The Monkey Cage takes on the Times piece mistermix spoke of about how Latinos don’t plan to vote in November:
I don’t know if 51% of Hispanics planning on voting in this election is better or worse for the Democrats than in previous elections, but the article is pitched as “yet another problem for the Democrats”. It is not until the 18th paragraph that the article notes that “Latinos have usually voted in lower percentages than non-Latinos, but the current gap between their enthusiasm to vote and that of the general population is wider than in the last midterm election”. To me, this is the crux of the issue, and unfortunately there is no data here.
Latino Americans are disproportionately Democratic and disproportionately young. It has been well-reported that Democrats and younger voters are less enthusiastic about this election than the past midterm election. In the absence of more conclusive data, it seems reasonable to assume that Latino voting enthusiasm is about what you’d expect from a young, heavily Democratic group that has a history of below-average (relative to the rest of the population) turn-out.
And of course there’s one other thing: the 43 point gap between Democrats and Republicans is even larger than the 36 point margin by which Obama won the Latino vote; in particular, only 22% of Latinos say they plan to vote for a Republican (31% went for McCain). It could well be that Republican-leaning Latinos will just stay home (I think that’s one pretty reasonable interpretation of the data). It’s hard to see how that hurts Democrats.
Update. Also too: if I were a Republican strategist, I’d be shitting bricks over the fact that, even in a political environment where Republicans are polling 5-10 points better than they did in 2008, Republicans have lost even more ground among one of the country’s fastest growing demographics. If Democrats continue to win 2/3 of the Latino vote, they will continue to win presidential elections.
cleek
if only there was a public option!
/asshole
Alwhite
It hurts Dems because thats the theme of this years elections – anything that does not fit the theme will either not be reported, dismissed as unimportant or an anomaly or twisted to fit the theme.
NobodySpecial
I’m not concerned about it at all. The splits will be about the same as in 2006 (70-30 D), and the share of the electorate will be larger (9.2 percent to 8.6 percent). That’s probably an extra 1 MILLION votes for the D candidates nationwide.
That’s a hell of an advantage for Dems. Reps are going to need INSANE turnout to win anything of significance.
Brachiator
This argues for a kind of voter inertia that is immune to any change in the political landscape. If this is the case, then it’s very unfortunate.
Let’s look at the background of California Proposition 187, perceived to be an anti-immigrant proposition:
Latinos may well be behaving like any other similar group of voters. But in this case, given the bad stuff brewing in Arizona and other states, this may come back to bite them in the ass.
Note that I am not saying that Latinos should be coming out to vote to save Democrats. But some don’t appear to care about saving themselves.
kommrade reproductive vigor
And the Repubs will continue to look for ways to keep them damn brown folks away from reaLAMErica’s voting booths.
mikefromArlington
“If Democrats continue to win 2/3 of the Latino vote, they will continue to win presidential elections.”
Until they evangelize them into being value voters.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
I’m assuming that the Repups figure they’ll get around this by deporting everybody who’s last name ends in “ez” or “les”, assuming they regain control of the entire gubmint (they already control the Judicial branch) for a couple of years in which to relocate them folks.
Baring that, yeah, they’re staring at a demographic howitzer.
Kryptik
Silly Doug, thinking the GOP is going to let those silly brown people vote like Americans. Your naivete amuses me.
Seriously, Doug, the answer for the demo problem for the GOP can be summed up with one word: Disenfranchisement.
Mike B
I’m confused. The byline says “DougJ is the business and economics editor”, but the math is not horribly wrong.
What gives?
Roger Moore
I don’t think they’re terribly worried. Just as their corporate masters have trouble looking beyond the next quarterly report, Republican leaders have trouble looking beyond the next election. As long as they’ve boosted their chances of wining in 2010, they’re happy to put off thinking about what it means for 2012 and beyond.
Dork
Fixed.
Mark S.
I don’t get the feeling that Republicans ever think that long term. What they did find is that immigrant-bashing (as well as Muslim-bashing) was very popular with their base and they ran with that.
I can’t remember which GOP congressman said it about a month ago, but it was something along the lines of “We’re having so much success with this immigration issue there is no need to bring up the gay marriage ruling in California.”
ETA: Also too what Roger Moore said. The CEO analogy is spot-on.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Kryptik:
This, and far easier to do than my whole deportation scenario.
The Repups have been far better at gaining and keeping control at the local-ish level. Hmmm, what have they been doing since the 60s to squash the black vote:
1) Very few polling places (and by extension, fewer booths, fewer workers, etc) in heavily black areas,
2) Voter caging. Just look at what’s happening in WI right now as an example. And that’s just the one getting the publicity. Voter caging stories in the Confederacy abound and ones here in Misery, while they don’t get any corporate media attention, are well known.
3) Photo ID laws. Yup, Misery’s pulled another suppression tactic and we’re not alone.
The black community rightfully bitches about the inequality of voting options. The hispanic community will get the full brunt of that in the next decade. Why? Repup state legislatures or weak Dem ones that run scared of their resident wingnut population.
Punchy
Anyone know if Sully ever dated a Latino?
beltane
Looking back, I’ve realized that ever since 1994 even when Republicans win they do not win big. It takes a lot of shenanigans and gerrymandering for them to win these days. If they manage to take Congress this year, they will further solidify their reputation as a freak show for olf white people in the minds of the young voters who will inevitably replace them.
joe from Lowell
My wife’s going to have a baby next spring. If Democrats continue to win 2/3 of the Latino vote, they’ll be winning presidential elections in Texas before he or she can buy beer.
GregB
Please stop trying to find good news for Democrats. That’s not how it works. Everything is supposed to hurt them and help Republicans.
Please get on board.
*The Meme Police
Steve
@Mark S.: There’s no question that the party strategists worry about this issue. Look at Karl Rove and all his efforts to get Bush to take a moderate position on immigration. He wasn’t just doing that to be nice.
MBunge
@mikefromArlington: Until they evangelize them into being value voters.
That strategy hasn’t exactly done wonders with religious African-Americans and I suspect it will only be marginally more effective with Latinos.
Mike
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I think you’re wrong here. When Bush/Cheney got elected, they had an agenda to roll back every piece of liberal legislation that they could, stack the courts with conservative judicial nominees, pack every Executive Branch Department that they could with robotic loyalists. And they stuck to their guns, and made the Democrats go along (helped tremendously by the phony calls to patriotism that came along with taking down Saddam Hussein).
They were stupid, but disciplined, using every trick they could, including recess appointments, to get their way.
And now that Obama has been elected, they are ramping up their BS argument that only conservatives are true patriots, and that the GOP is the sole legitimate political party in America. The tea party is pushing them even further to the extreme right, but anyone who thinks that the GOP is not looking beyond the next election just is not paying attention.
Tom Hilton
This is something Rove understood, actually. He was behind Bush’s attempt at immigration reform–the idea being to pull in Latino voters. The nativist frenzy of this year’s Republicans is totally off-message from Rove’s strategy.
WereBear
That was a pipe dream. I think you start out a “value voter,” and I don’t see any activity in the different columns, there.
Zifnab
All of this is just statistical wankery until you break out the numbers by state and district. If California is hinging on the Latino vote, or if Texas is going to swing blue on the Latino vote, or if purple states suddenly start gaining/losing Latino enthusiasm, we can talk. But if Delaware or New York get a giant spike / crash in Latino voters – who cares? Those races are all but decided anyway.
beltane
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: They can only do the disenfranchisement thing for so long before there will be a very severe backlash. We may yet live to see the teabaggers’ darkest fears materialize before our eyes. If they persist in this, they will end up regretting that they didn’t just let people vote.
Mark S.
@Steve:
That was Rove, who last we saw was on FOX apologizing profusely for saying Christine O’Donnell wasn’t the best candidate for the Senate seat in Delaware. The guys running the show right now are going with full on Mexican bashing.
Brachiator
@Zifnab:
California, 55 electoral votes
Texas, 34 electoral votes
Delaware, 3 electoral votes
Suck It Up!
Forget Latinos, I just learned today that we are being shunned by working class whites.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Republican Statergery for Winning Latino Votes:
Devote .0005% of campaign funds to one ad that clearly states Republicans love Latino voters, unlike the icky Democrats. (Perhaps they’ll unearth Alberto Gonzales).
This will trick the Latino voters into thinking Republicans actually do love Latino voters. They’ll ignore all of the other ads, speeches and platforms that depict Latinos as the biggest threat to reaLAMErica since the last biggest threat to reaLAMErica. Plus the other ads will be in English which none of those people don’t speak too good no how anyways.
I mean, it has worked so well on my people we often crack up whenever anyone mentions that Republicans love African-Americans. Wait, they want us to VOTE for them? Oh well.
Comrade Dread
@WereBear: Values may also vary from person to person and in intensity.
One can be (pro-life, pro-gun, pro-prayer in schools, pro-whatever) but be even more (pro-jobs, pro-safety net, etc.)
mclaren
Demographically the Repubs find themselves doomed. The numbers identifying themselves as “conservatives” just fall off a cliff for the under-35 crowd.
You have to wonder exactly how long the Repubs can hang on as a political party. Nothing in the next 20 years looks promising for them. America looks to become majority non-white sometime around 2040 or 2050 or so. And the current collapse of the job market for new college grads would seem to cement the demographic trends favoring Demos, since the Demos are the only ones even making noises about helping the chronically unemployed right now.
Comrade Dread
@Brachiator: At which point I think you’ll start hearing talk about ditching the electoral college from Republicans because the president is getting elected by coastal liberals and not real ‘Mericans.
NRH
One thing I’d really like to hear more of, and that nobody at all has mentioned this entire political cycle that I’ve noticed, is the gap between expressed enthusiasm and actual participation. There have been lots of elections before where people claimed to be wildly excited… and then when election day rolled around, turnout was nothing out of the ordinary. We have a polling gap of people who claim to be enthusiastic and intent on voting come hell or high water, but I will be very surprised if Republicans do in fact turn out at historically unprecedented rates for a midterm election. In order for all these ‘Republican enthusiasm’ predictions to be correct, we would have to see a higher turnout for the 2010 midterms than we saw for the 2008 presidential elections.
IM
As far as I understand it is not about California – that is yesterday or Texas – tomorrow. Right now it is the south – west: New Mexico*, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado.
* See? They are already renaming things! Just wait until the biggest cities in N. M. have some spanish names!
Martin
@Brachiator: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Over ⅓ of the electoral votes needed for president are in the 4 states that border Mexico. Texas has a ways to go to turn blue, but Arizona doesn’t. McCain won his home state by only 9 points.
PhoenixRising
Also too: if I were a Republican strategist, I’d be shitting bricks about the idiots in my party whose instincts led them to using the fastest growing demographic group in the US, which already skews 2/3 Democrat, as the piñata for the Tea Party.
It has to have been instinctive, because a fourth grade graduate could run the numbers and explain why beating on an ethnic group that often has 3 generations voting at once is just dumb.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Brachiator:
Unless what’s really going is that the conservative Latinos just aren’t going to vote.
That’s what’s nuts here. Suppose the current break-down of 65-22 holds up election day — that pro-rates up to 74-26 (roughly). Suppose Latino turn-out goes down slightly. All that means is you’re looking at the same number of Dem votes as before but with fewer Rep votes.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Watch for bills to repeal the 26th am and raise the voting age to 50.
cleek
@mclaren:
nothing’s permanent, though.
Kryptik
@mclaren:
They don’t have to win long term. Just long enough to institutionalize the stuff that keeps those silly proles and brown people down, and masking it in the flag and ‘REAL ‘MURIKAN!’ rhetoric.
And judging by how eager the electorate is so far to swallow the GOP bullshit wholesale or simply hate Dems so much they don’t care that they know the GOP bullshit really is bullshit? They may just get what they want.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Also too: if I were a Republican strategist, I’d be shitting bricks over the fact that, even in a political environment where Republicans are polling 5-10 points better than they did in 2008, Republicans have lost even more ground among one of the country’s fastest growing Demographics.”
Who’ve have thunk that rabid xenophobic nativism would turn off immigrants?
Anyway, I predict that the next ten years will be great if you’re an attractive male or female GOP Latino hack.
They’ll be desperate to have to show how inclusive they are, and the money and safe seats will be given. Maybe they’ll get Nicky Haley to learn Spanish & change her name to Nicola Rodiguez & hope that’ll count.
PhoenixRising
@IM: You nailed it. NM has a governor’s race featuring a Latina Republican vs an Anglo Democrat, both hailing from the part of the state that trends GOP. What the Republican has going for her is, she’s a good looking DA with a Hispanic surname. What she has going against her is, Hispanic voters in this state tend to vote a Dem ticket. This one is going to be a nail-biter, because turnout is it.
CO has a governor’s race in which a Tea Party backed serial liar is slugging it out for the Anglo vote with Tom Tancredo, race-baiting immigrant-basher, and both of them are going to get beat by the Dem who is currently Denver’s first black mayor.
AZ and NV are in play for the Congressional races, and the question is whether Mexican-American youth who are registered voters are going to let the GOP talk about their abuelas in the racist, insulting and just plain mean fashion that is their hallmark–without pushing back in the voting booth. I’d be stunned if the low turnout among Latinos isn’t at least in part among the 40% that are registered R.
danimal
For all the noise about GOP tidal waves, this election is looking (and, frankly has been looking for several months) like a typical midterm. Some GOP pickups, some Dem holds and a lot of statistical noise adding up to a slight Dem majority in the House and a moderate Dem majority in the Senate. I predict about 30 GOP House pickups and 6 Senate pickups if current trends continue. And those numbers may be pessimistic.
gex
@Kryptik: ES&S – maker of electronic voting machines – houses their offices on Galt Blvd. in Omaha. Makes me a bit uncomfortable.
IM
@PhoenixRising:
Wait a moment, the candidate for Governor in CO is black? And he had such a nice white sounding name!
Next you will tell me president O’bama is black too!
Isn’t a black democrat from godless liberal babel Denver quite the cliche in Colorado?
Kryptik
@gex:
…seriously? ‘Galt Blvd.’? Oh god, that’s a bad omen…
Lurked
@IM:
Hickenlooper is not black.
aimai
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Old New Yorker cartoon of the nine supreme court justices:
“Gentlemen, we’re agreed then? Life begins at 40?”
aimai
Zifnab
@Brachiator: Which matters in two years maybe. For the midterms, electoral votes don’t mean jack.
Gravenstone
DougJ; I never took you for a Mr. Big fan (re. thread title).
gex
@Kryptik: Yup. My company does work with them. Their organization and communication skills are horrific and the dough they are getting from the government is obscene based on what they are paying us for our services.
Brachiator
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
Interesting. Supposedly, conservative voters are more energized this year. But I haven’t seen anything focusing on nonwhite or gay conservatives.
But there are some contests, e.g. California Senate and gubernatorial elections, where the Latino vote could be the deciding factor between victory and defeat for Democrats. So, allowing for all the views of conventional voting behavior, there is potentially a huge opportunity to be lost here.
Let’s say that somehow crazy Christine O’Donnell wins in Delaware. If Latino voters could insure a Barbara Boxer victory over Carly Fiorina in California, you at least fight for a little parity. Otherwise, their failure to turn out in large numbers could be truly unfortunate.
New Yorker
Yes, but you forget just how delusional many of these people are. They genuinely believe the earth is 6,000 years old. They genuinely believe the budget can be balanced by cutting foreign aid only and not raising taxes. And they genuinely believe that they and their 50 friends in West Dead Skunk, Tennessee represent a more potent force in politics than, say, the population of Los Angeles. Why would one need to appeal to Latinos when everyone knows that all real Americans want to close the border and deport Those People?
P.S. my apologies to the sane people from Tennessee who post here.
mnpundit
What I have a problem with is the idea that 70% of registered voters are going to vote in a MIDTERM. That’s crazy, even presidential elections don’t produce that much turnout, 2008 was under 60%.
Also I am Latino.
ED: @New Yorker: Look at the last 30 years. They damn well HAVE made themselves a more potent force in politics.
Roger Moore
@PhoenixRising:
The problem is that the Tea Party is Latino bashing because they’re the fastest growing demographic group and they skew Democratic. Their basic motivation is fear of scary others, so bashing the biggest, scariest group of others is fundamental to their purpose. It’s what I see as the corollary to Kissinger’s comment about paranoid people having real enemies: if you don’t have real enemies, acting paranoid is a great way of getting some. Flipping out over scary immigrants is a great way of making enemies out of the immigrants who don’t already hate you.
NobodySpecial
@Gravenstone: That would explain his green-tinted Sixties mind, I assume.
Menzies
@WereBear:
I think the more likely scenario is still that the GOP will wedge legal immigrants against illegal ones. This was always (part of) the way to win Cuban votes, and there’s some indication it’s beginning to happen within Central American immigrants.
On the other hand, I’m only half Cuban, my other half is Puerto Rican, and I live and study in the Northeast. Firsthand, on-the-ground info is relatively rare up here.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Gravenstone:
Blame It On my Youth is a classic standard often associated with Chet Baker.
Brachiator
@Menzies:
Can’t happen, especially in California where too many legal people know or are involved with someone who is not legal. And this is not just Latinos, but also Asians, blacks and Anglos. And for good or ill, Democratic Party politicians in California, especially Latinos, often see themselves as representing non-citizen Latinos.
The downside to this is that some citizens feel somewhat disenfranchised when California politicians appear to side with non-citizens. There is a potential wedge here, especially if the economy continues to go down the toilet.
Linda Featheringill
@Menzies:
Cubans:
It has been my unscientific observation that much of the original, conservative Cuban population was oriented much more to the right than is so for other Latino populations.
Other Latino conservatives have traditional moral standards but they aren’t much into dominating others and forcing compliance.
Some of the early Cubans had lived an absolutely feudal life. Blood and tradition were everything. Class was much more important than ethnicity. They weren’t even much into capitalism. They were so different from the rest of the world that they were easy to separate out.
Those guys are old now, of course [as am I]. The young people and middle aged people have different views. Feudalism doesn’t give you many choices and everyone likes choices.
That doesn’t mean that any political party can “harvest” the Cuban vote at will. It does mean that the each voter probably makes up his or her mind on an individual basis.
HOWEVER, I am not Cuban. If you disagree with me, please say so.
Binzinerator
@Brachiator:
I would think there would be some mixed feelings or perhaps even some animosity among some in the latino community toward illegal immigrants. It’s not like everyone in the latino community has a family member who is in this country undocumented. The backlash toward illegal immigrants has to have made life harder for the ones who came here legally or went through the long process to become citizens. Some are going to not identify with the undocumented but rather resent them for causing this, and that resentment might play out as indifference toward these harsh immigration measures.
It may not be that they don’t care about saving themselves, but that they don’t see themselves as illegal immigrants and are not particularly disposed to defend those who are.
edit: Anyways, some thoughts. May be way off base as IANAL (I am not a Latino).
Menzies
@Brachiator:
That last sentence is what I expect will happen over time, with the help of the GOP noise machine. I think with the benefit of years and increasing affluence legal immigrants and their descendants might begin to adopt the view that their illegal counterparts and their descendants are a problem to them as well.
Again, I neither think this is irreversible nor do I hope it’ll happen. This is basically a worst-case scenario in my mind.
Menzies
@Linda Featheringill:
In the spirit of Sidney Morgenbesser, I do and I don’t. Agree with you, that is.
My older Cuban family isn’t, from what I can tell, properly upper class, but I’ve always suspected they’ve painted themselves as far more salt-of-the-earth than they actually were – they did, however, come to the United States (or Panama) with almost nothing, after what they saw as a total abandonment by the Kennedy Administration, and they had to start from scratch when they made it to their final destinations.
I think the original Cuban exile population moved to the right not just because of strong religious standards (which apparently were always far more hardcore on Cuba than elsewhere) but really just in reaction to the fact that it was a leftist who put them through all that shit in the first place. Cuban exiles are extremely proud of the fact that they lived through the conflict between Batista and Castro and still managed to get out before things got horrible.
Again, this is all cum grano salis, because I’m not close enough to firsthand (my grandfather is a social democrat and my grandmother essentially switched parties – inasmuch as someone who can’t vote can switch parties – thanks to Obama) and a lot of the interaction I have is with older guys who are taking the piss out of me and testing my debating capabilities.
Binzinerator
@Tom Hilton:
Rove helped whip up the mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging spittle-flecked racist morons who make up the Republican base, and then his strategy hinged on them being all cool and accepting of millions of brown people. Very funny!
It all makes perfect sense if you see Rove as nothing more than a mean stupid little bastard of an opportunist who got lucky, and not some master strategist.
Paula
@Comrade Dread:
[THIRD] PARTY TIME?
Brachiator
@Binzinerator:
You have no idea.
But yeah, there are some people, especially some legal residents and citizens who followed all the immigration rules who are not to pleased with anything that sounds like amnesty, but illegal immigrants are part of the fabric of this country, always have been. And in California, there has in the past been much more informal free movement of people back and forth between Mexico, especially, and the US.
And then, there are the thousands of Mexican American citizens who were deported back to Mexico during the Great Depression, and their descendants. It’s always been messier than people would like to admit.
And there are all kinds of interesting counter movements. For example, there are increasing numbers of young adults, Latino and non-Latino, who marry their illegal immigrant friends so that they can get legal status. And note that these are pure friendships, not romantic relationships. But here there is active defiance against what are perceived to be stupid and unjust rules.
Menzies
@Binzinerator:
Or else someone who honestly, truly believed that the Republican base could be convinced to focus the virulent racism to which it had become susceptible, thanks to dog-whistle politics, only on the targets Rove wanted it.
James E. Powell
@Binzinerator:
That’s exactly how I see Rove. Even with the corporate press/media working to destroy Gore, Bush needed the supreme court to prevent him from losing the election in a state where his brother was governor and his campaign manager was in charge of counting the votes!
And without 9/11 and the storm of patriotic fervor, accompanied by a wave of Democratic self-castration, Bush would not have been re-elected. As it was, he was one state away from losing.
Republicans have to whip up the mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging spittle-flecked racist morons because outside of the rich, the Republicans have no credibility with any other voting constituency.
Binzinerator
@Brachiator:
I surely don’t, especially in Cali. But I did know a latino who was a citizen and who seemed to have some conflicting emotions about amnesty.
Anecdotes not data points, I know. But here’s another one: I once worked for a man whose family emigrated from Portugal some 300 years ago and settled in what is now New Mexico. So his family never really emigrated to the US, but as a result of the annexations following the Mexican-American war, the US sorta came to them. He claimed that over the years his family only married with other hispanic families, and while he preferred to hire latino subcontractors for his construction business and did not care whether they were documented or not, he still had mixed feelings about amnesty.
(Speaking of anecdotes: He told me the Mexican immigrant crews got a kick out of his Spanish. They thought it old-fashioned and quaint. A linguist once told him his Portuguese sounded very 18th century, as if had been frozen in time. His spanish and Portuguese he learned from his family, the language, I suppose, faithfully keeping intact over the years and through the generations the style, idioms and grammar that were formed when his family was last in contact with the Iberian peninsula. Frozen in time, indeed. I imagine for an english speaker it would be like meeting someone who sounded like Coleridge. Even more funny when you realize the guy’s a general contractor.)
As you say, it’s a complex fabric.