Won't save the GOP.
Brit Hume:
"And I am absolutely convinced that this trope that you’re hearing that says that if the Republicans don’t go for immigration reform much as the Senate has done, they’ll never win another presidential election. Oh, baloney," Hume said during an appearance on the conservative cable news channel. "If you look at the statistics, you find there was one significant bloc of voters who turned out in smaller numbers this time in a major way — way below expectations, below even their '08 turnout — and that was white voters. Now, that doesn’t mean that if they turned out that Romney would have gotten them all but it shows you that this Hispanic vote, which is I think now 8.5 percent of the electorate or something like that, is not nearly as important as, still, as the white vote, which is above 70 percent."
Hey Brit, here's
your own site's exit polls, so you might want to check them out. Latinos were at 10 percent.
They were eight percent in 2004, so, you know, you might want to update your reality. It's gotten a lot browner in the last decade.
Put another way, whites were 77 percent of the 2004 electorate, but just 72 percent of the 2012. Starting to see a pattern? If current trends continue, the white vote should fall below 70 percent in 2016. And maybe then Hume will start to sweat the demographics.
But Hume is right about one thing—whites are the most important element of the GOP coalition, and that's exactly why they're losing and won't come close to sniffing the White House anytime soon. In fact, last year, more white people died than were born. And of 2.4 million new Americans, 93 percent of them were non-white (the other seven percent were white immigrants).
Now the xenophobes are fixated on the undocumented immigrants that would be legalized with immigration reform. But studies of past legalizations show that only about a quarter of former undocumented immigrants end up voting, so in this case, about 2-3 million immigrants. Sure, that's a lot, but not as many as there are natural-born Latinos angry at Republicans for sundering their communities. Remember, about 67,000 Latinos turn 18 every month, or 800,000 every year. That's 3.2 million every election cycle.
And since the median age of the U.S. Latino community is 18, there are as many waiting to become voting age as can already vote. And that's not even counting the Asian population, which is growing at an even faster rate than Latinos, and vote even more heavily Democratic.
THAT'S what Republicans should be worried about, not the few million of undocumenteds that might finally end up voting. So if you're betting on white voters to bail you out of this predicament, then you're just trying to unskew math.