Sometimes, distance lends perspective. From overseas, it looks as though the Democrats are in meltdown. They have lost both chambers of Congress and control only 11 state legislatures — the lowest number in nearly a century. In 2009 they had 27 state governorships and Sen. Mitch McConnell was warning Republicans that they were in danger of becoming “a regional party.” Today there are just 16 Democratic governors. Take out New York and California and the Democrats would pretty much collapse. Who’s the regional party now?
So why are Democrats confident of holding the White House in 2016? And why do American and foreign media broadly share their confidence? No one likes to say so in so many words, but the answer has to do with the changing ethnic profile of the electorate. Hispanic Americans are by far the fastest-growing segment of the population. Some 67 percent of Latino voters backed Democratic candidates in the recent midterm elections, and 71 percent voted for Obama in 2012. It’s only natural that a grateful president should want to add more Spanish speakers to the electoral rolls, ¿no?
Republicans used to reassure themselves with the thought that immigrants almost always lean left at first. Once they move up the scale and start matching the economic data of the electorate as a whole, or so the theory goes, their voting patterns adapt. As Ronald Reagan once put it, in a characteristically cheerful phrase, Latinos are “Republicans who just don’t know it yet.” But, 30 years on, they still don’t seem to know it.
Which raises a disquieting thought. What if Hispanic Americans — or, more precisely, Mexican Americans, since we’re talking numbers here — have a partisan inclination that transcends their socioeconomic status? Milton Himmelfarb is supposed to have observed that Jewish Americans “earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.” But since Jews make up only 2 percent of the electorate, a rather more pressing concern for the GOP is that Puerto Ricans vote like Puerto Ricans — as do Mexicans, Ecuadoreans and Nicaraguans.
For as long as I can remember, Republicans have assured anyone who will listen that Latino values are their values: family, hard work, religious observance and so on. Well, chaps, how’s that strategy working out?
In fairness, the same challenge is faced by right-of-center parties across the industrialized world. All have tried the “your-values-are-our-values” shtick, and all have failed. Except one. In Canada’s last election, the Conservative Party managed to win a higher proportion of votes from immigrants than from native-born Canadians, and a higher proportion from ethnic minority Canadians than from whites.
How did they do it? It was a long-term campaign, masterminded by Jason Kenney, now Canada’s immigration minister. Kenney was quick to see the problem. New immigrants, often arriving penniless, tend to live initially in areas represented by leftist politicians, especially at the local level. Their first impressions of Canada’s party system tended to come from those politicians: “We’re the nice party, eh; those other jerks don’t even want you in the country!” First impressions count.
Kenney’s solution was to ensure that he and other Conservatives were around often enough to ensure that they defined themselves in the minds of new arrivals, rather than being defined by their opponents. Put like that, it sounds simple, but it involves a lot of work. How many Republican activists will put time into, say, running Spanish-language business advice centers?
The situation is not hopeless. Several local Republican candidates bucked the trend in the midterms, often on hard-line conservative tickets. In Colorado, Georgia, Kansas and Texas, Republican candidates got close to half the Hispanic vote, while the brilliant Susana Martinez was handsomely re-elected in New Mexico.
Could the GOP nationally do something similar in 2016? If Kenney is right, then establishing your bona fides with new voters is more important than your position in immigration. President Obama is raising the prospect that a Republican president might repeal his amnesty, not because immigration is a winning issue for Democrats, but because he wants to reinforce the perception that Republicans are anti-Latino.
How to challenge that perception? Might it help to have a surname like Cruz or Rubio on the ballot? It might, but let me add one observation as a Latino myself, born and brought up in Lima, Peru. There is a broad cultural continuum that runs roughly from Mexico to Bolivia, whose peoples spend a lot of time watching each other’s abominable soap operas. Puerto Rico and, even more, Cuba, stand slightly apart from that nexus. It’s as if you were to say, “OK, we couldn’t find any Irish candidates, but we’ve got a Scot — that’s more or less the same, isn’t it?”
Likewise, having the authentically Mexican-origin Martinez as a vice presidential candidate would look like what it would it be: tokenism. If they really wanted to exceed expectations, Republicans could perhaps run two Hispanic candidates and launch the campaign in Spanish. That might just grab people’s sympathetic attention.
In truth, though, this isn’t really about surnames or language; it’s about, in the literal sense, sympathy — fellow-feeling. The blue-blooded George W. Bush did better among Hispanic voters than any subsequent Republican presidential candidate because he seemed simpatico. The party as a whole, so far, doesn’t.
If the GOP can get this issue right, it will enjoy such a hegemony as it experienced in the years after the Civil War. If not, all its recent gains will be ground away by demographic change. That’s how serious it is.
