Salon.com > The Latino vote

Why I quit the Republican Party

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:35:00 +0000

A year ago, Pablo Pantoja was the future of the Republican Party, courting fellow Latinos for the conservative cause and stumping across Florida with Ann Romney’s brother. "Hispanics in the area are going to realize the Republican Party is where they belong,” the Puerto Rico-born Iraq vet told the New York Times in April 2012, just a week after being named the Republican National Committee’s Latino outreach director in the electorally all-important Sunshine State. "We are going to engage Hispanics and Latinos like we've never done before," Reince Priebus had told reporters that month in a conference call introducing Pantoja and his counterparts in five other battleground states. (On Election Night, Mitt Romney lost all of those states except for one, North Carolina.)

How the Republican Party could go extinct

Sun, 12 May 2013 15:00:00 +0000

From a pure political perspective, supporting inclusion of same-sex couples in the immigration reform bill should be a slam dunk for both Democrats and Republicans. Scuttling the package over this provision would alienate the growing Latino constituency by blocking a pathway to citizenship -- and denying rights to LGBT Americans would be ignoring the direction of the country on civil rights.

And yet, according to a flurry of news stories from the past couple of weeks, the die is apparently cast on the matter: Allowing some 30,000 same-sex couples the same access to green cards that opposite-sex couples enjoy will halt the bill for 11 million immigrants. Even before the provision has been debated or a vote count begun, Republicans are holding firm to a position that’s literally killing their party. Meanwhile, Democrats run scared, to the detriment of the overall bill.

In plain English: The Republicans need this bill because their party doesn’t have a future if they can’t appeal to Latino voters. On the flip side, Democrats shouldn’t be sacrificing any progressive priorities before the horse-trading even begins because the more they start with, the more they will be able to keep in the end.

Rove’s plan won’t work: Don’t count on Latino social conservatism

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Drop the anti-immigrant rhetoric! Focus on the "family values" that Latinos supposedly share with the party! But that magic solution to Republicans' demographic problem that some conservatives are touting — which conveniently allows the party to resist moderating on so-called social issues like gay marriage and abortion — is unlikely to pan out.

Two days after Latino voters broadly rejected the Republican Party, Charles Krauthammer saw reason for optimism. Latinos, he said, "should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example.)" George W. Bush and Karl Rove found a way to approach 40 percent of the Latino vote; Romney barely netted half that. So Republicans, facing a demographic time bomb as their base of white men ages, have comforted themselves by thinking all they really need to do is perform as well as Bush did among Latinos to get near the White House again.