Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [55]
CHAPTER FIVE
POLITICS: PUP TENT REPUBLICANISM
As far as Simon Rosenberg is concerned, the 42 million Latinos who live in the United States have already shown that they have the political clout to turn a national election. It happened in 2000, he explained in an interview. It all came down to Florida. Al Gore was outspent in the Hispanic community by Bush, ten-to-one. The issue of whether or not Hispanics can determine who is president of the United States is settled.
A Democratic strategist, Rosenberg is a veteran of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. Today he runs the New Democratic Network, a center-left think tank based in Washington, D.C. Rosenberg is not one of those Beltway denizens so driven by partisanship as to be incapable of giving any credit to the other side. He tells me he spent the first six years of the Bush presidency admiring the “extraordinarily sophisticated and competent” efforts of Republican strategists—namely, Karl Rove, Matthew Dowd, and Ken Mehlman—to win over Latino voters.
In the past twenty years there’s been a vast increase in the number of foreign-born, Spanish-dominant voters in the United States, says Rosenberg. About 8 percent of the national electorate is now Hispanic, and it’s growing fast. Moreover, some 50 percent of the Hispanic electorate are foreign-born individuals who grew up speaking Spanish. That’s an increase from just 20 percent in 1988, and most of Bush’s gains among Latinos were from this group.
What this means, says Rosenberg, is that in essence, you have to become bilingual and bicultural to be competitive as a majority party in the twenty-first century. And the Republicans figured that out before the Democrats did. Latinos are projected to become 20 percent of the electorate by 2020 and one-quarter of the population by 2050. Bush realized that being on the wrong side of this demographic wave is the kind of thing that can relegate a party to minority status for a long time.
Even in 2004, says Rosenberg, the Democrats still hadn’t really grasped what was happening. “[John] Kerry ran no significant campaign in Spanish. They were barely present in the southwestern states. They were taking the Hispanic vote for granted. They thought it was a base vote. But obviously it became one of the most viable swing votes in American politics.” Another top strategist, Joe Lockhart, who advised the Kerry campaign, agrees that Democrats were caught off-guard in 2004, telling The New York Times, “It was an election where they [the Republicans] knew more than we did.”
Perhaps the Democrats finally have gotten their act together with respect to the importance of this vote. The 2008 Democratic Convention will be held in Colorado, where Latinos are by far the fastest-growing ethnic group and now number 19 percent of the population. The Democratic National Committee chose Nevada, another state with a large and growing Hispanic population, to vote second in the 2008 presidential primary calendar. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, two bilingual long shots for the Democratic nomination, nevertheless entered the race and speak Spanish everywhere they go.
But as Democrats attempt to make up ground in 2008 with this newly identified Latino cohort, the best thing they may have going for them is a bad stumble by the GOP in 2006. That was the year Republicans tried to turn Latino immigration into a midterm election wedge issue, like abortion or gay marriage. Not only did the strategy fail— Republicans lost their majority in the House and the Senate—but the party may have gone some distance toward undoing Bush’s large gains among a swelling and increasingly important voting bloc.
“I thought the Republicans had probably passed the tipping point on this thing with Latinos,” says Rosenberg. “I thought the Democrats had been caught flat-footed,