Correlation Does Not Equal Causation

Texas House Republican Lamar Smith takes to the Washington Post to argue that because Democrats didn't quite capture the same level of the Latino vote as they did in 2006 and 2008, that Latinos are now solidly in the R column come election time.

What about the much-trumpeted victories of Reid, Boxer, Gov.-elect Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.)? Their Republican opponents lost not because they underperformed among Hispanic voters but because they underperformed among white voters. National exit polls reported by CNN indicated that Republican U.S. House candidates received 60 percent of the white vote overall. But Fiorina and Angle won only 52 percent of the white vote, Ken Buck in Colorado won only 51 percent and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman won only 50 percent of the white vote. Had each received 60 percent of the white vote, they all would have won.


There was a story in the 2010 midterms that many in the media missed. Dalmia found that "one of the hugely under-reported stories of this election is that Republicans fielded far more minority candidates than Democrats - and they won by touting a restrictionist agenda, proof positive that skin color - and even immigration status - are not always correlated with [illegal] immigration views."

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, one of the most trusted commentators on Spanish-language television, concluded that "the United States moved to the right, and Latino politicians did so too - among them, a new generation of Hispanic Republicans who support policies that are essentially opposed to the undocumented immigrants in this country." 

And yes, Latino voters did slide towards the right in 2010, along with nearly every other group, by a few percentage points.  But not even Jennifer Rubin is buying Rep. Smith's theory.

But we should add a couple of caveats. First, Smith notes that Gov. Jan Brewer got 28 percent of the vote, a good result, he suggests, since in 2006 the GOP candidate got 26 percent. Umm … I don’t think barely exceeding the vote totals for 2006, a wipe-out year for the Republicans, should be the goal for the GOP. (Moreover, the percentage of voters who are Hispanic has been increasing in each election, so Republicans will need to do better with each election if they are to retain that share of the general electorate.) And while Rick Perry got 38 percent of the Hispanic vote, he got 55 percent of the overall electorate, suggesting that a huge gap still remains in the GOP’s appeal to Hispanics.

Second, Smith ignores the real issues: tone, rhetoric, and position on legal immigration. Marco Rubio believes in border control, but his life story is built around the immigrant experience, and he eschews inflammatory language that has plagued Republicans like Tom Tancredo. As Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell pointed out to me a few years ago, if the Republicans want to continue to make progress among Hispanic voters, they need to object to the “illegal” part, not the “immigration” part, of the equation.

Now both Smith and Rubin declare that the small rightward slide has to be a product of Republican policies on immigration.  What hasn't occurred to either one of them is that Occam's Razor suggests the far more likely causation for the rightward shift is that some Latino voters that backed the Dems in 2006 and especially 2008 stayed home in 2010 and did not vote at all because the Democrats failed to deliver on comprehensive national immigration legislation.

The Democrats did deliver on a number of things over the last two years.  But even I freely admit Obama over-promised and underperformed, and even then it was the Senate that became the graveyard of so much legislation that got through the House, shepherded by the wildly effective Nancy Pelosi.  She did her job.  She passed legislation in the House.  Literally hundreds of House bills will die in the Senate in six weeks.  Maybe a handful of them will be passed in lame duck.

But Pelosi failed to get immigration reform even through the House during the 111th Congress.  Rep Luis Gutierrez's bill was dead by July, and the DREAM Act that would give immigrants a path to citizenship by serving our country in the military is being tied up by Republicans.  The DREAM Act does have a shot and passing it would go a long way towards reversing the slide of Latino voters to the Republican party, which is exactly why it's being tied up by Republicans.

They know that if they can kill it in the lame duck, it will never pass with a Republican-controlled House.  Democrats are asking Latino voters to take the long view to stick with them, but it's increasingly difficult to do that when Republicans at the state level are making things worse for Latinos in the absence of a national immigration bill...oh, and there's the economy where Latino and African-American minorities in general are facing far higher unemployment rates than the national average.  Surely that is contributing to the slide towards the GOP as well.

Unless the Dems can deliver on the DREAM Act in the lame duck, Smith is right that the slide will continue towards the Republicans, despite not actually naming the reason why.