latest destination by
accident. They’re just the latest figures on the right to embrace the
compelling new message that’s whipping Republicans against immigration
reform while still promising a better tomorrow for the GOP’s
presidential candidates.
‘You Don’t Get To Come Over Here And Be Takers’
House leaders have been cagey about their views on immigration
reform, political or otherwise, suggesting a “wait-and-see” approach to
the ongoing civil war over the Senate bill. Speaker John Boehner says he
supports immigration reform in an abstract sense, but won’t bring
forward any bill that doesn’t have the support of the majority of his
caucus. Majority Leader Eric Cantor has shifted since the November
election to favoring a path to citizenship for young undocumented
immigrants, a far more modest position than the Senate’s “Gang of
Eight,” but one that suggests he’s at least nominally concerned about
the rising Latino vote.
The most vocal advocate for passing a far-reaching bill along the lines of the Senate’s has been
Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
Perhaps not coincidentally, he’s also the member most likely to face a
national Latino electorate in 2016 as the party’s presidential nominee.
But he’s gone out of his way to avoid the political argument over the
bill, focusing his attention on advocating for its individual policy
provisions instead.
But other House leaders are moving in the opposite direction. After
entertaining the idea of bipartisan immigration reform earlier this
year, House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte and Immigration
Subcommittee Chair Trey Gowdy are pushing an
enforcement-oriented bill modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070–despised
by Latino groups–that would criminalize unauthorized immigrants and
task local police with investigating suspected violators. This doesn’t
look like the behavior of politicians who are terribly worried about
courting Latino voters.
At the heart of their dueling approaches is a basic question: can the
party win back the White House without winning more Latinos?
Rush Limbaugh argues that it can, and if House Republicans and their
constituents take his side, the motivation to pass immigration reform
will vanish. For months, he’s tried to convince his listeners that
Latinos are unlikely to vote for the current Republican Party even if
immigration reform passes. During one on-air confrontation with Senator
Marco Rubio of Florida, Limbaugh asked whether “the Republican party is
committing suicide” by adding “nine million automatic Democrat voters”
through a path to citizenship.
Reformers such as Rubio counter that Latinos are only voting for
Democrats in such large numbers because the immigration debate has
drowned out Republicans’ compelling message of low taxes and
deregulation. Often they describe the bill as a “gateway” issue, one
that won’t win the GOP any votes by itself, but will at least open the
doors to outreach.
“I believe if we pass this legislation, it won’t gain us a single
Hispanic vote, but what it will do is put us on a playing field where we
can compete,” John McCain said in an
April breakfast with reporters.
Or, as Rubio is
fond of saying, “It’s
really hard to get people to listen to you on economic growth, on tax
rates, on healthcare if they think you want to deport their
grandmother.”
But Rush has some compelling data to back up his electoral claim. An
April 2012 survey by
the Pew Research Hispanic Center found that 75% of Latinos preferred a
“bigger government” that provides more services versus 19% who favor a
“smaller” one. Among the general population, smaller government won out
by a 48-31 margin. Obama’s healthcare law often
polls well with Latinos–a dynamic Romney infamously cited as one of the Democratic
“gifts” that cost him the election.
“This is scholarly data in academic reports: 75% of illegal
immigrants in the country also believe that government is the source of
prosperity,” Limbaugh said in a
January 31 broadcast. “So they’re naturally going to be inclined to vote Democrat.”
This helps explain Michele Bachmann’s warning last month to conservative fringe site
World Net Daily:
“We will never again have a Republican president, ever, if amnesty goes
into effect.” The Limbaugh argument is especially powerful in Tea Party
hands because it flatters their self-image as rugged independents
fighting off the welfare-hoarding invaders.
“The things that made America great are Americans like you that work
and understand that it’s sacrifice,” Congressman Randy Weber of Texas
said at a
June rally against the Senate bill. “You don’t get to come over here and be takers.”
Some conservative commentators argue that Latinos’ faith gives them
an advantage on social issues instead. Washington Post columnist Charles
Krauthammer
wrote after the election that
Latinos “should be a natural Republican constituency: striving
immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially
conservative (on abortion, for example)” and plenty of others have made
similar arguments.
But on abortion, there’s
little evidence Latino
voters are as conservative as they’ve been portrayed compared to the
general population. And on gay marriage, an issue the national GOP isn’t
too inclined to highlight these days anyway, some polls suggest they’ve
actually
grown more liberal than the average voter.
Their rhetoric may be crude, but here the skeptics raise a legitimate
point: if Republicans can’t win Latinos on the economy and they can’t
win them on religion, there isn’t a lot left to go on at the moment.
‘Natural Conservatives!’
Talk radio hosts and conservative lawmakers didn’t just stumble upon
this narrative. Anti-immigration groups like NumbersUSA have pushed the
argument for months in the hopes of increasing opposition to the bill.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration
Studies and a leading spokesman for the anti-reform movement, has made
it a special focus. Each day, he tracks and then highlights every poll
or news story that indicates Latinos are to the left of the general
public, often tweeting them out with a mocking “Natural conservatives!”
According to Krikorian, his group doesn’t have a “thought-out
strategy” when it comes to undercutting pro-reform political arguments,
but they try to showcase evidence as it arises.
“The debunking of this ‘natural conservatives’ storyline isn’t
ongoing: it’s over,” he told MSNBC. “You only really see Lindsey Graham
making this kind of argument and nobody takes him seriously,” he said of
the South Carolina senator.
To further stiffen wavering conservative spines, CIS sponsored a study by
University of Houston researcher George Hawley in
February demonstrating that Republican members of Congress who
supported immigration reform in 2006 fared as poorly with Latino voters
as those who opposed it. More brazenly (and less successfully),
NumbersUSA president Roy Beck has tried to persuade Republicans that
opposing immigration reform will actually
endear them to Latinos.
Krikorian and his fellow activists have done a bang-up job convincing
conservatives that Latinos won’t vote for them after they pass
immigration reform. But that conclusion raises the obvious problem:
Obama beat Romney by 5 million votes in 2012 in a lousy economy. If
Latinos aren’t going to close that gap in 2016, who is?
The Case Of The Missing Whites
In the run-up to the 2012 conventions, a Republican strategist predicted to the
National Journal that Romney’s plan to run up the white vote at the expense of minorities would be “the last time anyone will try to do this.”
Wrong. A new view on the right is taking hold: Romney lost because he didn’t go after whites hard enough.
This will probably sound a little odd if you were watching TV on election night 2012. Romney won 59% of the white vote in
exit polls, better than President Bush’s 58% in 2004. Unfortunately for Romney, the
white share of the electorate declined from
79.2% to 73.7 % over the same period. The result: Obama won by an even
bigger margin than Bush did thanks to blowout margins with minorities.
But conservative commentators are convincing themselves they can find
a few million more whites tucked between the couch cushions–at least
enough for one more election. Two columnists have been particularly
influential in this regard. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has
argued that census data shows about 5 million mostly poor and rural
white voters were “projected” to vote in 2012 based on population growth
and past turnout but
didn’t show up to the polls. Byron York, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, published a
related piece noting that Romney would have lost even if he had racked up a majority of Latino voters.
“Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply
stayed home on Election Day,” York wrote in May. “If they had voted at
the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since
then, Romney would have won.”
The problem is there’s no way Romney would have won all 5 million of
those whites, so Obama’s lead would have held. But if Obama had failed
to replicate his 2008 performance with minority voters
and Romney
had matched Bush’s 2004 performance with whites, the GOP could have
narrowly prevailed. This was the exact scenario Romney was shooting for.
York and Trende have some nuanced ideas about how the GOP can
accomplish what Romney failed to do, many of which involve tacking left
on the economy. But to the talk radio right, the main takeaway is that
there are several million angry white votes ripe for the taking if the
party can swing even more to the right.
White voters stayed home, Limbaugh
said in May, because “they didn’t think the Republican Party was conservative enough.”
You can hear the “missing whites” thesis everywhere once you start
looking for it. Hannity cited York’s piece in his column opposing the
“Gang of Eight” bill. Social conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly
recently
told a radio host that
“the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes,
the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election and there are
millions of them.” There’s “not any evidence at all that these Hispanics
coming in from Mexico will vote Republican,” she said.
“Their idea seems to be gaining currency,” Frank Sharry, executive
director of immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, told MSNBC.
“Right after the election most of the conservative commentariat said
they had to do something to get right with Latino voters. Now there
seems to be this bizarre conversation that could only happen in the
conservative bubble about how Romney didn’t win because he didn’t
mobilize enough white voters.”
Underlying these claims is a belief that Romney lost because he was a
blue-blooded moderate who failed to connect to conservative white
voters on a visceral level. Nominate an American bad-ass in 2016 and
those missing whites will reappear in a hurry. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to
add a few Hispanic voters, but the GOP can do that with some kind of
inoffensive “outreach” program instead. After all, look at Congressman
Steve Pearce of New Mexico, an immigration hawk whose retail politicking
has earned him an
impressive Latino following.
‘The Demographic Death Spiral’
If Bachmann, Schlafly and Limbaugh are able to convince the party
that it doesn’t need Latinos, then the GOP may be screwed for
generations. That’s because the coming Latino wave isn’t some
hypothetical outcome that can be undone by blocking “amnesty” or
bringing a few more white voters to the polls. It’s already baked into
the demographic cake.
The Latino share of the electorate was 8.4% in 2012. What’s worrisome to the GOP is that the Latino share of the
population in 2012 was
17.2% and growing.
The reason for the disparity has much less to do with illegal
immigration than it does with the relative youth of the Latino
community, where the median age is 27 versus 42 for whites. According
to
Pew,
there are about 7.1 million undocumented Latino adults who could become
citizens under the Senate bill–and only some of them would do so, let
alone vote. That group is dwarfed by the 17.6 million Latinos under 18,
the overwhelming majority of whom (93%) are U.S.-born citizens. Every
election cycle, more of them will become eligible to vote, while the
oldest, whitest and most Republican generations age out of the
electorate on the other end. (“Age out of the electorate” is a euphemism
for “die.”)
It actually gets worse for the GOP. Hispanic turnout is extremely
low–48% in 2012–in part because their eligible voters are so young. By
comparison, white turnout was 64% and black turnout was 66%. That gives
Democrats room to grow their Latino base through registration and voting
drives–an area where they’ve been incredibly successful with black
voters already–while Republicans may be operating near their ceiling
with whites.
The white vote also looks so GOP-friendly because the Deep South backs Republicans by
huge margins:
Obama won 51% of the white vote in Iowa, for example, but just 10% in
Mississippi. And according to Trende’s analysis, a lot of the “missing”
white vote is concentrated in rural portions of the Northeast. So even
if Republicans boost white turnout, a bunch of the gains will go to
running up the score in Southern states they already win or to improving
their margin in Northern states they don’t contest.
This is the
“demographic death spiral” Sen.
Graham is so worried about. And pro-reform Republicans are growing
panicked as the new revisionism on Mitt Romney’s loss takes hold. Karl
Rove, whose Crossroads group is spending millions promoting immigration
reform, confronted his critics head on in the Wall Street Journal last
month in an op-ed titled
“More White Votes Won’t Save The GOP.” Graham and fellow immigration co-sponsor John McCain aren’t just warning of a 2016 loss anymore, they’ve taken to
publicly guaranteeing one if their immigration bill fails.
“[If] we don’t pass immigration reform, if we don’t get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way,” Graham said on
Meet The Press last month, “it doesn’t matter who you run in 2016.”
