.
After nearly a decade of obsession
with and
pandering to the Hispanic vote, the leaders of both
major political parties are finally being told an
unpleasant truth—the Hispanic vote is overrated.
Last week
William Frey, one of the country`s leading
demographers and a major expert on immigration,
unbosomed this lesson in an interview with the
Washington Times. "The Hispanic vote is going to
be a lot less important than people think," he says.
Hispanic voters` role in `04 seen overstated [
By Joseph Curl, Washington Times, September 21, 2004]
Whether it is or isn`t is a more
important question than which party or candidate can or
should pander to it the most. The belief that the
Hispanic vote is critical to political victory was the
main reason the Republican Party abandoned immigration
control after the 1996 election. Its candidate that
year, Bob Dole, won a mere
21 percent of the Hispanic bloc nationally, and the
Open Borders crowd immediately
blamed Republican support for
immigration control as the reason.
That was dubious then and even more
dubious now, but the GOP under Newt Gingrich dropped
immigration control like a live hand grenade. Party
strategists started yattering about how
"the Hispanic strategy" would replace the
"Southern strategy" as the road to party
victory.
George W. Bush himself spent much
of the 2000 campaign yattering in
Spanish, in the
belief it would win Hispanic support.
In fact, though Mr. Bush`s Hispanic
support was a
bit better than Mr. Dole`s, Al Gore walked off with
an overwhelming 65 percent of Hispanics.
That has not
stopped Republicans from continuing to pander. This
year we have had Mr. Bush`s amnesty plan for illegal
aliens and yet more yattering in Spanish.
It still doesn`t help. Polls show a
strong preference for John Kerry among Hispanics,
who is
no sluggard himself when it comes to
pandering.
But what Mr. Frey is telling them
is that it doesn`t matter anyway.
It`s true that thanks to mass
immigration the Hispanic electorate has swelled to some
7 million voters, but the numbers need to be qualified.
Mr. Frey notes that
"One-third of Hispanics are below voting age, and
another quarter are not citizens. Thus, for every 100
Hispanics, only 40 are eligible to vote, 23 are likely
to register, and just 18 are likely to
cast ballots. For blacks the comparable number is
37, and for whites, nearly 50."
In
some states, like New Mexico, Mr. Frey acknowledges
that
Hispanic voters may be critical. Hispanics make up
29 percent of the state`s total population and may well
swing it in November. But in other states like
Arizona and
Nevada, they`re simply not that important.
"In both of those states, a
disproportionate number of those Hispanics are not
registered or not voting," Mr. Frey says. Hispanics
make up only an estimated 12 percent of Arizona`s voters
and 10 percent of Nevada`s.
So what groups will determine the
election? It`s very simple, says Mr. Frey. "This race
will be
determined primarily by
white voters."
White voters make up 86 percent of
all voters in the most competitive states, and "This
election is going to be won in the
Midwest, largely white, battleground states."
If that`s true, does it carry
implications for
Republican political strategy?
To put it bluntly: Yes.
If the Hispanic vote were really as
critical to national political success as the myth
claims, immigration control would indeed be a political
loser (assuming all Hispanics favor immigration, which
is by no means entirely true).
No serious politician would support
reducing immigration or controlling the borders if those
positions meant defeat, and that`s precisely what the
Open Borders crowd harped on in the past.
But if the Hispanic vote is
not so important and
the white vote is, then the party`s strategy needs
to adjust to that reality. It needs to think hard about
how to win and keep the white vote—far more than it does
now.
In 2000, George W. Bush won the
white vote—but only by 54 percent. In
1972 and 1984 Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan won a
whopping 67 and 64 percent respectively—support that
translated into a national landslide. In the 1990s,
weaker candidates like George Bush Sr. and Mr. Dole
carried only 40 and 46 percent of whites—which
translated into defeat.
The boondoggle that the current
President Bush created with his foolish
amnesty plan for illegals ought to tell him all he
needs to know about the politics of immigration.
If he wants to win the election, he
needs to forget the Hispanics and
worry about the white voters who put him in office
in the first place.
And if he wants to win and keep the
white vote, he needs to forget about
amnesty and the idiocies the
Open Borders lobby tells him and start doing
something to
control mass immigration.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Sam Francis [email
him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection
of his columns,
America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The
Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available
from
Americans For Immigration Control.
Click here
for Sam Francis` website. Click
here to order his monograph,
Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American
Political Future.
