"Bush Losing Hispanics": Couldn't Happen To A Nicer Guy. (Too Bad About GOP, Though)
05/23/2006
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The Washington Post runs a telling headline:

"Bush Is Losing Hispanics' Support, Polls Show; Surveys Find the Immigration Debate Is Also Alienating White Conservatives" by Thomas B. Edsall and Zachary A. Goldfarb, May 21, 2006

The priority given Hispanics in this headline is another example of a consistent pattern of media bias. Hispanics cast only 6.0 percent of the vote in the last election, according to the Census Bureau. White conservatives, whom the Post admits are also alienated, account for roughly four to six times more votes than all Hispanics put together.

If you just went by what you read in the newspapers you'd have to assume that the Constitution had been amended to make minority votes count more heavily than white votes.

Still, Edsall and Goldfarb confirm what we've been saying for over a half decade: the Bush-Rove immigration strategy makes no political sense. They write:

"Cumulatively, the data underscore the perils for Bush and his party in the immigration debate churning on Capitol Hill, one that threatens to bleed away support simultaneously from the Republican base and from Hispanic swing voters, whom Bush strategists had hoped to make an important new part of the GOP coalition."

Edsall and Goldfarb report:

"A survey of 800 registered Hispanic voters conducted May 11-15 by the nonpartisan Latino Coalition showed that Democrats were viewed as better able to handle immigration issues than Republicans, by nearly 3 to 1: 50 percent to 17 percent. Pitting the Democrats against Bush on immigration issues produced a 2 to 1 Democratic advantage, 45 percent to 22 percent."

Well, gosh, now why would the Democratic Party be more enthusiastic about importing more Latinos than, on the whole, the Republican Party?

Could it be because…Latinos vote Democratic?

In response, Bush and his GOP allies like Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) have been attempting to appeal to Hispanics by denouncing the GOP's conservative base as "the political lowest common denominator" (in Hagel's words last Thursday).

Not surprisingly, the spectacle of leading Republicans condemning the salt of the Republican Party isn't making Hispanics trust Republicans more.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has finally caught up to concept first put forward in the 1997 Brimelow-Rubenstein article "Electing a New People" that immigration is bad for the GOP. Edsall and Goldfarb write:

"Even if the GOP does maintain Bush's margins among Latinos in 2008, another study found that Democrats are likely to achieve a net gain in future elections, simply because Hispanics are growing as a share of the electorate."

Y-e-s! That is how simple arithmetic works! They continue:

Ken Strasma, a Democratic strategist who specializes in using demographic data to target potential voters, and the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study concluding that, if past voting patterns hold, the growing Hispanic population means that Democrats will increase their 2004 vote totals by nearly half a million votes in 2008.

That sounds a little exaggerated to me, probably due to Strasma assuming that the tidal wave of Hispanic electoral might will finally roll in in 2008, but clearly the direction is correct.

"The impact is even stronger farther out in the future, as Hispanic vote growth would move two Southwestern battleground states — Nevada and New Mexico — into the Democratic column by 2016, and add Iowa and Ohio by 2020," the study said. If the 2004 election had been held in an electorate based on the one forecast for 2020, with all other factors held constant, the higher Hispanic vote would have given Democrat John F. Kerry a slight victory in both the electoral college and the popular vote, the study added.

It only took the Post nine years to catch up with VDARE.COM's authors, but better late than never.

Of course, the Senate's Amnesty/ Immigration Acceleration bill, which would increase the number of legal immigrants by 47 million over the next two decades. would hasten this process radically.

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