The Wall Street Journal

August 22, 1997

GOP Confronts Future Without Hispanics: Adios!
By PAUL GIGOT, The Wall Street Journal

California is supposed to show us the future, which is why smart Republicans are nervous. They've glimpsed it and what they see looks eerily like their recent past in Hawaii.

They don't mean palm trees and poi. They mean a politics dominated by ethnic Democrats for decades on end.

That's the future suggested by two internal studies on voter trends and attitudes that are the talk of the former juggernaut known as the California GOP. The home state of Presidents Nixon and Ronald Reagan hasn't elected a Democratic governor since Jerry Brown lost to the medfly after his re-election in 1978. Yet the two studies all but shout that unless Republicans repair their fractured relations with the state's Hispanics, the party will soon be a permanent minority.

What's remarkable is that this warning comes from the staff of the state assembly's Republican Caucus, the heart of GOP conservatism. The state media used to call them "cavemen." Republican Gov. Pete Wilson played off them to display his own moderation.

Yet these studies reveal that Republicans owe much of their weakness with Hispanics to the political strategy of Gov. Wilson himself. His attack on immigration as a political wedge may have helped him win a second term in 1994. But the effort so polarized Hispanic voters that it backfired on Republicans in 1996, and could well cost them the statehouse in 1998 and beyond.

Here's the bad news: GOP voter registration has been lower this decade than at any time since the 1930s. Only 11% of new voters have signed up as Republicans. Democrats have registered 26%, while third parties and those who refused a label total 64%. In the Reaganite 1980s, Republicans outregistered Democrats by more than two to one.

Why the reversal? A two-term presidency explains part of it, because new, younger voters identify with the first president they know, even Bill Clinton. But the GOP analysis also fingers "demographic changes," especially "the political awakening of Latinos."

Thus the really bad GOP news: The Latino share of the vote has increased in California in each election in the 1990s (to 11% in 1996), but the GOP share of that Latino vote has decreased. Mr. Wilson took one in three Latino votes in 1990 but only one in four in 1994, while Bob Dole's share fell to nearly >one in five last year. More ominously, GOP consultant Kevin Spillane says he's seen a poll showing that the likely GOP nominee for governor next year, Attorney General Dan Lungren, now gets only 14% of the Latino vote. Vaya con Dios, amigo.

All of this reminds Mr. Spillane of what happened in his native Hawaii 40 years ago when it was a two-party state. Hawaii's first Republican governor, elected in 1959, was also its last. The state's white GOP elite ignored the native Hawaiians and Asian-Americans who flocked into Democratic ranks. Hawaii has since become more Democratic than even West Virginia, tragically evolving into a slow-growth welfare state.

The reaction of the GOP's Pat Buchanan-National Review immigrant-bashers to all of this is to dismiss all Hispanics as hopeless Democrats and recommend building a Tortilla Curtain even faster. To reduce the Hispanic population in the future, in short, Republicans are supposed to drive even more Hispanics into Democratic arms today.

This assumes, in good deterministic logic, that third- or fourth-generation Hispanic-Americans will vote the same way in 2040 as their grandparents did in 1996. So what hasn't been true of Irish or Italians or Vietnamese is certain for Latinos.

This strategy also ignores the fact that Hispanic voter share is going to rise fast no matter what happens to immigration. That's because Hispanics have higher than average fertility rates and because many recent immigrants aren't yet registered to vote, or don't bother to turn out.

Instead of targeting immigrants, Republicans could always try something truly radical -- like asking Hispanics to vote for them today! The GOP assembly analysis confirms that Latinos are more culturally conservative than most Americans--for example, on abortion, crime and gay rights. While Latinos tend to be more liberal on economics, they also have a strong and growing culture of small-business entrepreneurship. They would respond to GOP themes of economic opportunity, lower taxes and education reform.

Republicans are also privately debating whether to require that all students be taught in English. The concept is supported by most Latinos, who know English is the path to upward mobility. But the GOP analysis says the party "must avoid" any "nativist sentiments from infecting its message." The immigrant-bashers may have poisoned the well on even this sensible assimilationist proposal.

One Republican who's shown what's possible is Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. He won 60% of Latinos in his re-election this year, compared to 43% in 1993. "We haven't spent enough time saying that, one, immigration is valued, and two, the Latino community is valued," says Curt Pringle, former assembly speaker and a sponsor of the GOP Caucus studies.

The good news amid all of these bad portents is that the crusade by a few columnists and British expatriates to turn the GOP into an anti-immigrant party seems to have failed. Immigrant-bashing has proven to be lousy American politics. When even California conservatives admit this, the debate should be over.