Digging more into the issue of Hispanic voters and their
rejection of Romney, I looked at some exit poll data. In 2010, Rick Scott won the Hispanic vote in
Florida 50% to 48%. In 2012, just two
years later, Mitt Romney lost the Hispanic vote 66% to 34%.
Part of that is due to turnout, there were 500,000 more
Hispanic voters for the Presidential election and you would have to presume
most came out for Obama. But there is a certain
schizophrenia to a Hispanic vote that will elect Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and
Barack Obama. Republicans need to
understand that. While it is probably
too trite to say they wanted to vote for a candidate who looked like them in
Obama, or they perceived some greater empathy there than really exists (nothing
about Obama’s policies suggests he is fighting for the little guy), it is also
too simplistic to say they rejected GOP positions.
The reality is most Hispanic immigrants to this country come
from Mexico, where their religion at some point in their lives was
Catholicism. I think this is the bridge
the Romney campaign failed to build, even with Paul Ryan on the ticket. Catholicism represents the only clearly
pro-life ideology in the country at this moment. Our protestant friends are waning in their
commitment, Evangelicals cannot clearly articulate the case as evidenced by Akin
and Murdoch, and apparently Romney’s confusing view represents his faith. Abortion is largely illegal in Mexico and
that would be a huge similarity that conservatives should be able to tap into.
But again on Catholicism, this President put forth an HHS
mandate that will violate the conscience rights of literally millions of
Catholics. That should have been a
rallying cry among Hispanics. While the
Cristero War has largely been scrubbed from history books in Mexico, the
Mexican people have in their not all that distant past, their own experiences
with religious oppression.
The big gap in the Romney campaign was clearly a
conversation around values, around the importance of the right to life, around
what having strong families actually means.
All of these things are getting easier and easier to connect to our
economic ills (more on that in coming blogs).
Romney’s failure to offer ANY resistance to the abortion-fest that was
the Democratic convention meant that key voting blocks like women and Latinos
did not get challenged to think differently.
That represents a missed opportunity, but the tragedy will
be if Republicans take that to mean they need to shut up on social issues to
win because there are plenty of places where that was the campaign and they
lost. Romney didn’t say much about
social issues and was beaten, ditto for McCain, same for Scott Brown in Massachusetts. In Illinois, Judy Biggert who was almost a
pro-choice Republican was soundly defeated.
Time and time again when Republicans seek to blur the differences, they
lose. That’s not to say that simply
charging out there and reminding people you are pro-life is going to work
anymore, we need to begin to start to re-educate people to why abortion is so
abhorrent in the first place. It gets
more and more so each year, as slavery did, not more palatable.
Back to the Hispanic vote.
A lot of handwringing among Republicans about losing that vote, but keep
in perspective that in the key battleground states (with the exception of
Florida), it was a smaller percentage of the vote.
In 2010 (2012 numbers aren’t all in yet) in Ohio Hispanics
represented 1% of the vote; Wisconsin 1.7% of the vote; Pennsylvania 1.9% of
the vote; Michigan 2.0% of the vote; Virginia 2.1% of the vote; North Carolina
2.6% of the vote; and even in Colorado only 7.9% of the vote. While you cannot afford to lose even these
small segments 4:1 as Romney did nationally, the notion that the GOP needs to
solve for Latinos is a red herring being tossed out by a media that doesn’t
want the GOP to figure it out. Latinos
are a piece of the puzzle but not the magic bullet.
Lost in the handwringing over Latinos is the fact that
Romney won the white vote among 18-29 year-olds handily, 51-44%. White college students and young people voted
for a Republican candidate by a majority.
That would have been a pipe dream 20 years ago. Romney’s victories among most white groups
were the foundation for Reagan’s landslide.
Romney’s misses were among Latino women and not running up the score more
among white women (6 point smaller margin versus white men).
In short that means the Democratic strategy that looked
crazy at the time, of making the convention abortion-palooza was a calculated
and ultimately correct gambit.
Pre-election polls showed women placing more importance on contraception
and “women’s health issues” (code for abortion) than the economy. I will delve more into this in future blogs.
Cannot ignore the fact that 20% of voters had no religious
affiliation or were atheist. These
voters went for Obama at a rate of more than 7 in 10.
A lot more to get to, that’s probably enough for today.
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