Undermining The Conservative Message . . .

affects the base more than any targeted demographic.

Gary Bauer’s Campaign for Working Families  calls our attention to a Byron York article  in the Washington Examiner.  It is entirely relevant to the announced Scott County Republican “demographic” outreach task force activities.

The conventional wisdom among Beltway elites is that Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election in part because Barack Obama won a landslide among Hispanic voters. So, as the logic goes, the GOP must now surrender on immigration reform and border security in order to attract more Hispanic votes to remain competitive in future elections.

That is one reason why many well-meaning conservatives in Congress are rushing headlong to embrace legislation that has Democrats salivating. But is it really necessary?

I know conservatives and Christians that are on all sides of the immigration reform debate. But if anyone has deluded themselves into accepting the view that we must accept amnesty, please read this analysis by Byron York. He demolishes the myths surrounding the role of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 election.

According to York’s analysis, Romney would have needed 73% of the Hispanic vote last year in order to win the White House. The GOP’s best showing ever was George W. Bush’s 44% in 2004. Yet, a minor improvement of just four points among white voters would have been enough to defeat Obama.

Whether it is border security or values, the conservative message is not the problem! The GOP is learning all the wrong lessons from the 2012 elections and is suppressing its own base support.

York’s important article available here  revolves around the use of a calculation tool  available from The New York Times’ online  which allows one to “look at the presidential election results and calculate what would have happened if the racial and ethnic mix of voters had been different.”  Nate Silver who is credited with being very accurate in his predictions regarding the 2012 election (to our chagrin) created it.  More permutations are set forth in York’s article reinforcing his conclusions, which we heartily endorse.

The most serious of those problems was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off by the campaign that they abandoned the GOP and in many cases stayed away from the polls altogether. Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day. If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.

We would add here that those white people did not vote because of a dearth of turn-out effort, a.k.a. “mechanics”  or not knowing where or how to vote or that they could vote early, it is because they were unconvinced as to authenticity or unmotivated by ineffective messaging .  York goes on:

Likewise, the white vote is so large that an improvement of 4 points — going from 60 percent to 64 percent of those whites who did vote — would have won the race for Romney . . .

It is simply not reasonable to believe there is something the GOP can do — pass immigration reform, juice up voter-outreach efforts — that will create that result    (73% Hispanic vote necessary to have changed the 2012 results as referred to above)

That doesn’t mean future Republican presidential candidates should not work to increase their share of the Hispanic vote. They could, for example, actually campaign in areas with large numbers of Hispanic voters.

But here is the real solution. Romney lost because he did not appeal to the millions of Americans who have seen their standard of living decline over the past decades. They’re nervous about the future . . .  they either voted for Obama or didn’t vote at all. If the next Republican candidate can address their concerns effectively, he will win. And, amazingly enough, he’ll win a lot more Hispanic votes in the process. A lot from other groups, too.

It would do more than any immigration bill or outreach program ever could.

Our comments four days ago referred to the benefits of a conservative rising tide message.  It has all the benefits of efficiency, consistency and avoiding the balkanization of politics and  dangers of degrading base support for little gains elsewhere.  Why is that so hard for local and state members of the GOP CLEC to understand?     R Mall

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