The Republican Party has two Latino senators and one Black senator. That tops the Democratic Party in the “Looking like California” metrics but doesn’t move the political numbers forward.
“We need to have black people, brown people, white people, we need to have people with tattoos, without tattoos, with long hair, with short hair, with beards, without beards,” Rand Paul said. “We need to look more like America. We need to appeal to the working class; we need to appeal to all segments of the country.”
Let’s assume that the Republican Party gets people with hair of all sizes, what then? Talking about appealing to the working class is nice, but Rand Paul lost the under $30,000 vote. He tied for the $30,000 to $49,000 vote. He only broke out with the above $50,000 voters. That was the same thing that happened to Romney. And unlike Romney, race couldn’t be blamed for those results. Not when Bush decisively won those same voters in Kentucky in 2004.
Politics does run on reciting truisms, but that only works for winning elections, not for election strategies. Election strategies, unlike elections, require actual solutions. Realistic solutions don’t depend on making a play for voters that you rarely get. They depend on shoring up your numbers with the voters that you can get.
In 2004, Bush tied Kerry among the $30,000 to $49,000 voters. In 2012, Romney lost them by 8 percent. McCain had lost them by 7 percent in 2008. Grafton County, the site of Obama’s biggest margin of victory in New Hampshire, is 95% white and its median household income is $41,962. That’s well below the median household income in the country, but that only hovers a little above $50,000.
In 2000, Bush nearly tied Kerry in Grafton County. In 2008, Obama won it by 63 percent. Instead of looking to see why Republicans can’t win the Latino vote, it might be a good idea to see why Republicans have begun losing Grafton County; which looks a whole lot like America, by margins almost as bad as the ones that they hope to win the Latino vote by.
Amnesty for illegal aliens will hit low-income voters hardest. It will punish the very voters that Republicans need in order to win and build up demographics of voters who are not going to vote Republican anyway.
Republicans would be foolish to give up on minority voters, but even more foolish to give up on low- income white voters. In 2011, Republicans had pulled ahead among $30,000 voters, going from 37 to 47 percent since the 2008 election. The real question worth asking about the 2012 election is what happened to those numbers?
The amnesty sellout is not really about winning elections. Its odds of accomplishing like that are nil. It’s about a larger divide between Nationalist Republicans who believe in America as a country and Transnational Republicans who believe in America as a set of economic and political principles that can be applied equally well anywhere in the world.
The Transnational Republicans backed the Arab Spring because they believed democracy could work anywhere, because it worked here. They support open borders, because they believe that economic freedom, like political freedom, can turn any population into Americans. Americans being defined solely by the ability to sell things without government regulation.
Transnational Republicans are a disaster because they don’t really accept the concept of American Exceptionalism. Their foreign policy is a disaster because they think that every country will be better if it runs by American rules. Their domestic policy is a disaster because they believe that the entire world would be American if it just got a chance to move to America.
Transnationalists of the left and the right don’t view America as a country, but as a political experiment. The American system may be an experiment, but the country isn’t. And confusing the two is destructive and dangerous.
Republican Transnationalists keep trying to marry fiscal conservatism with liberalism on most other fronts, sometimes even including foreign policy. Their liberal social policy prescriptions make the country more liberal, even as their fiscal conservatism alienates those same voters. Amnesty is a perfect example of this stupidity in action, legalizing voters in the name of diversity who will reject them on economic grounds.