No, The Hispanic Vote Didn't Cost Romney The Victory

Via Byron York, they weren't even close to being the decisive factor.

For example, in Wisconsin, 3,056,613 votes were cast, of which 4 percent, or 122,264 votes, were cast by Hispanics according to exit polls. Mr. Obama’s margin of victory in Wisconsin was over 200,000 votes — even if all Hispanics had voted for Mr. Romney instead of voting for Mr. Obama by more than two to one, he would have won the state.

Not unexpectedly, the Hispanic vote was also not decisive in Iowa or New Hampshire where Mr. Obama could have carried the states even if he had won none of the Hispanic vote whatsoever.

In Ohio, where the president received an estimated 54 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to exit poll data, we find he could have won the state with as little as 22 percent of the Hispanic vote, and in Virginia, where he received 64 percent of the Hispanic vote, we find that he could have carried the state with just over 33 percent.

...

With these five swing states, along with the safe Democratic states that Mr. Obama should have carried regardless of the Hispanic vote, the president would have reached 283 electoral votes, winning the Electoral College without needing to win a majority of the Hispanic vote in each state.

So even if Romney equaled W's Holy Grail number from 2004, he still wouldn't have won.

Oh and that 2004 number? Yeah, it was an outlier for the GOP with Hispanics.

1984 66/34 Democrats
1988 70/30 Democrats (this was the first election after the last amnesty when
it should have paid off most for Republicans)
1992 61/25 Democrats (Perot was 16)
1996 72/21 Democrats (Perot was 6)
2000 62/35 Democrats (Buchanan 1, Nader 2)
2004 53/44 Democrats (Nader 2). Bush's support may have been as low as 40%.
2008 67/31 Democrats
2012 71/27 Democrats

If you average those numbers you'll see that the GOP traditionally gets about...31%. So Romney wasn't exactly that far off. Granted, this is a crude way of looking at it given the increase in the percentage of Hispanics, about 2% in 1988 up to 9% this year and lots of other factors, but it gives you a ballpark.

We seem to have this "Help us amnesty, you're our only hope!" conversation every two years and it's always wrong.

Long term the GOP needs to figure out a way to broaden its coalition but making more likely Democratic voters isn't going to do it. Personally, I'd start with toning down the rhetoric. Not making every illegal alien caught doing something terrible the poster child for all illegals seems like a reasonable start. If the price of reaching the "Hispanic" community is amnesty, we've got an unsquarable circle.

More immediately, the pro-amnesty forces are going to keep pushing out crap about how amnesty is the key to the GOP's future. Don't buy it.

There may well be a humanitarian case for regularizing their status but amnesty supporters need to make it and stop making up BS reasons that are easily disprovable.

posted by DrewM. at 10:00 AM

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