[caption id=”attachment_134228″ align=”aligncenter” width=”744″] Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. announces his bid for presidency, Monday, June 1, 2015, in Central, S.C. (AP Photo/Rainier Ehrhardt)
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Newly-announced Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has a solution to his party’s low results with Hispanic voters: Become more like Democrats.
According to Fusion, Graham is “leaning in” on the immigration issue, as Frank Sharry, the executive director of pro-amnesty group America’s Voice, put it. Ironically, “lean forward” is the tagline for MSNBC, the progressive cable news channel.
Graham is marketing himself as the solution to Republican Party’s Hispanic problem. He believes that only by adopting a progressive view of immigration, having open borders, and rewarding illegal immigrants who break the law can Republicans ever hope to win the Hispanic vote.
Unlike Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Graham has refused to compromise his position on the issue, unabashedly supporting citizenship for illegal immigrants.
“We better get immigration right and pick people from all over the world, not just ones next door,” Graham said last month at the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit in New Hampshire. “You’re going to have to come up with an immigration system to have workers to run the economy in the future.”
“And the reason I’m making this point — there’s no room I can’t go into as a candidate and look any member of the Hispanic community in the eye and say, ‘Listen. I believe that you should be a Republican. You’re hard-working. You’re entrepreneurial. Pro-life. Patriotic. And I’ve tried to solve a hard problem like immigration,'” Graham concluded.
Graham’s words may be a rallying cry for the Republicans who support rewarding lawbreakers, but they are not found anywhere in reality.
His supposition that Hispanic voters will only support a Republican if he or she is liberal on immigration is incorrect.
A Pew Research Center poll found that 54 percent of Latino registered voters would vote for a candidate who disagreed with them on immigration policy if they agreed with them on the majority of other issues.
For example, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) received a plurality of votes among Hispanic men and 44 percent of the total Latino vote last year despite being tough on illegal immigration.
Not only does a Republican not need to support amnesty to receive a large portion of the Hispanic vote, but supporting it guarantees very little of it.
In his 2008 run for the White House, Graham’s ally on immigration, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), received just 31 percent of the Hispanic vote in the general election. McCain’s numbers were just four points higher than 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s 27 percent, even though Romney had a much more conservative immigration platform.
Many of Graham’s allies, including the executive director of the American Principles Project’s Latino Partnership Alfonso Aguilar, have pointed to Romney’s loss as a reason Republicans should play ethnic politics. Rubio pollster Whit Ayres recently said that Republicans will need 40 percent of the Hispanic vote to retake the White House in 2016.
All these assessments do not match the facts. According to the Washington Examiner, Mitt Romney could have gotten 70 percent of the Hispanic vote, and he still would have lost.
