Sultan Knish
Getting an early start on primary season, Rand Paul stopped by New Hampshire and offered some sage advice
for winning elections. According to the article, "Senator Paul Rand
urged New Hampshire Republicans to become more diversified."
New Hampshire is 94.6% white, 2.9% Latino and 1.3% Black. I don't know the exact diversity
statistics for New Hampshire Republicans, but if they get a half-black
and half-Latino guy in a wheelchair to run for something, they will
probably have covered all the statistical bases.
"We need to grow bigger," Rand Paul said. "If you want to be the party
of white people, we're winning all the white votes. We're a diverse
nation. We're going to win when we look like America."
Looking like America is common advice these days. What does America look
like? For now it still looks more like New Hampshire than like
California. And despite that, Democrats scored some big wins in New Hampshire in the last election.
Obama won New Hampshire 52 to 46 and it probably wasn't the black vote
that put him over the top. He picked up over 100,000 votes in
Hillsborough County, which is 90 percent white. Clearly, despite Rand
Paul's optimism, Republicans aren't winning all the white votes in New
Hampshire. Or in Kentucky.
Rand Paul's Kentucky looks a lot like New Hampshire. It's 88.9% white.
And its white Senator, who did not win all the white votes, decided to
visit another white state to tell Republicans there that they needed to
look more like America or California. Or someplace like that. Because
the white vote was all locked down.
In his 2010 Senate election, Rand Paul won 59% of the white vote and his opponent won 86% of the black vote. Two years later, in the national election Romney won 59% of the white vote and his opponent won 93% of the black vote. Both men scored the exact same percentage of the white vote.
Some might try to find a silver lining in that Rand Paul won 13 percent
of the black vote, but he wasn't running against a black candidate. In
2004, Bush won 12 percent
of the Kentucky black vote. Nearly the same amount as Rand Paul. More
importantly, he won 64 percent of the white vote and 58 percent of the
female vote to Rand Paul's 51 percent. The female vote is far more
important, if you're going to win elections, than picking up minority
votes in New Hampshire or Kentucky.
While Rand Paul tours as some sort of expert on winning the minority
vote, he has never actually won the minority vote. Similarly Rubio
promises that illegal alien amnesty will turn the Latino tide for the
GOP, when he could not win a straight majority of the non-Cuban Latino
vote in his Senate election.
The Republican Party is suffering from a surplus of self-appointed
experts in winning the minority vote who don't actually win the minority
vote. Their advice is stupid and destructive.
Romney did not lose because he lost the Latino vote. That's a myth which
has been discredited again and again, but still rises from the dead to
push for an illegal alien amnesty, five times bigger than the last
disastrous 1986 amnesty, so that next time around Republicans can lose
by even bigger margins. But instead of trying to be diverse for the sake
of diversity, the GOP might try doing what the other side did,
increasing the turnout for its base by actually appealing to them.
The Republican National Convention in 2012 was a study in diversity. It
was possibly even more diverse than the Democratic National Convention.
It also didn't work.
Diversity is familiar enough to be met with casual contempt. Every
company trots out stock photos overflowing with stock minorities so that
they can look like America or some part of America. It impresses
absolutely no one. "Looking like America" is slang for racial tokenism
which is both patronizing and insulting. And it's the least innovative
advice that could be imagined.
Common skin color alone does not win elections. If it did, the
Republican Party could just push out countless white Democrats in
precarious districts by running black candidates against them. The idea
that skin color alone is representation is still the law and its
emotional resonance is sometimes undeniable, but emotional
identification is also based on more than just race. And representation
cannot be reduced to racial diversity as a winning strategy.
The Republican Party has two Latino senators and one Black senator. That
tops the Democratic Party in the "Looking like California" metrics but
doesn't move the political numbers forward.
“We need to have black people, brown people, white people, we need to
have people with tattoos, without tattoos, with long hair, with short
hair, with beards, without beards,” Rand Paul said. “We need to look
more like America. We need to appeal to the working class; we need to
appeal to all segments of the country.”
Let's assume that the Republican Party gets people with hair of all
sizes, what then? Talking about appealing to the working class is nice,
but Rand Paul lost the under $30,000 vote. He tied for the $30,000 to
$49,000 vote. He only broke out with
the above $50,000 voters. That was the same thing that happened to
Romney. And unlike Romney, race couldn't be blamed for those results.
Not when Bush decisively won those same voters in Kentucky in 2004.
Politics does run on reciting truisms, but that only works for winning
elections, not for election strategies. Election strategies, unlike
elections, require actual solutions. Realistic solutions don't depend on
making a play for voters that you rarely get. They depend on shoring up
your numbers with the voters that you can get.
In 2004, Bush tied Kerry among the $30,000 to $49,000 voters. In 2012, Romney lost them by 8 percent. McCain had lost them
by 7 percent in 2008. Grafton County, the site of Obama's biggest
margin of victory in New Hampshire, is 95% white and its median
household income is $41,962. That's well below the median household
income in the country, but that only hovers a little above $50,000.
In 2000, Bush nearly tied Kerry in Grafton County. In 2008, Obama won it
by 63 percent. Instead of looking to see why Republicans can't win the
Latino vote, it might be a good idea to see why Republicans have begun
losing Grafton County; which looks a whole lot like America, by margins
almost as bad as the ones that they hope to win the Latino vote by.
Amnesty for illegal aliens will hit low-income voters hardest. It will
punish the very voters that Republicans need in order to win and build
up demographics of voters who are not going to vote Republican anyway.
Republicans would be foolish to give up on minority voters, but even more foolish to give up on low- income white voters. In 2011, Republicans
had pulled ahead among $30,000 voters, going from 37 to 47 percent
since the 2008 election. The real question worth asking about the 2012
election is what happened to those numbers?
The amnesty sellout is not really about winning elections. Its odds of
accomplishing like that are nil. It's about a larger divide between
Nationalist Republicans who believe in America as a country and
Transnational Republicans who believe in America as a set of economic
and political principles that can be applied equally well anywhere in
the world.
The Transnational Republicans backed the Arab Spring because they
believed democracy could work anywhere, because it worked here. They
support open borders, because they believe that economic freedom, like
political freedom, can turn any population into Americans. Americans
being defined solely by the ability to sell things without government
regulation.
Transnational Republicans are a disaster because they don't really
accept the concept of American Exceptionalism. Their foreign policy is a
disaster because they think that every country will be better if it
runs by American rules. Their domestic policy is a disaster because they
believe that the entire world would be American if it just got a chance
to move to America.
Transnationalists of the left and the right don't view America as a
country, but as a political experiment. The American system may be an
experiment, but the country isn't. And confusing the two is destructive
and dangerous.
Republican
Transnationalists keep trying to marry fiscal conservatism with
liberalism on most other fronts, sometimes even including foreign
policy. Their liberal social policy prescriptions make the country more
liberal, even as their fiscal conservatism alienates those same voters.
Amnesty is a perfect example of this stupidity in action, legalizing
voters in the name of diversity who will reject them on economic
grounds.
The TR's might be defensible if their liberal social policies at least
won over voters. They don't. Instead they give us the worst of both
worlds. Liberal and Transnational Republicans keep insisting that we
should do a better job of reaching out to non-traditional voters. But
they never succeed in actually doing it. Instead they blame the
"radicalism" of the Republican Party for their failures.
The Republican Party does not need to "look like America." That's a
Transnational Republican charade. It needs to actually look at America
and start trying to relate to the voters that it used to have. And if it
can do that, if it can actually find common ground with low-income
voters, then it will find that it has increased its share among minority
voters as well. It worked for Reagan. It might just work in 2016.
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