KILLING THE IMMIGRATION BILL, POLARIZING AMERICA
In March, the Republican National Committee released a remarkable document. A report by what is known as the Growth and Opportunity Project X-rayed the 2012 election results and came to one major conclusion: the G.O.P. needed to attract more nonwhite voters or it would never win at the national level again. Mitt Romney won three-fifths of the white vote in 2012, a historically high level, but he still lost the election by almost five million votes, or four percentage points. The Republican report did not mince words about the crisis that the Party faced in the wake of these numbers. “The perception that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years,” it said. “It is a major deficiency that must be addressed.”
The report warned Republicans that “the nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become.” To the authors, demographic trend lines made the case for attracting nonwhite voters obvious and immediate:
Unless the RNC gets serious about tackling this problem, we will lose future elections; the data demonstrates this. In both 2008 and 2012, President Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority voters, including not only African Americans but also Hispanics, Asians, and others. The minority groups that President Obama carried with 80 percent of the vote in 2012 are on track to become a majority of the nation’s population by 2050. Today these minority groups make up 37 percent of the population, and they cast a record 28 percent of the votes in the 2012 presidential election, according to the election exit polls, an increase of 2 percentage points from 2008. We have to work harder at engaging demographic partners and allies…By 2050, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population could be as high as 29 percent, up from 17 percent now. The African American proportion of the population is projected to rise slightly to 14.7 percent, while the Asian share is projected to increase to approximately 9 percent from its current 5.1 percent. Non-Hispanic whites, 63 percent of the current population, will decrease to half or slightly less than half of the population by 2050.
The R.N.C. exists to help Republicans win elections. Like the D.N.C., it’s not a policy committee, and it’s highly unusual for these organizations to tell office-holders what positions to take. But, in perhaps the most startling passage of the hundred-page report of the Growth and Opportunity Project, the R.N.C. made one firm recommendation about the first step that the Party needed to take to begin to repair its reputation among Hispanics: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” It’s not that immigration reform itself was a cure-all for the Party’s many problems, but it had become the prerequisite for convincing Hispanic voters to listen to Republican ideas. “If Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies,” the report said. “In essence, Hispanic voters tell us our Party’s position on immigration has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door.”
The conclusions of the Growth and Opportunity Project echoed loudly on the right, and they undoubtedly helped immigration reform pass in the U.S. Senate, with fourteen Republican votes. But as the legislation has moved to the House of Representatives, and as the sting of the 2012 election results has faded for Republicans, the R.N.C.’s dire warnings of demographic Armageddon have lost some of their impact. Of all the power centers of the Republican Party—governors, Presidential candidates, senators—the Republican Conference in the House is the least susceptible to arguments that the Party faces any demographic dangers. Of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans, there are only five Hispanics and twenty women. (Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Hispanic woman ever elected to Congress, is in both groups.) The remaining two hundred and nine Republicans—or ninety per cent of the House G.O.P.—are white men. Eighty-nine per cent of the voters who elected these two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans in 2012 were white.
It is no wonder, then, that a new demographic argument about how the Party can thrive has seized many Republicans in recent days. Writing at Real Clear Politics, the perceptive elections analyst Sean Trende has pointed out that Republicans have not necessarily maxed out on their potential with white voters. If Republicans are currently winning whites at a rate of roughly sixty to forty, perhaps they should try to increase that margin, especially since whites will continue to represent a majority of voters for many years to come. (Trende has come under fire for his argument, but, if one reads it carefully, he’s not advocating that Republicans take this route; he’s merely laying out the data.)
The seduction of this alternate path for the G.O.P. is obvious. The changes associated with diversifying the Republican Party’s coalition are dramatic and, to some conservatives, frightening. Superficially at least, simply attracting more whites seems safe and more ideologically consistent with the Party’s current agenda. (See both Paul Krugman andDavid Brooks today for why that’s probably not the case.)
If this is indeed the path that the G.O.P. pursues, it would intensify one of the less welcome political trends of the past few decades: the racial polarization of the electorate. In a recent paper, the political scientist Alan Abramowitz documented this “growing racial divide” in our system. “The growing dependence of the Democratic Party on nonwhite voters has contributed to the flight of racially and economically conservative white voters to the G.O.P. thereby further increasing the size of the racial divide between the party coalitions,” he noted. He predicted that this racial polarization would continue and deepen.
The outcome of the immigration debate will decide how much this trend accelerates. Under one rather ominous scenario, House Republicans will kill immigration reform, and Democrats, led by President Obama, will mount a withering attack on the G.O.P. in the Hispanic community, blaming the Party for the bill’s demise. (In an interview with me earlier this year, a senior White House official was explicit that this is what would happen if Republicans scuttled the bill.) Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down part of the Voting Rights Act has led Republicans in several Southern states to pursue laws that previously would have been challenged by the Justice Department as making it more difficult for some minorities to vote.
The net result of all this is the opposite of what the R.N.C. had in mind: a Republican strategy to defeat immigration reform, increase its support among whites, and make it harder for some nonwhites to vote. It’s a recipe for a future in which America’s two parties are largely defined by race. The unpleasant conclusion of this debate—and of the Obama years—could be the opposite of where we thought we were headed as a country. Rather than a multiracial future in which both parties compete aggressively for the votes of fast-growing nonwhite populations, Democrats and Republicans could become more cleaved than ever by race. The decision that Republicans make on immigration reform in the coming months will help determine that future.
Photograph by Allison Shelley/Getty.
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