Whitman's Hispanic Outreach Comes Up Short
Want surefire evidence that the Republicans have a HUGE Latino problem? Look no further than California, where Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has made a serious, serious effort to win the support of the Latino community and yet still is getting her tail whipped by a man who has hardly lifted a finger to appeal to the community of voters as a group. A new LA Times/ University of Southern California poll shows that only one-third of registered Latino voters say they support Ms. Whitman.
When I say that Meg Whitman has courted Latino voters, I don’t just mean that she has refrained from saying that we should refrain from rounding up all of the illegals and shipping them to a location to be determined at a later date (not in the United States). No. Whitman has actually made a play for the voters (it helps to have a seemingly unlimited budget, but still). Whitman has been airing Spanish language ads since she won her primary and has been doing anything and everything to make clear her opposition to Prop 187 (a 1994 measure that sought to withhold taxpayer funded benefits to all illegal immigrants) as well as to the Arizona immigration law. It hardly has made a dent. 44 percent of Latinos said they would vote for Democratic opponent Jerry Brown if the election were held today, with another 7% saying that they “leaned” towards Jerry Brown. Only 26% percent of Latinos said they were going for Whitman, with an additional 6% “leaning” towards Whitman. 15% of Latino voters are still undecided, but based on general Latino turnout trends, undecided probably simply means “won’t vote.”
But even if Latino turnout doesn’t kick up, the Latino vote is HUGE in California (among other places). Put simply, there are increasingly more Latinos and less white people. And given that Census data pegs the current Latino population at 37%, Republicans can hardly afford to lose them now.
The broader take away of this poll may be that Republicans have completely destroyed their relationship with the Latino community. Meg Whitman has done more to court the vote than any major candidate in recent memory and she is on the proper side of all of the major issues that would win the support of Latino voters. When you combine all of this with a voter climate that heavily favors the GOP and find that there is still little Latino support for the Republican candidate, one has to wonder whether the immigration rhetoric of the Sarah Palins of the world has done irreparable harm to the Republican party’s ability to court the largest growing voter population in the United States.
Follow Jeb Golinkin on Twitter: @Jgolinkin