The Week
By Shikha Dalmia
October 31, 2014
If
the latest polls and predictions are to be believed, the real question
on Nov. 4 is not whether Republicans will win the Senate, but by how
much.
Democrats
really do have Obama to blame for this. With the president's approval
rating sputtering after the administration's bungling of HealthCare.gov,
ISIS, and Ebola, it's no wonder GOP
voters are more fired up and ready to go than the Dems. But President
Obama will ruin his party's presidential prospects in 2016 too if he
allows the deflating midterm results to spook him into scaling back or
abandoning his long-promised executive action
on immigration.
He'll
be under real pressure to give up. RNC Chair Reince Priebus has been
promising the GOP faithful that if his party takes the Senate, it will
do everything in its power — "defunding, going
to court, injunction…you name it" — to stop Obama from declaring
"executive amnesty."
This
is a poetic mischaracterization of what the administration has proposed
given that executive action can't actually offer amnesty — meaning a
path to citizenship or even permanent legalization
— but instead, only temporary stay from deportation and a work permit.
Be that as it may, Obama must not back down.
Some
liberal commentators worry that the president will do just that. Vox's
Matthew Yglesias argues that pushing a controversial initiative after
losing an election would leave the administration
vulnerable to accusations that it is trying to overturn an "adverse
result." Furthermore, notes The New Republic's Brian Beutler,
Republicans will "place 'executive amnesty' at the center of proximate
fights over funding the government and increasing the debt
limit" — meaning they will argue that Obama can't be trusted with more
power or money.
These
worries are not unjustified, especially given that the administration
has repeatedly prioritized other issues — ObamaCare, for example — over
immigration. But doing so again wouldn't
be smart — from a political or policy standpoint.
Many
Latinos are disgusted by Obama's midterm switcheroo on executive action
— he deferred action till after Nov. 4 for nakedly political reasons.
But cynical as his decision may have been,
it did make a certain amount of political sense. Of the 10 toss-ups
that are in play next week, only one — Colorado — has a significant
Latino presence. Deferring action will certainly depress their turnout
next week (although by how much is debatable since
Latinos don't show up in huge numbers for the midterms anyway). But
forging ahead would have mobilized far more whites in the other nine
states, making next week even more of a rout of Democrats, especially
since the gap is no more than a few percentage points
in most of these races.
But
in the 2016 presidential election, this dynamic will fundamentally
change: Latinos will be a crucial factor in far more swing states.
Indeed, the president himself admitted to The Des
Moines Register before the last presidential election that the one big
reason he would capture a second term is because the GOP had so
thoroughly alienated Latinos, the fastest-growing demographic group. And
what was true then is going to be even truer next
time.
Latinos
made up 11 percent of the eligible voting population in 2012, and that
number will be even higher by 2016. It will rise by 2 percentage points
in critical presidential swing states,
including Florida (where their share of the electorate will hit 19
percent), Colorado (16 percent), and Nevada (18 percent) — as well as
New Mexico (42 percent), Texas (29 percent), and Arizona (22 percent).
That
ought to give Democrats an automatic advantage except for this fact:
Just because Latinos are eligible to vote doesn't mean that they will.
Only 50 percent of them turn out compared with
66 percent of whites; that's one reason why Texas is still so reliably
red. Latinos' 2012 turnout rate was higher because Obama had vowed to
push immigration reform through Congress on a priority basis in his
second term.
Latinos
are perfectly aware that Obama's failure to deliver was in no small
part due to the obstructionism of a small subset of loudmouthed House
Republicans. Latinos might have forgiven him
for that — except that he has removed more undocumented immigrants from
the United States than even President Bush, earning the soubriquet of
deporter-in-chief. Worse, he has been downright heartless in how he's
dealt with unaccompanied Latin American minors
seeking asylum, pressing to deport them without even the hearing
required under a Bush-era law against human trafficking.
So
the only way to inspire Latinos to make the schlep to the voting booth
and pull the lever for Democrats in 2016 is to make good on Obama's
promise and offer their unauthorized loved ones
deportation relief. But that isn't the only political advantage of
pushing executive action.
Everyone
(even Real Clear Politics' election analyst Sean Trende, who authored a
compelling series called the "missing white voters," noting that
Republicans can become more competitive by
concentrating on white voters) acknowledges that Republicans will have
to do better than the 27 percent Latino vote that Mitt Romney got in
order to win presidential elections. At the very minimum, that will
require them to back off from the kind of harsh
anti-immigrant rhetoric that Romney and other Republican presidential
hopefuls deployed during the last primary.
But
they can't do so while raising a big stink over executive action.
Making that the central issue in budget fights will rally Latinos not
just to vote for Democrats — but against Republicans.
It would cement Republicans' reputation as an anti-Latino,
anti-immigrant party, hurting its prospects in the long term when whites
do become a mere plurality. What's more, many Republican governors in
Latino-dense states, such as Rick Scott in Florida, are
making an all-out drive to attract Latinos. Congressional Republicans'
harsh talk will intensify the civil war in the party, all of which will
redound to the benefit of Democrats.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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