CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 3, 2014, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 3, 2014, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“GOP’S
NEW HISPANIC OUTREACH ANOTHER FUTILE EXERCISE”
Give the Republican Party credit:
After drawing fewer than 23 percent of Latino votes in the last presidential
election, the GOP will now spend $10 million nationally trying to build
permanent ground organizations and “a year-round presence” in Latino
neighborhoods around the nation.
But also recognize that this is
strictly tokenism: You don’t sway the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic voting
bloc by spending less on it than on many campaigns for a single seat in
Congress.
You also don’t win over Latinos simply
by saying you’re going to be hanging around their neighborhoods and pestering
them from time to time.
And you don’t win over Latinos or any
other ethnic group simply by recruiting candidates “who look like them,” one of
the nostrums pledged by Jim Brulte, the onetime state senator who now chairs
the California Republican Party.
Nope, there appear to be only two ways
for the Republican Party to win even close to half the Latino vote (about 73
percent of Hispanics cast ballots last time for Democratic President Barack
Obama):
One is to run a celebrity candidate a
la Arnold Schwarzenegger. Each time he ran for governor, he pulled almost half
the Latino vote, chiefly because (exit polls showed), many youthful Hispanics
thought having the “Terminator” as governor was cool. Trouble is, there are no
prominent celebrities now publicly evincing interest in running as Republicans
for any office.
The second way to win over voters –
and Latinos are no different than others – is to take policy positions
congruent with their views. The GOP isn’t doing this, either.
Its members in the House of
Representatives have bottled up the Senate’s immigration bill, even though the
plan's pathway to citizenship for the undocumented is extremely arduous,
for about six months, knowing full well it would pass if it ever came to a
vote.
They’re still in denial about climate
change. They do what they can to thwart abortions. And so on and on.
They believe their stances are
congruent with most Hispanic voters on almost all issues except immigration,
where many of their leaders are on record saying that unauthorized immigrants
all are criminals who cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars.
But polling by the usually reliable
Latino Voices firm has found in the last year that Latinos back measures to
limit greenhouse gases and climate change, while also favoring abortion on
demand and strict gun controls. Plus, several surveys have found Latinos – like
other voters – mostly blame Republicans in Congress for last fall’s lengthy
government shutdown and the brinksmanship over whether to raise the national
debt ceiling or risk defaulting on bonds and other loans.
So the GOP assumption about Latinos
eventually joining them because of their adamant stances on social and fiscal
issues does not fly.
But it’s immigration that hurts
Republicans most. One Latino Decisions survey last summer found that about
three-fourths of U.S. citizen Hispanics have either a family member or close
acquaintance who is undocumented. Legalizing those people is their No. 1 issue.
But the closest congressional
Republicans have come to acquiescing on that issue is to allow some concessions
to so-called “Dreamers,” children brought here by unauthorized immigrant
parents.
That won’t cut it in the vote-getting
department.
Even some Republicans realize this.
Lanhee Chen, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who was
presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s policy director in the 2012 campaign, told
a reporter the party’s message “is going to be very difficult to convey unless
we can demonstrate some seriousness about solving the broken immigration
system.”
That’s an understatement. The typical
GOP outreach effort in recent years has been to eat an enchilada in a
Mexican-American neighborhood while listening to a mariachi band.
But Jennifer Korn, the Republican
National Committee’s deputy political director for Hispanic initiatives, told a
luncheon last fall that the new GOP outreach is different from past ones.
“We’re starting early…and we’re going to stay even after the (2014) election is
over,” she said.
That’s little more than a repeat of
the usual Republican whistling past the Latino graveyard. For the party will
win over very few Latinos unless it invests much more and changes some of its
fundamental positions.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
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