It appears likely the Gang of Eight’s comprehensive immigration reform bill will come up for a vote in the Senate this week. Most political analysts believe the controversial measure, primarily sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., will pass the upper chamber easily. These same pundits are virtually unanimous on another point in the immigration reform debate: Republicans must support the measure if they hope to win future presidential elections.

The idea that the GOP must pander to Hispanic voters in 2013 in order to win the White House in 2016, however, ignores key facts in the Republican loss in 2012. To begin with, the failure to attract sufficient numbers of Hispanic voters was not the reason Mitt Romney lost to President Obama. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York pointed out in May, Romney could have won 70 percent of the Hispanic vote – almost exactly the reverse of the actual results – and still fallen short. Citing a statistical tool created by the New York Times’ Nate Silver, York noted that “Romney would have had to win 73 percent of the Hispanic vote to prevail in 2012. Which suggests that Romney, and Republicans, had bigger problems than Hispanic voters.”