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Republicans and Their Amigos
GOP no longer stands for the gringos-only party.
by Tamar Jacoby
11/25/2002, Volume 008, Issue 11
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/protected/articles/000/000/001/919qoudy.asp
NEW YORK
DOMINICAN BUSINESSMAN Fernando Mateo spent Election Day driving
around New York City, getting out the vote for George Pataki.
The Dominican community is among the poorest in New York, and it
has traditionally been one of the nation's most reliably
left-leaning. Still, Mateo is convinced that it is up for grabs
politically. He is building his political future among the
smallest of small-time entrepreneurs: the Dominicans who own and
drive most of the city's non-medallion taxis. And in the week
before the election, he visited 150 storefront dispatchers,
using their two-way radios to urge both drivers and passengers
to go to the polls. All kinetic energy and optimism, he drove
along one of the broad boulevards of the South Bronx and pointed
to a row of neighborhood businesses--bodegas, money-wiring
services, travel agencies, and the like. "Look," he gestured,
"these entrepreneurs are natural Republicans. They may not know
it yet. But all we have to do is explain it to them."
Mateo is far from the only Republican with this dream. The party
has been talking about appealing to Latinos for 20 years now,
and some consultants, including Bush pollster Matthew Dowd, have
argued that unless the GOP can significantly increase its share
of this vote, to a reliable 40 percent, the party will be doomed
to oblivion. So the stakes could hardly have been higher this
month--and the Republicans passed with flying colors. But that
doesn't mean the game is over--or even that everyone in the
party understands what has to be done to consolidate a win.
The biggest coups were in Florida and New York, where incumbent
Republican governors Jeb Bush and Pataki seem to have met or
exceeded Dowd's 40 percent goal. (Bush may have polled as high
as 60 percent among Florida Hispanics, according to the
Republican National Committee.) Even in Texas, where the
Democratic gubernatorial candidate was himself a Latino, more
than a third of Hispanics crossed ethnic lines to vote for
incumbent Republican Rick Perry. Latino voters are not entirely
unmoored--many still approach politics with traditionally
Democratic assumptions--and their turnout remains anemic. But
this election showed that unlike blacks, they are not automatic
Democrats. "If there was any question, the Florida and Texas and
New York results put it to rest," says California-based
consultant Mike Madrid, who specializes in Hispanic outreach.
Pataki's success was perhaps the most remarkable, given New York
Puerto Ricans' reputation as a conventional "minority" (read
ultra-liberal) bloc. Encouraged by growing Latino support for
Republican mayoral candidates Rudolph Giuliani and Michael
Bloomberg, Pataki has been courting this constituency for
several years now, on the campaign trail and also as governor.
No favor was too large or too small, starting with a $1.8
billion raise for the mostly black and Hispanic health and
hospital workers union, SIEU/1199. The governor visited the
Puerto Rican island of Vieques in April 2001 and persuaded the
White House to phase out Navy bombing exercises there. He made
it easier for the children of illegal immigrants to attend state
universities; he even instituted stiffer penalties for those who
mug or murder livery cab drivers. Latino voters felt the
difference acutely: Pataki was one of the first Republicans ever
to visit their neighborhoods, much less spend heavily on
Spanish-language ads or encourage grass-roots get-out-the-vote
groups like Amigos de Pataki.
The effort paid off on Election Day. The failure of the Voter
News Service means there are fewer reliable numbers than usual.
But at the very least, according to an estimate embraced by the
New York Times, the governor garnered 38 percent of the New York
City Hispanic vote, up from 15 percent in 1998--and according to
other analysts, his statewide total may have been considerably
higher. Based on tracking surveys and results in a few key
election districts, the campaign believes he pulled in more like
43 to 46 percent. Angel Santana, a mom-and-pop store owner and
former policeman who ran the Amigos chapter in the heavily
Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, says Latino voters
are more pragmatic than partisan. They "don't really care if
someone is a Democrat or a Republican," he says. "What matters
is the candidate and what he has delivered for the community."
Jeb Bush found much the same thing in Florida. Like Pataki, he
has been wooing Latinos for years. In contrast to earlier
Florida Republicans who relied on the Cuban vote and left it at
that, Bush has visited Puerto Rico and focused on issues that
matter to the poorer, non-Cuban service-sector workers who now
account for 70 percent of the state's Latino population. He
speaks fluent Spanish, advertises in Spanish, and knows the
difference between new immigrants and those who have been here a
generation or more. His TV spots, which appealed to
Spanish-speakers as both Latinos and Americans, were said to be
highly effective: One of the most popular showed a flag changing
colors--first Puerto Rican, then Cuban, then Mexican, then
Salvadoran, and finally, lastingly, the Florida banner.
According to a Fox News exit poll, Bush won 56 percent of the
Latino vote, including a predictable 70 percent among
Cuban-Americans, but also an astonishing 51 percent of non-Cuban
Hispanics.
But arguably it was the Texas vote that was the most chastening
for Democrats. Convinced that Latinos were a classic minority
that would vote with underprivileged blacks, the party pinned
its hopes on a color-coded ticket--a black, a Latino, and a
liberal Anglo known collectively as the "Dream Team." (The only
real issue for many Democrats was whether the minority turnout
would be big enough.) As in Florida and New York, the GOP pitch
didn't ignore ethnicity--there was plenty of advertising in
Spanish--and it recognized that Latinos are sometimes concerned
about different issues, in a different style. But like Pataki
and Jeb Bush, Texas Republicans depended more on old-fashioned
ethnic-ward campaigning than identity politics: delivering for a
constituency as a way to bring them into the system, rather than
appealing, implicitly or explicitly, to racial anger and
alienation.
The Texas race brought the two approaches head to head for the
first time, and according to exit polls, there was much less of
a rainbow effect than Democrats were counting on. Virtually all
blacks (97 percent) voted for black senatorial candidate Ron
Kirk, but only two-thirds of Hispanics did. And blacks voted
even more heavily than Latinos--significantly more so--for
Mexican-American gubernatorial challenger Tony Sanchez.
Meanwhile, despite two TV ads that the mainstream press deemed
demeaning to Hispanics, the Anglo governor, Rick Perry, walked
away with an estimated 35 percent of the Latino vote.
Not all Republicans succeeded in pleasing Latinos. The
overwhelming majority of Hispanic elected officials are still
Democrats. In most places, even where top-of-the-ticket
Republicans won big, Hispanic voters still sent mostly Democrats
to Congress and the state legislatures. And, perhaps most
telling, in races like the California gubernatorial contest,
where Republican Hispanic outreach seemed little more than an
afterthought--a matter of a few ads or a last-minute appearance
in an ethnic neighborhood--most Latino voters remained solidly
in the Democratic fold.
It's the sort of partial success that leaves young Latino
Republicans chomping at the bit. The kind of GOP platform most
likely to lure Hispanics is obvious enough. Opinion surveys
consistently show that they like big government and look to it
to help them--a tendency that often inclines them toward
Democrats. Yet like other immigrants, they also put a premium on
opportunity--and Republicans can offer to provide it in the form
of education, loans for first-time homeowners, tax cuts for
small business, and a more rational immigration policy. Still,
Latino party insiders insist, it's a message that will only work
if more Republicans adopt it--many more. "Jeb Bush and George
Pataki showed it can be done," says consultant Mike Madrid.
"It's not only possible, it's probable--but only if the party
can get its act together."
Tamar Jacoby is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. |
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Republican
National Hispanic Assembly