Step 1: Stop the Hispanicing

I’ve held off on offering up immediate judgment on the election because I’m incredibly lazy to get past the panic and knee-jerk reactions. The world hasn’t ended, Republicans are not doomed to permanent minority status, and the cause of smaller government is not lost forever. Go over that list of bright spots again. Republicans did not do as badly as they did in 1932, 1964, 2006 or 2008. And we survived those elections, just as the Democrats survived 1994, 2004, and 2010. We’ll survive this one.

One persistent theme in a lot of recaps is how badly Republicans did among Hispanic voters, and that Republicans must immediately cave on the issue of illegal alien amnesty to have any chance of courting Hispanic votes. Though no one can dispute that Republicans need to do better among Hispanics, much of the panic over the 2012 Hispanic vote (and the resulting predictable knee-jerk push for amnesty among prominent RINOs) has been overblown, for a number of reasons:

  • First, we don’t actually know how well Republicans did among Hispanics because the AP and the networks decided not to do detailed exit polling in Texas and 18 other states, the vast majority of them red states. Thus we don’t know the true percentage of Hispanics who voted for Republicans, as states where Republicans would do better among Hispanics have been systematically excluded from the count.
  • The Hispanic vote did not cost Romney the election.
  • Romney did worse than Bush not only among Hispanics, but among several other demographic groups, most notably white voters.
  • There are several reasons to doubt liberals’ demographics are destiny theory.
  • Those who think that caving on illegal alien amnesty is the key to Republicans winning Hispanic votes are deluding themselves.
  • Indeed, it’s more likely to destroy Republican competitiveness for the foreseeable future.

    • So take a deep breath. Republicans are far better off trying to pitch the ideas of freedom and limited government to Hispanics, and running conservative Republican candidates who happen to be Hispanic like Ted Cruz, than transparent and incompetent pandering via illegal alien amnesty.

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    This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2012 at 6:34 PM and is filed under Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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