Latinos Aren't A "Cheap Date" for Democrats Anymore

TheDailyBeast.com:

Now that they’ve failed their midterms, Democrats are spinning the election losses and trying to convince themselves and everyone else that things are really not so bad. Meanwhile, privately, they’re thinking about 2016 and hoping it doesn’t get worse.

They must take comfort from the likelihood that they’ll likely have the formidable Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket, and she’ll be hard to beat. They expect to maintain the White House, and then, they tell themselves, everything will return to normal.

Part of what they mean by “normal” is that the Hispanic vote will return to their column, that last week’s result—when 36 percent of Hispanic votes went Republican, up from 27 percent in 2012—was an aberration that they can get beyond.

But is it really? Or is this something they should be worried about for the long term? Given the changing demographics of the voting population, it’s an important question that Democrats can’t afford to get wrong.

Hispanic voters made up just 8 percent of 2014 voters, according to the national exit poll. Keep in mind that Hispanics are the second-fastest growing ethnic group in America, after Asian-Americans, and that, every month, another 50,000 U.S. Hispanic teenagers turn 18 and thus become eligible to vote.

And yet the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project estimates that the turnout rate for Hispanic voters was about what it was in the last midterm election, around 31 percent. And that means that, even as the number of potential Hispanic voters continues to climb, their participation rate in midterms has flat lined.

The only silver lining for those who would like to see more Hispanics vote is that they do tend to make a better showing in presidential election years. In 2012, when President Obama squared off against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Hispanics accounted for one in 10 voters. And since they gave more than 70 percent of their votes to Obama, it’s no exaggeration to say that Hispanics played a major role in reelecting the president just as they helped elect him the first time four years earlier.

Democrats got spoiled. And it appears that many of them were counting on this trend to continue this year. For the last several months, prominent Democrats have urged Hispanics to make their voices heard on Election Day. They just naturally assumed that Hispanics would show up in large numbers and cast an overwhelming majority of their votes for whatever Democratic candidate happened to be on the ballot.

In September, in Salt Lake City, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told a gathering of the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that the way to prod Republicans in Congress to finally tackle immigration reform was for Hispanics to vote. ”The real message that reaches Republicans is at the ballot box,” she said. “And that’s where they have to feel the impact.”

Just a few days before the election, Vice President Joe Biden told a Hispanic audience in Miami: “This is your election…This will be the election, if the community stands up, where we start to say, ‘The outcome of every future election in America will be fundamentally impacted upon by the Hispanic community.’”

There is no doubt that Hispanics had a big impact on the election, and that they made their voices heard. In fact, they shook up both political parties. And they did all that by doing two things they weren’t supposed to do. Many of them stayed home, and those who did vote didn’t just roll over and automatically pick the Democrat on the ballot.

Part of the problem was the quality of the Democratic candidates this time around. To call them mediocre, uninspiring, and stale would be overly generous. And bad candidates tend to make bad choices.

In some races—like that of Democrat Wendy Davis, who lost the Texas governor’s race to state Attorney General Gregg Abbott—the Democrat became known for ignoring Hispanic voters, and thus giving a Republican opponent the opportunity to fill the void with targeted, ethnic-specific advertisements in English and Spanish. Abbott took advantage of that opening and pulled down a hefty share of the Hispanic vote.

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The Democrats' Problem Is The White Voter

NJ.com:

Everyone’s got a favorite reason for the Democratic Party’s disaster last week: poor turnout of young and minority voters, over concentration on women’s issues, failure to trumpet up-beat economic news, a shameless abandonment of President Obama that played into Republican depiction of him as a liability.

Take your pick. My favorite is something overlooked and maybe more fundamental _ the growing alienation of white voters from the Democratic Party.

It gets lost sometimes by a media used to measuring elections as special interest contests (socio-economic stuff) but we’re are still an overwhelmingly white nation -- some 75 percent white if Hispanics who identify as white are included, over 65 percent even if only non-Hispanic whites are counted.

Democrats can’t win elections, presidential or mid-term, without a substantial black and Hispanic turnout. But it’s become clear they may not even prevail in mid-terms without a much larger share of the white vote.
And, if the loyalties of African-Americans and other minorities cool -- say after Obama leaves office -- the deficit with white voters could imperil Democrats even in presidential years, at least in the short run.

The white alienation from the Democratic Party is not new (remember Reagan Democrats?); its been losing white males for most of the last 40 years, making up that deficit with support from white women (especially singles) and minorities.

Last Tuesday, however, Democrats lost even white women in some key Senate races (Georgia and Colorado, for example) and got fewer than expected in the states they won. The party of women and the “little guy” suffered political hemophilia last week.

It hemorrhaged the once loyal working class white voters. Why? The decline of labor unions and the great urban Democratic machines is a partial explanation.

The hired-for-the day turnout organizations do a decent job, but they lack the personal, round-the-clock links with voters that labor and old Democratic machines boasted. They can’t call on that “throw one in for Barney” tie to the voter, especially when Barney, the local Democratic precinct worker, is also a drinking buddy or friend of the family.

But there’s something else, too -- a sense of fear and foreboding among middle-aged and older whites, especially men.

The America of their youth is vanishing. It even looks different; it’s browner. Often it doesn’t even speak English. And it fights political wars that no longer produce victory parades and the glory that accompanies them.

What they’re feeling is a toxic mix of nostalgia and more than a little hostility. Democrats must begin to acknowledge this and work to dispel these white fears and feelings if they’re to recover their election mojo.

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Supreme Court Allows Texas to Go Ahead with Voter ID Law

Mediaite.com:

The Supreme Court today officially permitted the state of Texas to proceed with its controversial voter ID law for this November’s midterm elections. A majority of justices earlier today rejected a Department of Justice request to prohibit Texas from engaging in a practice it believed to be discriminatory.

A federal judge sided with the DOJ and struck down the law just last week, ruling that it “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose.” He even compared it to the poll tax.

A federal appeals court overturned that ruling this Tuesday, and now the Supreme Court has weighed in and will allow Texas to proceed with the law in place.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a dissent warning that the law “risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”

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