Are Republicans poised to defeat immigration reform? I gave my take HERE on the dangers if they do. Our political Quote of the Day is the last part of New York Time’s Charles
Blow’s column where he recounts President George W. Bush’s thwarted attempt to enact comprehensive immigration reform:
According to exit poll data, from the early 1980s to the early 2000s, Republicans made significant headway in closing the gap between the number of Hispanics who voted for Democratic candidates to the House of Representatives and those who voted for Republicans, shrinking a 50-point Democratic advantage in 1982 to just 12 points in 2004.
Many Dems and GOPers forget those days. It seemed as if the Republican Party was steadily piecing together a bigger winning coalition. And then what happened?
But then came Bush’s attempt at comprehensive immigration reform and the enormous pushback it got from Congressional Republicans.
And many forget where the pushback began: on talk radio where conservative talk show hosts who need rage to garner audiences clamored against the sellout Republicans who were about to work with Democrats to give the Democrats something they wanted — and who pushed all the stereotypical buttons about how dangers illegal immigrants (supposedly) were:
Just before Christmas in 2005, the Republican-led House passed an enforcement-only immigration bill that sparked huge protests.
In the 2006 elections, the Democratic advantage among Hispanic voters for House races shot back up to 48 points. That year, Democrats recaptured the House and the Senate, and took control of a majority of governorships.
Republicans, seemingly ignorant of the lessons of history and impervious to the wisdom of experience, are hellbent on revisiting 2005. While the Democratic advantage among Hispanics in presidential races is large and growing, the Democratic advantage in House elections has slowly begun to shrink again. And Hispanics, seemingly excited by the movement on immigration reform and optimistic about its prospects, have developed sharply more favorable opinions of Congress. A full 56 percent of Hispanics hold Congress in high esteem, up from 35 percent in November 2011, according to an ABC News/Washington Post Poll.So what do some Republican lawmakers want to do to the only segment of the population in which a majority now has a favorable opinion of Congress? Spurn them and dash their hopes.
Brilliant, if you want to cement Democratic preference among Hispanics in perpetuity.
That could be where this is heading in the end.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.