New York Times (The Upshot)
By Nate Cohn
October 21, 2014
Political
analysts keep urging the Republican Party to do more to appeal to
Hispanic voters. Yet the party’s congressional leaders show little sign
of doing so, blocking
an immigration overhaul and harshly criticizing President Obama for his
plan to defer deportation for undocumented migrants.
There’s
a simple reason that congressional Republicans are willing to risk
alienating Hispanics: They don’t need their votes, at least not this
year.
Republicans
would probably hold the House — and still have a real chance to retake
the Senate — if they lost every single Hispanic voter in the country,
according to an
analysis by The Upshot.
Such
a thing would never happen, of course, but the fact that the
Republicans may not need a single Hispanic vote in 2014 says a good deal
about American politics today.
The
fact that the Republican House majority does not depend on Hispanic
voters helps explain why immigration reform has not become law, even
though national Republican
strategists believe the party needs additional support among Hispanic
voters to compete in presidential elections. It’s true that Republicans
would stand little, if any, chance of winning the presidency in 2016 if
they lost every Hispanic voter. If anything,
the Republicans probably need to make gains among Hispanic voters to
compete in states like Florida and Nevada.
But
Congressional elections are different. Although the young, urban and
racially diverse Democratic coalition has won the popular vote in five
of the last six presidential
elections, that coalition has not delivered House control to the
Democrats. Gerrymandering isn’t the only cause, either. It’s the way the
population is distributed.
Even
a situation in which every Latino voter in America chose the Democratic
candidate would mainly allow Democrats to fare better in the heavily
Hispanic districts where
the party already wins. This is already occurring, to a lesser degree.
Over the last decade, Democratic gains among young and nonwhite voters
have allowed Democrats to win a majority of the House vote without
flipping enough districts to earn a majority of
seats.
The
Upshot analysis found that if not one of the eight million Hispanic
voters supported the Republican candidate, Republicans would lose about a
dozen House seats, especially
in Florida and California. The loss of those seats would make the
Republican House majority more vulnerable if Democrats made gains
elsewhere in future years. But given the Republicans’ current strength
across rural areas and in conservative suburbs, the loss
of every Hispanic every voter would not be enough to cost them the 17
seats that would flip House control.
Those
heavily Democratic districts are concentrated in metropolitan areas,
while much of the country’s geographical area tilts Republican — and is
still heavily non-Hispanic
white. In districts held by House Republicans, Hispanics represent only
6.7 percent of eligible voters and an even smaller share of the
electorate.
Hispanic
voters will most likely make up less than 4 percent of voters in 18 of
the 23 Republican-held congressional districts deemed potentially
competitive by the Cook
Political Report. Very few, if any, of these districts will be close
enough for the loss of a fraction of Hispanic voters to make a
difference.
Perhaps
the clearest way to see that Republicans do not need Hispanic voters to
keep the House is to look back to 2012. Because it was a presidential
year, Hispanics voted
in larger numbers than they are likely to this year, yet Republicans
probably would have retained the House without Hispanic support two
years ago. Republicans would have lost about 11 seats — six short of
what Democrats needed to take the House – according
to an analysis of election results, exit polls and census data.
The
would-be Republican losses generally fall into two categories. The
first are the few Republicans, often Hispanic themselves, who represent
districts with a meaningful
number of Hispanic voters. This group includes Representatives Mario
Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both from the Miami area, and
Representative David Valadao, from the Central Valley in California.
The
second group are the members in extremely close districts, where losing
anything, even a tiny number of Hispanic voters, could make a
difference. Representative Rodney
Davis, of rural Illinois, who won by just 1,002 votes in 2012, is an
example.
These
estimates are just that — estimates — and they may be imperfect in some
districts. Another dozen districts would have been extremely close, and
Democrats could have
won the chamber if six more of them had gone their way. But if the
Republicans could have survived losing every Hispanic voter in 2012,
their chances would be still better in 2014, when Hispanic turnout will
be lower than it was two years ago. Most analysts
also expect the Republicans to pick up a handful of seats this year,
giving them a bigger cushion to withstand would-be losses from Hispanic
voters.
The
Republican lead in the race for control of the Senate, on the other
hand, does not include such a cushion. A percentage point could make the
difference in several
of this year’s crucial contests, and winning every Hispanic vote might
be worth a point to the Democrats — even in states with a small Hispanic
population. Hispanic voters will represent about 3 percent of the
electorate in the Senate battlegrounds.
We
did a special run of our Senate model, Leo, imagining that the
Republicans lost every Hispanic voter. In this situation, the odds flip —
precisely, as it happens. Republicans
would have just a 31 percent chance of retaking the Senate, compared
with the current chance of 69 percent on Monday. Without any Hispanic
votes, Republicans would lose a bit of ground everywhere, but become
decided underdogs in Colorado and find themselves
in a tight race in Texas.
Yet
the Republicans would still have a plausible path to victory — as
plausible as the actual Democratic path — because they could pick up the
six Democratic seats they
needed elsewhere. In South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Louisiana,
Arkansas, Iowa, Alaska, North Carolina and New Hampshire, there are very
few Hispanic voters.
Perhaps
most remarkable is that we’re even entertaining this notion. In
reality, the Republicans will win millions of Hispanic votes this
November. But the House Republican
majority does not depend on those votes. Indeed, it could even
withstand losses far beyond reason.
To
win the White House in 2016 or any future year, the Republicans will
need a substantial number of Hispanic votes. But the fact that the party
doesn’t need many of those
votes to hold the House makes the Republican effort to appeal to
Hispanic voters far more challenging. The Republican Congress has few,
if any, immediate incentives to reach a compromise on immigration reform
or otherwise reach out to Hispanics.
For
individual Republicans in Congress, supporting such measure would verge
on the irrational. It would leave them vulnerable to primary challenges
and offer little or
no benefit in the general election.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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