02/29/2012
Roy Beck at NumbersUSA has a lengthy blog on Romney’s success in Arizona and his support for E-Verify. The point here is that if Romney hadn’t done well in Arizona, we would be hearing that his "immigration hardlining" had defeated him, by waking the mythical Latino voter, and offending "moderates."
The fact is that by supporting immigration enforcement, including E-Verify, Romney has moved into the mainstream of American opinion, which is good for him because neither of the two major parties have been there.
Romney’s Vocal E-Verify Stance Assisted Strong Arizona Win Tonight — New Poll Confirms Huge E-Verify Popularity
By Roy Beck, Updated Tuesday, February 28, 2012, 9:45 PM EST
In Arizona where immigration was near the top of voter concerns, the candidate who “owned” the E-Verify issue was bound to benefit. After last week’s debate, Romney owned it; in today’s Arizona election, he benefitted.
The reason Romney benefited was not stance but leadership.
All three Non-Paul GOP candidates (Santorum, Gingrich & Romney) have been supporting national mandatory E-Verify through the campaign. But only Romney in last week’s all-important debate made sure the voters knew his position by wrapping himself in that stance (see bottom of this blog).
Not surprisingly, exit polling today found that Arizona voters most concerned about illegal immigration broke strongly for Romney, who they saw as "the mandatory E-Verify candidate." The poll results below should cause every candidate of every party for every office to consider being the "E-Verify candidate" in their race. While Romney had long been expected to win Arizona, polling showed his lead was narrowing until last week’s debate performance with the powerful appeal for E-Verify.
Many pundits claimed Romney’s robust advocacy of making Arizona’s mandatory E-Verify law a model for the nation was a blunder that somehow put him on the political fringe. Paul Begala just stated on CNN that Romney in last week’s debate moved "so far to the right" on immigration that he will find it very difficult to move back enough to the center in the general election.
But a new national poll shows that kind of analysis to be nonsense.
- The poll reveals that overwhelming majorities of virtually every type of American support mandatory E-Verify.
- And it shows that "the political center" of Independents and Moderates is about as thrilled with mandatory E-Verify as are Republicans and Conservatives.
- In fact, Democrats and Liberals aren’t that different on this issue, either.
HARD TO FIND AN OPPONENT OF MANDATORY E-VERIFY
The Pulse Opinion Research poll sponsored by NumbersUSA found that only 12% of all likely voters nationwide oppose requiring every employer to use electronic verification to keep illegal aliens from getting U.S. jobs — and to ensure that all U.S. jobs go to Americans and legal immigrants who already are here.
The question was phrased in a neutral way:
POLL QUESTION: “On the issue of ILLEGAL immigration, do you favor or oppose mandating that all employers electronically verify the immigration status of their workers.”
Among all likely voters:
- 78% favored mandatory verification
- 12% opposed mandatory verification
- 9% weren’t sure
[More]
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