06/19/2012
Sean Trende writes in RealClearPolitics on why Obama’s Administrative Amnesty is a bad thing for Obama — for reasons that we've been talking about for more than ten years, and that we call the Sailer Strategy. (This is an excerpt, and the links in it are Trende’s)
1) Latinos are underrepresented in swing states. While the Latino vote is frequently portrayed as a critical voting bloc, in truth it is concentrated in only a few swing states with just a handful of electoral votes. The only states where Latinos make up more than 10 percent of the electorate are: Arizona (16 percent of the electorate in 2008), California (18 percent), Colorado (13 percent), Florida (14 percent), Nevada (15 percent), New Mexico (41 percent), and Texas (20 percent).
Of these, only Colorado, Florida, and Nevada are swing states; New Mexico and Arizona are at best borderline swing states. In Florida, the Latino vote largely (though decreasingly) comprises voters of Cuban descent and is therefore atypical of other Latino electorates.
So in the end, we’re talking about Colorado and Nevada as the states where this is likely to produce dividends of any size, for a total of 15 electoral votes.
2) There is a trade-off here. Fifteen electoral votes could still be crucial in a close election. But here’s the rub: The analyses that focus only on the potential effect among Latino voters miss half of the equation: The potential effect among white voters.
I’ve made this point before, but consider the case of Arizona. For many liberal commentators, the silver lining to the state’s immigration bill was that it presaged the eventual death of the state’s Republican Party. By alienating Latino voters, Republicans would soon find it impossible to forge winning coalitions in the state.
To be sure, Latino voters were alienated. In 2004, George W. Bush won 43 percent of that group in Arizona. Four years later, John McCain won 41 percent. In 2010, Jan Brewer pulled in a paltry 28 percent.
Yet Brewer ran ahead of both McCain and Bush overall. The key is that her policies played well with white voters. In particular, McCain captured 60 percent of whites without college degrees and 58 percent of whites with college degrees.
Brewer actually ran somewhat behind McCain among whites with college degrees, capturing 55 percent of their vote. But among whites without college degrees, Brewer won 66 percent of the vote. This is where her increased victory margin came from.
This is important, because Obama has ongoing weaknesses with working-class white voters. So weak, in fact, that they threatened his presidential bid during the Democratic perfect storm of 2008.[Obama’s Puzzling Immigration Decision By Sean Trende — June 19, 2012]
In one of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, he explains that while tactics is something that needs careful study, "strategy’s another matter. At the simplest, it’s mere common sense" involving the "the age-old laws that you learn in the school playground" — I. E. how many on our side, how many on theirs.
In an election, this is a pure counting exercise. One of the earliest pieces we ran on VDARE.com was
WSJ: "Republicans need to keep courting Jewish and black voters."
By Steve Sailer on December 9, 2000 at 2:15pm
VDARE: Make that counting!
In his quest to block imaginary inroads on the "Hispanic Vote", President Obama, like Republican Hispanderers, has lost count of the voters who will actually swing the election.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.