Republicans: Harsh Talk
“Republicans often seem to think if they could just get beyond immigration issues there’d be all kinds of opportunities for them with Latino voters,” John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, says. “That’s a little like saying if we could just get beyond civil rights we’d be good with black voters.”
.. Last month, at a candidates’ forum in Plano, Texas, the conservative activist Ralph Reed proposed a strategy that ignores the issue altogether: Republicans should just focus on the evangelical vote, which, he claimed, is “larger than the African-American vote, the Latino vote, the feminist vote, the gay vote, and the union vote combined.” He was resurrecting a popular G.O.P. theory that President Obama was reëlected only because millions of conservative, and especially evangelical, voters went “missing” in 2012. All the 2016 Republican nominee has to do is get those voters to return to the polls.
.. Before the start of last month’s debate, representatives from conservative Latino groups gathered in Boulder to issue some warnings about what would happen if the Party didn’t distance itself from extreme immigration politics. Their message was of a piece with the 2012 report, but even more blunt. Rosario Marin, who served as the U.S. Treasurer under President George W. Bush, said, “Don’t expect us to come to your side during the general election. You are not with us now, we will not be with you then. You don’t have our vote now, you won’t have it then. You insult us now, we will be deaf to you then.”