A New York Times writer says Republicans should emerge reasonably unscathed in November after last week’s vote to end Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
House Republicans passed the bill 216-192 as part of a compromise to pass an emergency bill to deal with the surge of child migrants at the southern border.
The vote infuriated congressional Democrats.
“This bill will have the effect of removing DACA from the dreamers and making them deportable,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., called it “one of the most mean-spirited and anti-immigrant pieces of legislation I have seen in all my years of Congress.”
And Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., told the Washington Post that Republicans “want to punish our community. And the punishment will be reciprocated with a political punishment. Be sure that we are not going to forget the bad treatment that our community has received.”
But the Times’ Nate Cohn writes that Republicans shouldn’t expect too much punishment at the polls, at least from the Hispanic community.
According to Cohn, Hispanics represent 6.7 percent of eligible voters in House seats held by Republicans, and they aren’t represented much better in battleground districts.
In fact, reports Cohn, “half of all eligible Hispanics live in just 65 of the nation’s 435 congressional districts.”
The math isn’t much different on the Senate side, where only Colorado possesses a substantial Hispanic voting block. (And note that the Republican senate candidate in Colorado, Rep. Cory Gardner, voted against the bill to repeal DACA.)
Below is Cohn’s chart of Hispanic voter composition in the primary battleground states for Senate races in November.
The legislation is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, and Obama issued a veto threat on Friday.
