Latinos Will Pick Our Next President Of The United States

In November 2010 I wrote the following.

I have argued over and over that the strident meanness over immigration that seems to fester deep within much of the Republican Party would hurt their long-term chances as a political powerhouse.  After all, the demographics in the nation are changing.  America is becoming brown.  That makes our country stronger.  Diversity has always enhanced our national story.

Diversity is taking place in our neighborhoods, and it reflects in the outcomes of elections.  This month we witnessed the tipping point that Hispanics gave Democrats in Nevada, Colorado, and California.  The outrageous words and actions by the GOP candidates in each state was in no way tolerable for the fastest growing segment of America.  As a result the non-white vote helped secure wins in each of those states.  Even though it will be a few decades until white America is a minority statistically speaking, the power of non-white voters can be seen today coast-to-coast.

This is why the all-white Tea Party, and the unconstitutional Arizona immigration law baffles me.  Short-sighed hate on the front side, and long-term political damage on the end side makes no sense for the Republican Party.  When will the mature faces of the GOP pull the party away from the brink?

Now comes a must-read in the latest edition  Time.

For the Obama campaign nationwide, “expanding the electorate” increasingly means “expanding the Latino electorate.” If Obama is able to win heavily-Latino Western states like Nevada, Colorado and Arizona, he could still win in the electoral college even if he loses historically key states in the industrial Midwest like Ohio and Wisconsin. “If we do our grassroots stuff right on the ground in all these Western states, which we will, because it’s something we are good at,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told me, “we could seriously change the outcome.”

At the same time, Republicans have generally done a dismal job through the primary of appealing to Latino voters. George W. Bush won more than 40% of the community in 2004, but in a recent Latino Decisions poll conducted for Univision, 72% of Latinos said the GOP either did not care about their support or was hostile to their community. The 27% who sensed hostility represented a seven point increase from April of 2011, when the same pollsters asked the question. “Conservatives have not realized how their tone and rhetoric has turned people off,” says Jennifer Korn, who led George W. Bush’s Latino outreach effort in 2004.

There are many within the Republican party urging a moderation in tone. Marco Rubio, the newly elected Cuban-American senator from Florida, and a potential vice presidential pick, is trying to make that shift happen. “I’m always trying to remind my colleagues that if they lived in Mexico or anywhere in Latin America, and their kids were hungry, every night went to sleep hungry, and your country provided no opportunity for you to feed them, you’re telling me that there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to feed them?” he says. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t go anywhere there was a job so you could send money to them?”

So in the days remaining before the Arizona primary, pay close attention to how the GOP Presidential candidates talk about immigration. They have little to gain from Republicans by pivoting to softer rhetoric, but they have much to gain in the general election.