Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [57]
RESTRICTIONIST LOSERS
The strategy bombed, of course, even in places where illegal immigration is a huge problem and even among Republican candidates defined by their opposition to it. In Arizona, which is ground zero in the border wars, Representative J. D. Hayworth and Randy Graf were trounced. “Hayworth, who is so proud of his desire to turn the U.S. into a single gated community that he wrote a book about it, lost handily, ” wrote The Wall Street Journal in an editorial that appeared just after the election. “So did Randy Graf, another anti-immigration absolutist who ran for an open seat in a district that borders Mexico and sees more illegal immigrant traffic than perhaps any other congressional seat in the nation. ”
Moreover, as the editorial went on to explain, these Democratic gains in Arizona came in solid Republican congressional districts that Bush won easily two years earlier. Graf was attempting to succeed Republican Representative Jim Kolbe, an eleven-term incumbent who was retiring. Kolbe, who favored Bush’s approach to immigration, had won re-election in 2004 with 60 percent of the vote. Graf lost 54 percent to 42 percent, after having won a GOP primary against a candidate with views similar to Kolbe’s who could have kept the seat Republican.
Elsewhere in the country, Republican candidates who focused on immigration also fared poorly. In Indiana, Representative John Hostettler, another outspoken restrictionist, won just 39 percent of the vote in his losing bid for a seventh term. Hostettler’s district was so Republican that John Kerry won only 38 percent of the vote there in 2004. In Colorado, Representative Bob Beauprez made opposition to illegal aliens the centerpiece of his run for governor. His Democratic opponent bested him by 15 percentage points. What’s more, the Republican candidate who ran to replace Beauprez in the House, and appropriated much of his restrictionist rhetoric, also lost by nearly as much.
GOP Senate candidates like Tom Kean, Jr. in New Jersey and Mike McGavick in Washington State, who took increasingly hard line stances on immigration as Election Day approached, still lost to vulnerable Democratic incumbents. Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum, who ranked number four in the GOP Senate leadership, spent the summer of 2006 trying to convince voters that Mexican immigrants were a national security threat. He lost 59 percent to 41 percent.
It’s possible, even probable, that the situation in Iraq sealed the fate of Republicans in the midterm elections, and that GOP immigrant-bashing didn’t play a major role in the “thumping” the party took, to use President Bush’s term. But there’s also strong evidence that perceived GOP nativism did significant damage to the party’s Latino outreach efforts. Which means that immigration restrictionism not only couldn’t help Republicans hang on to Congress but also might have made it more difficult for them to win state and national elections going forward.
There’s also this irony to mull: In 2005 and 2006, the Bush administration had been making a concerted effort to reach out to black voters, even though Bush had done poorly among them in both 2000 and 2004. In July of 2006, Bush addressed the NAACP’s annual convention and spoke frankly about the party’s history with blacks. In 2005 and 2006 alone, Ken Mehlman spoke to more than fifty black audiences nationwide, including the NAACP and the National Urban League, acknowledging that Republicans in the past had tried “to benefit politically from racial polarization” and that “we were wrong.” So at the same time that Bush and Mehlman were looking to bury the so-called southern strategy with respect to blacks, House Republicans were looking to employ it with respect to Hispanics.
And they may have succeeded, even if the tactic itself failed to produce the intended result. The Republican share of the Latino vote grew from 21 percent in 1996, to 35 percent in 2000, to 44 percent in 2004, according to exit polls. But in 2006, just 29