More than a week of soul-searching and
grieving has passed since Obama shocked less than half the nation by winning
re-election. Demographics has caught up to politics—a fact clearly evidenced in
the exit polls
and even in the images we saw of the two campaign election watch celebrations
the night of Tuesday, November 6 (this
vs this).
Obama won the popular vote and the electoral college vote through a coalition
of women, ethnic minorities, labor, the LGTBQ community, and young people. The
GOP knows it needs to bring more people to the polls in order to win—the
coalition it counted on for victory is just not wide enough.
Cue
the Hispanic vote. We’ve heard numerous GOP members and
conservatives muse about how to get more Hispanics to vote Republican. But, as
the strategizing goes openly on in public, the GOP has misdiagnosed the problem
they have in the Latino community (and, I suspect, in the Asian community).
[Hispanics] should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example). The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants. (Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post)
More Latinos voted in this election
than in any previous election and this is a growing population (half of the
U.S. Census growth from 2000-2010 came from increases in the Hispanic
community). We’ve already seen the numbers from this election: Romney got
somewhere between 25 to 27%of the Latino vote (worse than McCain and way worse than George W. Bush in
2004, who walked away with 44%).
The
Flawed GOP Solution: Immigration Reform Isn’t the Silver Bullet. Like
Hannity,
many conservative leaders
are “evolving” on immigration.
They’ve edged away from Romney’s harsh stance on “self deportation” and are
trying to find a way to make immigration reform
not just the province of the Democrats. This is going to be good for everyone.
But the GOP lost the Latino vote on
something deeper than just immigration; they lost it on meanness. The whole
Birther Controversy over Barack Obama’s citizenship, birth, and
Americanness—something that has deep grassroots traction with the base—cut to
the very heart of the experience of the Hispanic community in the United
States. And I suspect this is also why the Asian-American community supported
Obama with the same numbers. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal got it right today when he said, "If we want people to like us, we have to like them first."
We’ve heard for years that Barack Hussein
Obama seems somehow not a “real” American. The son of an immigrant, he’s got a
foreign-sounding name and there’s been a constant push to get him to prove that
he was really born in the U.S. (and publicly released official documents have
not staved this off). But look at the Obama story from an immigrant community’s
perspective: this is a kid who had to deal with having a strange name, who came
from a non-wealthy family, who worked really, really hard, got into Columbia
and then got into Harvard.
Obama’s story is the immigrant’s dream.
And when it’s denigrated as somehow not being “really” American, this cuts deep
into the experience of families from Latin America and Asia. Hispanics,
Asian-Americans, immigrant communities from everywhere have made a deeply
conscious choice to be American and yet in the rhetoric from the Right, they
are doubted and rejected. Immigration reform offered as a quick palliative to
convince Latinos to vote GOP comes across as simplistic pandering and not a
deep enough heart change. The question that the GOP faces is one of hospitality
and community, not just one of policy. Without the heart change, the immigration
reform smacks of insincerity.
This
is what the GOP needs to change to draw Latino and Asian-American voters: to
view immigrants and the children of immigrants as real Americans.
2 Responses to “Hispandering”: What the GOP doesn’t get about Latino (and Asian) voters
The GOP is also missing a very important point in their simplistic approach to politics: the brand of individualism they uphold and promote is antithetical to the community-oriented spirit and tradition in Latino and Asian communities. Additionally, the Pioneer myth about bootstraps and an antagonistic attitude towards one's government finds no parallels in those communities either. The Republican ideology simply is not resonating with very many groups of people these days.
I'm a legal immigrant. Not Hispanic, but of Anglo-Celtic descent from another "new world" land of immigrants.
I can relate. I think you're spot on. The whole notion of two classes of citizen - one that can be president and one that can never be - is an anaethema to me, as in my homeland of Australia, anything a born citizen can do, so can a naturalised one. The current leader is a woman born in Wales for example.
So yes, the whole birther movement just smacked me in the face personally. Reminding me that even if I ever decide to become a citizen, I'll never be truly American. I can only imagine what it did to the millions of Hispanic-Americans.
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