I think Benjy Sarlin’s piece for MSNBC on the Republicans’ changing attitudes about immigration is excellent. In particular, his observations about Brit Hume and Sean Hannity are very interesting.
At the moment, the anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”
Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced the day after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill.
“Not only do I doubt the current legislation will solve the immigration problem,” he wrote in a June column, “but it also won’t help the GOP in future elections.”
It appears that most Republicans are dropping the idea that they need to do better with Latinos and adopting the idea that they need to do even better with white voters. Mr. Sarlin’s documents this very well, but he doesn’t come out and say what it means.
A new view on the right is taking hold: Romney lost because he didn’t go after whites hard enough…
…conservative commentators are convincing themselves they can find a few million more whites tucked between the couch cushions–at least enough for one more election. Two columnists have been particularly influential in this regard. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has argued that census data shows about 5 million mostly poor and rural white voters were “projected” to vote in 2012 based on population growth and past turnout but didn’t show up to the polls. Byron York, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, published a related piece noting that Romney would have lost even if he had racked up a majority of Latino voters.
“Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day,” York wrote in May. “If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.”
What Mr. Sarlin doesn’t broach is the subject of how conservatives might be able to grab a higher percentage of whites and how they might go about driving up white turnout. The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what that 47% speech was all about.
An added element was introduced by Barack Obama, whose controversial pastor and Kenyan ancestry opened up avenues for both veiled and nakedly racist appeals to the white voter. A white Democratic nominee would be less of an easy target for talk about secret Islamic sympathies and fraudulent birth certificates, but that would only make other racially polarizing arguments more necessary.
The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.
That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.
The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.
One of the things that’s particularly striking about this line of argument is that there isn’t any sort of consideration of what going after those “missing” voters by being more racially divisive might cost. It’s like it’s never occurred to them that there are white people who would object to voting for an even more hateful GOP, or even that those missing voters might be staying home because the Republican Party is such already such a freakshow.
Is there a cost now that SCOTUS has overthrown voting rights? You definitely want white votes if you are only going to count white votes.
Also, that there “missing” voters, being poor, were probably turned off by what a naked plutocrat Romney was. They could find a nominee who is not so naked, of course, but probably at the cost of another part of their coalition.
The Party of ‘when in doubt, double down’. So much easier if you don’t have to reinvent yourselves, no new facts to learn, friends to make…but then the question of just what it is that you’re going to promise the white apathetic crowd to get them out to vote for you? Chances are the apathetic crowd only recognizes Rush’s Talk Right crowd as leaders. The RINO crowd have tried and failed the homeboys as politicians so what’s to vote for?
Modern Conservatism cannot fail.
It can only BE failed.
And, in their minds, Mitt Romney wasn’t white enough, or conservative enough, to get out those additional Conservative white voters.
You have to love their “logic.”
Every day, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Republicans die of old age/disease.
And yet, they don’t see that as a problem.
If only ALL of the surviving Conservative white people come out and vote in 2016 – VICTORY IS ASSURED!!!
Well, ya gotta admit, the SCOTUS just made that a bit of a greater possibility, but still…
Of course, they don’t factor in people like me, who, in decades past, occasionally voted for a Republican candidate (just NEVER for President!), and now, wouldn’t vote for any single one of them, at the point of a gun.
Uhm, Republicans, you’re ALSO losing white voters, the harder you try to get more white voters, at the exclusion of everyone else.
Did anyone seriously believe they would reverse? It was obvious that they’d double down at least one more time. I’d argue they won’t stop doubling down until the national party is dead. What’s the use in reversing when they’re making so many gains statewide, and reversing only makes them “democratic light” based on both the Dems obsession with moving right and their own whackadoodle mentality? Plus with VRA dead they can delay even more. Oh sure it might be detrimental in the long term, but the crazies run this asylum; they’d rather die fighting than rule by abandoning their principles. Babbitt has no principles, but he takes his cues from the base just as much as they take their cues from him.
Babbitt should read Hannity. Also I’m pretty sure we’re going the route I said: House passes national security build the danged fence bill with mortars and turrets. Can’t reconcile with Senate. Then it dies. Or even more possible: House passes nothing because the bill doesn’t have any exemptions from the law for the Minutemen or a moat with crocodiles and sharks.
If your poor and white, the Democratic party is your best option. Because, opportunity does not begin with a tax cut for the top 1% percent and a tax hike via a sales tax, which Kansas is doing.
Maybe those 5 million white voters stayed home because they didn’t want to vote against their own self-interest.
Its a start. Hopefully empathy is next.
I wonder how many of those poor, rural white voters got hit by the very voter ID laws the GOP pushed to suppress the non-white vote.
I also wonder how many of them would have voted in states that Romney won anyway.
I further wonder if Nate Silver giggles like a maniac when he reads pieces like Trende’s.
“Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses…”
Amen, Boo. You hit the nail right on the head.
Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient.
Haven’t there been some polls showing younger people having a more positive impression of socialism? It would make sense, because to them the word “socialism” wouldn’t have all these connotations. If you’re first becoming aware of politics in the Obama era, then a socialist to you is what the Republicans keep calling the President. If you like the President better than the Republicans, which is not unlikely given your youth, you might conclude that a socialist is an admirable thing to be.
And if they follow the interest in Socialism and find Bernie Sanders they might just hear what an awesome point of view it is!
But yes, they do seem to be circling their wagons, which of course is what you do just before you’re annihilated. Only the cavalry aren’t riding to the rescue, because the cavalry are federals.
That’s the crucial point that the neo-Confederate strategy leaves out. They keep forgetting that not all white people are white supremacists, and in fact plenty of white people despise white supremacists.
The GOP has been self-deporting itself from reality since 2000.
I just wish they’d hurry up and make it complete.
It seems to be vogue for republicans to claim that all they need to win is the older white voters who stayed home.
But IMO the reason they stayed home is because of republican desire to gut SS and Medicare. Romney was screwed as soon as he put Ryan on the ticket. No matter what Ryan (and all the other republicans, for that matter) says, he wants SS and Medicare taken private. When they say ‘strengthen’ they mean ‘weaken’. Most on SS and Medicare know this. Some won’t care and still vote against the black guy, but plenty will just stay home.
This puts the republicans in a real bind. It’s actually what they mean when they say they want to go after hispanics. They mean ‘go after Hispanics and still kill SS and medicare’. Because if they are going the ‘go after more whites’ route and win, they will have to drop their plans for SS and Medicare. They will never do that, because the big money won’t let them.
Their choice is go after Hispanics and keep their basic message. Or go solid white, and change their SS and Medicare plans to get them to come out.
Both are losers. And both are double losers as soon as the democrats nominate a white person who defends SS and Medicare.
This desperation on the part of Republicans might not translate well at the national level. But they are steamrolling a radical agenda through so many states right now, and they are often doing it with little notice.
Here in Ohio, John Kasich and the GOP super-majority in the state legislature just wrote and signed into law the most radical anti-woman legislation in the country. And it was all done with no debate; slipped into a state budget at the very last minute so there could be no citizen referendum possible on any of it. It was the most supremely dictatorial action that a political party could take. And they absolutely are getting away with it. There should be riots in the streets of dozens of states right now. Yet, by and large, it is not happening.
The mainstream media has ignored a lot of it, but the internet is providing a lot of coverage of Ohio, and Texas, etc. People may not be in the streets, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be showing up in 2014 at the polls.
Well, that will really be the singular point that to be hammered from this day forward, until election day, for Democrats in the state. Discussions are already taking place about how to hang this around the necks of all statewide GOP candidates.
Votes are a lot better than riots.
They’re not mutually exclusive.
Horse puckey. Riots cause people to vote Republican. Period. Community organizing and registering women and People of Color is the only way to fix this.
Not necessarily.
What we’re seeing is the final stages of the current incarnation of the GOP: they’ve now given up entirely on the future. The ship is sinking, and they’re the rats who are running up the mast, hanging in there till the last possible moment.
They would change course if they could.
But every step they take towards fixing the problems LOSES them votes in the short run, and them some Sara Palin kind of person steps in and fills the void. So they cannot stay in place, and the cannot move forward.
It really is a difficult place. They got married up with some crazy people, and there is no GOP strategist who has a clue how to get the GOP out of it. They are just going to have to wait for their base to kind of die out/calm down. And they may have to lie, cheat and steal a few elections in the meantime.
It took what 1997-2010 for the British conservatives to turn over a new leaf on social issues and soft peddle their economic agenda? At least a decade of short term losses, since the republicans have been the racist party for 50 years.
Interesting post from Kos, March of this year, suggesting why this GOP strategy is unlikely to work.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/05/1191725/-Democrats-will-do-ok-with-white-voters-as-long-as-
White-Racist-Evangelicals-Keep-Dying
I’m finding it frickin’ hilarious that people are overlooking the fact that Democrats are dying off at the older range as well. They’re dropping like flies all around us in the Blue States. Age gets people…but mostly Cancer and heart problems get people. Accidents, too. I think it’s lazy and irresponsible to keep relying on the old saw that the GOP is dying off. That’s not how electoral politics works.
Just hilarious, democrats dying at the same rate as Republicans. How could we have missed that? Except you miss the point that the Democratic demographic is a much younger one and is being replenished at a much faster rate than the republicans.
so, this should make things clear to all the hesitant non-White folks that aren’t sellouts.
THE GOP DOES NOT WANT YOU
The Supreme Court has given them the go-ahead. And it may not matter how many new voters Democrats enroll if a few weeks before the election they purge the rolls. They aren’t worried by lawsuits after the fact. That is what this change of heart is about.
How about we assume that some of those white people staying home are just a little racist. Perhaps they didn’t want to vote for the dark fellow, and as a matter of fact, they did not want to vote for the icky corporate millionaire either.
My feeling is that once Obama is not on the ballot that there may be a re-coil, and that the democrats will end up with more net votes, not less. They will have all of the minority coalition still well fired up and they will receive the votes of the white folks who may still be a little unwilling to vote for someone like Obama. Kind of like how Hillary did so well in the south when she ran.
So post-Obama the GOP has big problems across the board, bigger than just trying to be nice to Mexicans. Their brand is in tatters.
As a number of commenters have alluded to, it makes sense to focus on the white vote if you don’t expect any people of color to be able to vote. John Roberts changed that calculus immensely – not because the VRA enabled states already in the Republican electoral column to try to further suppress the vote, but because it reassured Republican legislators everywhere that they’d be able to get away with even more direct and draconian suppression than they’ve already tried. Who’s going to stop them?
I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating: as goes California, so goes the nation.
Twenty years ago, California Republicans – then on a roll with Reagan, Deukmejian, and Wilson all having served two terms as governor, having sent Nixon and Reagan to the White House, and having a number of prominent House Republicans – faced exactly the same sort of demographic crossroads the national party now faces. They responded exactly the way the national party has responded, distancing themselves from moderates like Wilson and doubling down on ever-more-radical ideological purity every time their party lost. Their only recent statewide victor, Schwarzenegger, got into office on a fluke and became a despised RINO to most of his own party.
Republicans are now less than 30 percent of registered voters in California. Of the state’s 55 people in Congress, 37 are Democrats, almost evenly divided along gender and racial lines. Only 18 are still Republicans, and every single one is an older white guy. In statewide races, the Republicans are no longer remotely competitive.
When faced with a choice of increasing their appeal to non-traditional demographics or thinking their agenda would be more appealing to whites if only it were more explicitly radical and racist, California’s Republicans have gone with the latter at every opportunity for two decades. Even as their results got steadily worse, they always found a way to explain way their losses as either someone else’s fault or their own failure to be conservative enough. They were absolutely immune to the real-world evidence, which consistently contradicted their bubble-world fantasies.
There’s no reason to believe the national party is any different. If anything, it’s worse. These people would much rather tear the country apart than rethink their beliefs.
So basically like California, we need to get to the brink of collapse (and maybe go a little over the brink)?
I’d argue it isn’t just being driven into the ground by crazies that sent people toward more progressive politicians. It’s the preponderance of diversity itself. It’s just not possible to grow up in California anymore in a little white bubble. That’s not to say there aren’t some serious segregation issues in CA, but they don’t tend to be around white vs “other” lines.
I see only one thing that would bring more whites to the party of racism: Zimmerman is acquitted, and the blacks riot. Especially bad if liberals have problems being full-throated in condemning the rioting.
Not complicated; Lee Atwater would understand.