New York Magazine (Opinion)
By Jonathan Chait
August 3, 2015
In
2004, the only time the Republican presidential candidate has won the
popular vote in the last six elections, George W. Bush carried the
Latino vote in Florida. But
since 2004, the state’s Latino electorate has grown quickly, and its
expansion has had a heavily Democratic cast. The influx of Latino
Democrats, along with rising black turnout, allowed Barack Obama to win
the state twice despite suffering the same deteriorating
support among white voters he had across other Southern states.
A
new analysis by the Pew Research Center shows how quickly the partisan
balance has flipped in the state. For years, the Cuban-American
community, whose political orientation
was dominated by a reaction against the Cuban revolution and an
alliance with the Republican Party, defined the Florida Latino vote. As
recently as 2006, Republicans still held a voter-registration advantage
among Latino Floridians. In 2008, Democrats nudged
ahead, and the gap has widened since.
How
do Republicans plan to rebuild their standing in Florida? Nominating a
Floridian who speaks Spanish would probably help. What’s not going to
help them is Donald Trump.
A
new Wall Street Journal/NBC/Telemundo poll finds that 75 percent of
Hispanics hold a negative view of Trump. The danger posed by Trump is
not that he’ll win the party
nomination, an outcome that remains fantastically improbable, but that
he’ll maintain a loyal following that Republicans will need. If Trump
can avoid total self-immolation, he can force Republicans to give him a
speaking spot at their convention, and generally
treat him as a respected ally. That would be a poisonous outcome for
the party, but Trump can probably obtain it if he wants to, because he
can credibly threaten a third-party run that would make it virtually
impossible for Republicans to win.
The
Jeb Bush campaign believes (or, at least, tells people) that the
attention commanded by Trump has redounded to its benefit. It is
probably true that Trump is vacuuming
up blue-collar voters who might otherwise support Scott Walker. Perhaps
Trump will stay in the race all the way through, denying Walker a chunk
of his primary base and letting Bush win the nomination. But what then?
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