Not Logical At All

Nate Silver very logically concludes that today's 31 Republican votes in the Senate against Sonia Sotomayor are not in the best interests of expanding the GOP's reach among the Latino community. I logically conclude that falling into an open volcano filled with magma is also not in my best interests as well.

More sophisticated modelling techniques, like logisitic regression, do not reveal any connection between the Hispanic status of a state and the expected vote on Sotomayor. In some formulations, in fact -- for example, if a state's PVI is accounted for but not the ideology of the Senator -- a higher Hispanic population actually turns up as a statistically predicdtor of a vote against Sotomayor.

I suspect that is probably a fluke; among the five Republicans in the states with 20%+ Hispanic populations planning to vote against Sotomayor, Kyl and Ensign are very conservative, Cornyn is in a leadership position in his caucus, and Hutchison may have to bolster her conservative credentials in anticipation of her primary against Rick Perry. John McCain's nay vote is more surprising, and he seems to being a thorn in Obama's side.

Pressure from the NRA, which will "score" a yea vote on Sotomayor as being a vote against gun control, may also be a factor. With the exception of Florida, the states with large Hispanic populations are Western ones that tend to have large numbers of gun owners and where gun rights are certainly an issue with the GOP base. That seems to outweigh any concerns the Republicans might have about alienating Hispanics.

To be clear, I don't think anybody should vote for (or against) Sotomayor because she's Hispanic, nor do I think they should vote for her because their constitutents are. But given that Sotomayor is reasonably popular with the public -- most polls show about 50 percent wanting a vote in favor of confirmation, 30 percent against, and 20 percent indifferent -- I was expecting a few more 'yeas'.

Nate's numbers are pretty shocking, actually. Of the 21 Republicans senators from states with the highest percentages of Hispanic voters, 20 of them voted against Sonia Sotomayor. Only Florida's Mel Martinez (#6 on the list) voted for her of those 21 Republicans...and like Judd Gregg, Kit Bond and George Voinovich (who also voted yea), he's not running for re-election in 2010.

Then again, attributing logical actions to Republicans is bound to end in confusion and failure. After all, many of these same senators not only telegraphed their no votes weeks in advance, but they did it through various displays of both overt bouts of racism and covert dog-whistle politics. When it became clear that Sotomayor was going to breeze through as she did, the party devolved into a mess where the nasty base of the party thought the GOP senators should have been even more racist.

I suppose logically they'll be wondering why they failed to magically take over the Senate in 2010 too.