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
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/publications/p20/2012/tables.html
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.shtml
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.shtml
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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