Republicans and Hispanics

Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics has an interesting post up about Republicans, Hispanics, and just how important comprehensive immigration reform is to the GOP:

One of the assumptions lurking behind the immigration debate is that Hispanics spurn Republicans in large part due to identity politics, with immigration as a primary motivator. But there’s usually precious little data offered up to buttress this assumption, aside from the occasional generic poll question of “How important is issue this to you?”

But dig down. When Pew asked Hispanic voters what the most important issue was in 2012, immigration ranked near the bottom of the list. At the top of the list was jobs, just as it was for whites. In the 2008 exits (the last presidential election for which we have full data), a majority of Hispanic respondents told the exit pollsters that they didn’t care much about immigration (regardless of how they ultimately voted), or that they cared a lot (but voted Republican).

Mr. Trende’s analysis is interesting but I think there are a couple of distinctions that eludes him. First, I question whether there’s really an Hispanic vote. I think that Mexican-Americans tend to vote differently than Cuban-Americans who vote differently than Salvadoran-Americans. The term “Hispanic vote” is a first-class case of reification—making a thing by giving it a name where there really isn’t a thing. Great marketing but probably not so great analysis.

There’s more than one Republican Party. If the populist Republican Party is on the ballot, Republicans tend to do reasonably well with Hispanics. When the Hamiltonian Republican Party shows up, it does a lot less well. When the Know-Nothing Republican Party is on the ballot, it does terribly. Mitt Romney is practically the poster boy for the Hamiltonian Republican Party as was George H. W. Bush.

When all is said and done I don’t care how the Republican Party fares other than that I’d prefer two robust, vote-worthy parties over one. If, nationally, we’re going to be stuck with one party and, as here in Chicago, it’s the Democratic Party, I care very much about what the Democratic Party is from an operational standpoint. If the Democrats remain true to form and take Mexican-American votes for granted just as they’ve taken African-American votes for granted for the last half century while promoting a faux technocratic regime that is really a combination of crony, “pay to play” capitalism with a full employment program for Ivy League attorneys, that will be bad for everybody. Except cronies and Ivy League attorneys, of course.