From the Wall Street Journal:
The nation’s largest Latino advocacy group says it invited every presidential candidate to annual convention next week. Not a single Republican plans to attend, a spokesman said.
Democrats Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, and Martin O’Malley, former governor of Maryland, will appear at a lunch Monday in Kansas City, Mo., before the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy and civil rights organization for Latinos. Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont originally had a conflict but now plans to appear as well, his spokesman said…
Spokesmen for several Republican candidates did not respond to requests for comment…
So if that one totally-not-a-racist second cousin by marriage on your Facebook feed suddenly breaks out in a spate of Cesar Chavez “jokes”, now you know why.
mai naem mobile
This is dumb. Even Marco Rubio and Jebeh! ain’t showing up? Carry on. Please keep on doing stupid stuff.
Baud
Nah. The jokes will be about how no Democrats will attend the white people’s convention.
Keith P.
Their big plan to court the Hispanic vote consists of putting ‘!’ in front of their slogans and picking a Cuban VP candidate.
rikyrah
But, the Villagers say that Donald Trump doesn’t speak for the Republican Party…..
ok……
Felonius Monk
Republican candidates should be falling all over themselves to come before this group and disavow Donald Trump’s bullshit comments in the hopes of gaining some support, but I think they have already written Latinos off and figure why bother.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Well, technically, he doesn’t use their code words.
MobiusKlein
@Baud: you mean the GOP presidential convention?
NonyNony
@MobiusKlein:
Zing!
Baud
@MobiusKlein:
Nodding in approval.
Patricia Kayden
So not even one Republican can attend? Bet if it was a NRA or T’Bag event, all 50 candidates would be there. Great Latino outreach they’ve got there.
NonyNony
@efgoldman:
There are some possibilities that come immediately to mind:
a) the conspiratorial answer – they’re planning on vote suppression tactics to win it for them. I doubt this, actually, because I don’t think any of them have shown any capacity for that kind of long term planning. At this point the Republican Id is just running wild.
b) the delusional answer – they’re sure that there are enough white voters out there to win the election and that they can get a bigger share of that white vote than Romney or McCain did. Since the percentage of the white vote that Romney and McCain got is roughly the same as what every Republican has gotten since at least Reagan, if they believe this it means that they’re falling prey to magical thinking.
c) the cynical answer – the candidates believe (b) but have campaign staff that have convinced themselves that it’s impossible for a candidate to both win the GOP primary AND win the national election. So they’re not even going to try – they’re going to do what they can to win the primary and then, when their candidate loses at the general election, they can still pimp themselves out to campaigns having made their name as “they guy who got Ted Cruz/Marco Rubio/Scott Walker through the primary”.
I personally think (c) is a whole lot of it – with the campaign staff encouraging magical thinking on the candidate’s part to keep them grabbing for that brass ring. The longer they can keep their respective candidates in the game the more they and their buddies get paid.
Patricia Kayden
@efgoldman: Not sure Republicans have written off Jews. Agree with the rest of your comment though. Let’s see if winning just the White vote will work for them in 2016. Doubt it.
mai naem mobile
@efgoldman: you forgot gays, families of gays, Catholics who like Pope Frank , minimum wage earners,muslims, pot smokers,single parents
Baud
@efgoldman: @mai naem mobile:
If they keep this up, we might not even need ACORN this time.
NotMax
They’d show up if it were held at a Confederate flag factory…
Roger Moore
@efgoldman:
No. By TeaHadi math, that means it’s necessary to “true the vote” by making sure that only angry white guys are allowed to vote.
chopper
@NotMax:
and amy schumer was MCing.
wot, too soon?
JMG
Many people, some of whom I know personally and well, have none of the sentiments of the Republican party en masse but will vote for the Republican candidate anyway out of habit and peer group conformity.
kc
@NonyNony:
I don’t doubt it one bit; the GOP has been pushing relentlessly, state by state, to make it harder for certain people to vote.
NotMax
@mai naem mobile
And the bicycle riders.
/Ship of Fools reference.
Major Major Major Major
Nice to see Bernie finally catching on that he needs something other than college-educated white folks from the far North if he wants to have a chance.
Omnes Omnibus
@mai naem mobile: … and Methodists!
Kropadope
@Baud:
Well, you don’t expect the RNC to invite the Democrats to their nomination convention, do you?
Roger Moore
@NonyNony:
Another possible explanation is that the candidates are still making a rational decision to go flat out to win the primary. Basically, their chances of winning the presidency are the product of their chance of winning the primary times their chance of winning the general given that they’ve won the primary. Right now, they’re already at a big enough disadvantage for the general election that their best chance may be to hope for disaster (in the form of a recession, terrorist attack, etc.) to strike the Democrats. If that’s true, they’re almost as likely to win the general no matter how much they pander to the worst elements of their party, but that pandering increases their chances of winning the primary.
Major Major Major Major
Did that Pando article about tobacco get front-paged yet? My brain’s a mess right now.
Matt McIrvin
@NonyNony: (d) they’re hoping for a miracle: a new economic collapse or international crisis that gets them that huge percentage of the white vote, for reasons beyond anyone’s control.
It could happen. It may even be happening as we speak: it sounds as if the Chinese markets are melting down and the euro is about to disintegrate. If the world economy collapses, Democrats will be blamed; and if Putin decides to use the chaos to make his move and pick a war with NATO, we could be back in Daddy Party territory again. Not to mention end-of-the-world territory, but that pretty much goes hand in hand.
Svensker
La Raza has been branded by the GOP as socialist racists, so they wouldn’t have anything to do with them.
Matt McIrvin
@Svensker: Yeah, got it in one. In winger mythology, La Raza is an insane radical group bent on the Reconquista. Meeting with them would be like attending an ACORN meeting, if ACORN actually still existed. Nobody who did it could get the Republican nomination.
John Revolta
Perhaps they prefer consentual?
srv
Sheesh, what do you people want? At least none of the candidates are showing up to protest.
Where’s Geraldo?
jl
@mai naem mobile: And non-rich youth and non-rich elderly… what other groups are we forgetting?
Roy G.
@efgoldman: Please inform Hillary then – she just deep throated Haim Sabin’s BDS counter-offensive.
catclub
@efgoldman:
AIPAC excepted.
xenos
@Svensker:this is the critical point. In one of their typically stupid rhetorical ploys the GOP has promoted the idea that “raza” is the same thing as anglo-American ideas of race. Thus, (wait for it) Hispanics are the real racists.
I suppose it was good while it lasted, but now having demonised the core Hispanic political organisation they have made it toxic to their base. The candidates can’t even talk to la Raza without giving the game away. Aclu, naacp, la raza..the GOP has painted themselves into a corner again and again.
Plantsmantx
@Svensker:
Yep. For years now, conservatives have pretended that the NCLR is the same as the long-defunct La Raza Unida Party.
aarrgghh
curious why of all candidates ted cruz isn’t attending, seeing how he’s mastered the proper approach for addressing groups toxic to his base.
Zinsky
White supremacist thought (if you can call it that) has gotten these knuckle-draggers this far – why quit when you are behind??
Zinsky
@Roy G.: Hillary deep-throated what??
Another Holocene Human
@Plantsmantx: Which from what the internet has coughed up doesn’t even seem all that radical … democracy? Self-governance? Self-help? Why, they could practically be Republicans!
burritoboy
re comment 16:
muslims, gays, bike riders are all too small populations to make a difference. Also, those groups are highly concentrated in places where no Republican is even conceivably going to win. Outside of the states where these groups concentrate, there are none of these groups from an electoral perspective.
minimum wage earners – who don’t vote, and so can be entirely ignored. The white ones blame the coloreds for their problems anyway.
non-rich youth – who don’t vote, and so can be entirely ignored.
non-rich elderly – under the control of right-wing media, peer pressure among the elderly and pressure from church. Anyways, they aren’t going to start voting for a different party at this point.
Pissing off Hispanics, on the other hand, is a different story. That’s 17% of the population, with another 13% being African-American. Of course, the candidates may well have concluded that they weren’t going to get any Hispanic support anyway in the primaries, while any efforts in winning over Hispanics would cost them substantial losses of support among the white Republicans – precisely those who are going to turn out for the primaries.