Two days before Christmas, Edward Schumacher-Matos, a scribe for the Washington Post, worked himself into a lather because he believes the GOP is doomed at the ballot box unless it accommodates “Latino” concerns, mainly on immigration.
Schumacher-Matos is wrong. The GOP can retain control of American politics as long as it gets most of the white vote, and, of course, if it reforms immigration laws and stops the invading reconquistadores from south of the border.
Wrote Schumacher-Matos, “Some Republicans are crowing over the 2010 Census, but any red-state gains they make will depend on two big ifs: whether the party undergoes a virtual religious conversion and supports immigrants, or it gerrymanders like mad.
“Most news reports this week on the new population figures understated the size of the immigrant impact. If you add their American-born children, immigrants accounted for fully three-fourths of the nation’s population growth over the past decade. . . .
“It would be wonderful if the GOP saw the light and tried to incorporate these new Americans, who generally are socially conservative. . . .
“Predictions for 2012 depend on how you interpret the November results. According to the national exit poll, Latinos voted 60 to 38 for Democrats in November, a significant gap but a surmountable one if you handily win the much larger white vote, as Republicans did.”
“Latinos” vote so heavily for Democrats, he concluded, that “Republicans in 2012 are going to have to achieve even larger margins among whites. It’s easier to resort to the legal cheating called gerrymandering, a practice that both parties embrace.”
Schumacher-Matos’s analysis is misleading. “Socially conservative” Hispanics, particularly immigrants, vote overwhelmingly for the party of abortion, lesbian mothers, and sodomite “marriage,” which means “Latinos” vote against their own interests. But they don’t much care. Like blacks, they collect a disproportionate share of welfare and other government benefits. Many blacks are socially conservative. But they vote Democratic.
Second, Schumacher-Matos’s claim that Republicans must “achieve even larger margins among whites” is a gauzy asseveration he doesn’t back up with numbers. His conclusion that the alternative is “legal cheating” through gerrymandering, the numbers show, is false.
A better reading of voting patterns comes from VDare’s Steve Sailer, who argues that Republicans can win easily with only slightly more white votes. “In 2010,” he argues, “GOP House candidates crushed Democratic House candidates 60-37 among white voters. . . . The GOP picked up 91 percent of its votes among whites—in contrast to the Democrats’ 65 percent.”
In the congressional elections of 2002 and 2004, “whites turned out in large numbers and voted Republican by sizable margins—basically as a patriotic response to 9/11 and the subsequent Bush wars. With the war going sour in 2006, however, the Republicans failed to hold their share of whites: Republican House candidates only won the white vote 51-47 and thus lost the House.”
As far the 2008 presidential contest goes, Sen. John McCain received just 55 percent of the white vote, compared with 58 percent for George W. Bush in 2004. “To win the popular vote,” Sailer wrote, “McCain needed either 59 to 60 percent of the white vote, or to expand the number of white voters by raising issues of interest to the unmotivated, such as, say, immigration.” But McCain proclaimed that he didn’t want anyone to vote for him because he feared Barack Hussein Obama. In short, he gave white males permission to vote Obama.
In 2000, George W. Bush struggled “to eke out a 271-267 win in the Electoral College” not because he lost the minority vote by a margin of 77 to 21 percent, but because “he commanded only a measly 54% of the white vote.” Sailer did some math and found that, if Bush had won just 57 percent of the white vote, “he [would have] cruised to an Electoral College landslide of 367 to 171. Why? Because whites remain by far the dominant bloc in the U.S. They count for 81% of all votes cast.” Sailer also found that, if Bush had received that 57 percent but only 13 percent of the minority vote, he would have won 310 to 228. Had Bush won those additional points and lost every nonwhite vote in the United States, Sailer concluded, “he still would have won. Bush would have tied 269-269 in the Electoral College and been elected President by the House of Representatives.”
In the 2010 gubernatorial elections in Texas and California, GOP candidates Rick Perry and Meg Whitman lost the Hispanic vote by 23 and 26 points. But Perry won his election 55-42, while Whitman lost 41-54. Why? “Because Perry won the Texas white vote 69-28. In contrast, Whitman only edged out Brown 50-46 among California whites.” Avers Sailer, “If a Republican candidate can’t win a majority of whites, he or she can’t win the election.” As elections go, the number of “Latinos” living here doesn’t matter. And whites, Sailer observes, are more than 80 percent of the electorate.
So Republicans needn’t gerrymander to win, because those “larger margins” aren’t as large as Schumacher-Matos thinks—at least, not yet—and they are not impossible to attain if Republicans continue to portray the Democrats for what they are: a leftist party that panders to aggrieved minorities, militant homosexuals, and angry women. Meanwhile, the GOP must keep its promises and work to stop immigration.
But even then, in the near term, they can safely stay in power if they dance with the ones that brung them: white voters.
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