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Bemoaning their losses in the last election Republicans have
decided that they need to sign on to immigration reform.
You see, they figured out that Obama won the election be
attracting a sizable majority of the Hispanic votes. Ergo, they believe that
they must appear to be friendlier to Hispanics.
When this thesis is tested, however, it turns out to be
wrong.
Byron York ran the numbers on the New York Times calculator
and discovered:
What if
Romney had won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, the high-water mark for
Republicans achieved by George W. Bush in 2004? As it turns out, if Romney had
hit that Bush mark, he still would have lost, with 240 electoral votes to 298
for Obama.
York continued:
But
what if Romney had been able to reach a mind-blowing 70 percent of the Hispanic
vote? Surely that would have meant victory, right? No, it wouldn't. Romney
still would have lost, although by the narrowest of electoral margins, 270 to
268. (Under that scenario, Romney would have won the popular vote but lost in
the Electoral College; he could have racked up huge numbers of Hispanic votes
in California, New York and Texas, for example, and not changed the results in
those states.)
According
to the Times' calculator, 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.
The Republicans’ real problem lay in the low turnout of
white voters.
I have argued this point in the past, but it is good to have
statistical confirmation. York explained:
The
most serious of those problems was that Romney was not able to connect with
white voters who were so turned off by the campaign that they abandoned the GOP
and in many cases stayed away from the polls altogether. Recent reports suggest
as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day. If they
had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes
since then, Romney would have won.
Likewise,
the white vote is so large that an improvement of 4 points -- going from 60
percent to 64 percent of those whites who did vote -- would have won the race
for Romney.
Something to think about while rushing to open the borders.
2 comments:
"Something to think about while rushing to open the borders."
=
True. Also something to think about while rushing to nominate the next empty-suit RINO.
It has never been more clear that the GOP is dying. Even eight wasted years and two phony wars under conservative imposter George Bush weren't enough to convince people of that truth. Now, the Democrats have held the presidency despite a disastrous economy, and gained seats in the Senate against overwhelming odds. Those feats are only possible against a decrepit opponent.
The other day, I came across the fruits of attempts by insiders to fill the GOP's leadership vacuum by pimping Jeb Bush. I haven't looked, but $20 sez that somewhere there's a parallel effort to ensure Karl Rove is part of his strategy team. A rotting political party sprouts all sorts of fungus and mushrooms.
Something else to think about is that Republicans did very, very well the last election, as well as showing surprising strength in places which were thought to be permanently Democrat rotten boroughs. Perhaps we should not let an Idiot Savant successes distract us from a winning formula. Especially given how well it worked last time, when Porkbusters gave control of Congress to the Democrats, putting us in the mess we are now......
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