Friday, August 21, 2015

Why Republicans Aren't Afraid of Latino Voters

 
            After Donald Trump and a number of other Republican presidential hopefuls signaled their willingness to ignore or try to repeal the provision of the 14th Amendment that grants any person born in the United States citizenship, Paul Waldman of the Washington Post wrote an article asking whether Republicans had just given away the 2016 election.
            The idea that we should ignore or reinterpret the 14th Amendment is outrageous to anyone who believes in the rule of law.  And the notion that anyone ought to spend any time trying to amend this provision out of the Constitution—it takes a 2/3 vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and the approval of ¾ of the states—is ludicrous.
            Waldman’s point, though, wasn’t that these candidates had taken a position most Americans would consider to be obnoxious.  Looking at our country’s changing demographics, Waldman was saying that positions like these are particularly offensive to Americans of Hispanic descent, and given the increase in the number of Latinos and the decrease in the number of whites, alienating (no pun intended) the former was an ill-conceived electoral strategy.
            In the long run, Waldman is right.  The supply of conservative white Americans is on the decline, and if Republicans want to have a chance to remain relevant into the 21st century, they have to do something to reach out to the increasing number of Americans with Hispanic, African and Asian ancestry.  It’s not enough to argue that you are the party of freedom and economic opportunity when the party is also busy making it clear that part of the audience isn’t really welcome.
            Yet, Waldman may not be right about the electoral consequences of this attitude on the 2016 presidential election.  While there may indeed be many more Latinos and fewer whites in the U.S. in 2016 than ever before, those factors are likely to have a muted effect on our politics.
            Under the Constitution, the real election of a president depends on the Electoral College in which every state gets a number of votes equal to the size of its congressional delegation plus 2.  Regardless of the popular vote, whoever wins 270 electoral votes becomes the next president.
            Generally, the Electoral College vote result tracks the popular vote, and there have only been a handful of cases in which the popular vote and the Electoral College vote were at odds.  The last time it happened was when George W. Bush was elected in 2000.
            For all of the states except Maine and Nebraska, it doesn’t matter whether a candidates wins with 50.1% of the vote or with 99% of the vote.  Whoever wins a state’s popular vote receives all of the state’s Electoral College votes  And that’s why Waldman’s observation might not be correct.
            In the last presidential election, only 15 states were decided by five percentage points or less.  The winners in the rest of the states had much larger margins of victory.  Most of the states are safely “red or “blue” and aren’t likely to flip to the other party.  That’s why, in 2012, the candidates spent much more time and money in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida and not much time or money in Maryland.
            Using data from the Federal Election Commission and the Census Bureau, Table 1 shows the 15 states with the smallest margins of victory, ranked from the
Table 1
States
Dem %
Raw Obama
Raw Romney
Dem Margin
Available Hispanic Votes
Needed for Change
MI
54.80%
2,564,569
2,115,256
449,313
158000
224656.5
MN
53.94%
1,546,167
1,320,225
225,942
44000
112971
WI
53.52%
1,620,985
1,407,966
213,019
71000
106509.5
NV
53.41%
531,373
463,567
67,806
157000
33903
IA
52.96%
822,544
730,617
91,927
30000
45963.5
NH
52.83%
369,561
329,918
39,643
15000
19821.5
CO
52.75%
1,323,102
1,185,243
137,859
259000
68929.5
PA
52.73%
2,990,274
2,680,434
309,840
184000
154920
VA
51.97%
1,971,820
1,822,522
149,298
103000
74649
OH
51.51%
2,827,709
2,661,437
166,272
98000
83136
FL
50.44%
4,237,756
4,163,447
74,309
1399000
37154.5
NC
48.97%
2,178,391
2,270,395
-92,004
95000
-46002
GA
46.04%
1,773,827
2,078,688
-304,861
114000
-152430.5
AZ
45.39%
1,025,232
1,233,654
-208,422
400000
-104211
MO
45.22%
1,223,796
1,482,440
-258,644
63000
-129322
Source: http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.shtml
highest margin of victory for President Obama to the smallest margin of loss.  It also shows the raw vote totals, the number of votes needed to equalize the outcomes for each state and the number of people in each of these states who were both registered to vote and claimed to be of Hispanic ancestry.
            If you do the math, you’ll see that even if Mitt Romney had every single Latino vote in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa and New Hampshire, there were not enough of those votes to move the state from the Democratic column to the Republican column. 
            Similarly, Barack Obama could not have changed the results in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia or Missouri by winning every single Latino vote, again because there weren’t enough Hispanic voters to offset Romney’s advantages with other groups.
            The only states in which there were enough Hispanic votes to change the outcome were Nevada, Colorado and Florida.  Table 2 shows the improvement in performance with Latinos Mr. Romney would have needed to win the state.
Table 2
State
Romney Share Hispanic Vote
Needed Share
Improvement in Performance
Nevada
29%
51%
22%
Colorado
25%
52%
27%
Florida
40%
43%
3%
Calculations based on Federal Election Commission, Census Bureau and Exit Poll Data
            Increasing Latino vote share in excess of 20 percentage points is unlikely and so Nevada and Colorado were probably both off the table.  Let’s spot Florida to the Republicans—Floridians Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have taken pains not to antagonize Latinos—and Barack Obama still wins the election with 303 Electoral College votes. 
            Instead of courting Latinos, it makes much more sense for a Republican candidate to try to expand the number of white voters in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania who feel resentful of the new brown faces popping up in their communities.
            Of course, there would be a completely different outcome dictating a completely different strategy if we did away with the Electoral College.  In that case, the Latino voters living in places where their votes are now “wasted” would make a much bigger difference.  But that too would take a constitutional amendment.
            There will come a day when offending Latino voters will matter to Republican presidential candidates.  But that day is not today.

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