Progressives and liberals cling to the expectation that Republican antagonism of Hispanics will lead to electoral disaster. This was ever-present during the confirmation fight over Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Now the predictions of GOP doom are back. This time Republicans are slitting their own throats by using the health-care-for-illegal-immigrants lie to reignite the anti-immigrant (anti-Hispanic) hysteria in The Base. This is suicide to alienate the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority, and it will be especially lethal for Republicans in the Southwest, with its huge Hispanic population. That, at least, is the view from Washington, D.C. The reality can be summed up in two words.
Joe Arpaio.
The Italian-American sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, anchored by the nation's fifth-largest city, Arpaio waged a vicious campaign against illegals ahead of last fall's election. Egged on by talk-radio haters, the "sweeps" were part of a notorious climate of antagonism against all Hispanics, even Mexican-Americans who have been in the country for generations. Arpaio didn't go after the Anglo Republicans who employed the illegals. He arrested the weak, the vulnerable, the already exploited. Maricopa County is at least one-third Hispanic citizens who might object to this racist atmosphere. Risky, no? And it should be added that the incumbent was lacking in many ways that informed citizens of ethnic groups should have found deserving of a swift kick to the door. Arpaio was re-elected by a landslide -- and the sweeps mostly stopped, having served their purpose for a publicity seeking hotdog many other cops call "The Badged Ego."
Arpaio knows the reality of Arizona and many other places. To put it into the quaint local lexicon, it boils down to this: "Mexicans don't vote."
No wonder John McCain could flip-flop on immigration reform, while Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn of Texas could vote against Sotomayor. They know who does vote: the older white person who gets most of his or her information from Fox News or talk radio, if at all. In Phoenix, it's the Sun City or Gilbert phenomenon. People in the white suburbs vote -- and they vote for anyone who goes after those people. It is those people, after all, who are responsible for everything bad in the lives of these aggrieved, frightened white suburbanites. They were terrified a few years ago when 100,000 Hispanics marched through downtown Phoenix demanding reform, flexing potentially game-changing political muscle. A veteran Hispanic politician told me at the time, "We'll see. Will they (the marchers) vote in November?" They didn't.
Yes, exceptions exist, such as the coalition that elected LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; political power among Puerto Ricans in New York and Cubans in Miami are long-standing. For decades, the west side of San Antonio and Rio Grande Valley represented blocks of voters for sale to Democratic politicians, often controlled by Anglo patrons. Hispanics are not monolithic. But in general, they lack the race consciousness and class consciousness that liberal observers hope for. Many are working poor, unlikely to vote without, as in the LA situation, unions to raise political awareness. In the Southwest, more than a few Mexican-Americans resented the recent, huge wave of immigrants. Some, rising to the middle class, vote Republican. There is no galvanizing leader or movement.
So while Hispanic citizens may feel empathy with illegal immigrants, they don't have the equivalent of the right-wing crazies. They don't constitute a game-changing electoral block yet. They may not for many years to come. As with so much else in this season of discontent, the right-wing did not do enough damage. I suspect they will get another chance, sooner than many believe.
There's no reason to think that the right-wing noise machine can't choose a new organizing principle (i.e., a common enemy) besides Hispanics. Think secular humanists, gays, Planned Parenthood, and the ever-reliable African-American community. You might need a Hispanic Glenn Beck to midwife the transformation but that shouldn't be difficult to find.
Moreover, when Hispanics do start voting efficaciously, the results would be disappointing for liberals anyway. Part of the problem is that the two places they coalesced around - labor unions and the Catholic church - are different today than several decades ago. Since John Paul II, Catholicism has migrated markedly to the right. Unions, needless to say, play a decreasingly relevant role in the workplace.
The Democratic Party is now the good-government league, more interested in reasonable and earnest reforms than cut-throat political machinations. That cedes the collective id as a political battleground to the right. Now Bubbas, Baptists and Teamsters vote Republican while Democrats proudly claim Vermont. Liberals sorely miss the kick-ass unions that spoke directly to workers in a language they understood.
At some point, Democrats will have to ponder whether their squeamishness with the tactics of Pavlovian communication cancels out their political competitiveness. It's not an either/or proposition but it does demand a strong stomach.
Posted by: soleri | September 17, 2009 at 04:06 PM
"In the Southwest, more than a few Mexican-Americans resented the recent, huge wave of immigrant."
That sums it up right there. The Latinos who ARE registered to vote are much less likely to vote in favor of immigrants.
Posted by: Matt Self | September 18, 2009 at 12:44 PM
Good points, Mr. Talton.
But I wonder whether the return of Uncle Joe Arpaio to office allows us to infer, ipso facto, that Hispanics didn't get out the vote in the Sheriff's race?
Regardless of working-class apathy in general elections, regardless of attitudes by some Hispanic-Americans toward undocumented immigrants, it seems that there was a broad concensus among Hispanics in Maricopa County that the MCSO under Arpaio was out of control and broadly threatening to their civil liberties.
Arpaio won by only 55 percent, a slim majority. His opponent Dan Saban was terribly underfunded and undersupported by the state's Democratic Party (whom I feel are the real culprit, not apathetic Hispanics), and Saban was lamed from the start by previous personal scandals (predictably renewed in an infamous television ad funded by state Republicans using money raised by the shadowy SCA (an MCSO front organization).
In short, for an opponent fighting an entrenched incumbent on a shoestring budget with an albatross tied around his neck, Saban did pretty good. I suspect that without the Hispanic vote he would have fared considerably worse.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | September 18, 2009 at 05:19 PM