Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Marxism] Latinos sank the Republicans in the mid-term elections Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2006 07:14:44 -0500 From: Joaquin Bustelo <jbustelo at bellsouth.net> Reply-To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu> To: Marxmail <marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
Here's the news neither the Faux News Channel nor the Corporate News Network nor even the august New York Times is willing to tell you about what happened in the U.S. elections.
A massive wave of Latino anti-Republican votes sunk the Grand Old Party.
According to the corporate media's exit poll, two years ago the Republicans got 44% of the Latino vote, and the Democrats barely 53% --the first time Democrats had gotten less than 60% among Latinos in a national election since exit polls made such statistics possible.
This year, according to exit poll figures apparently noticed only by CNN's Spanish-language network, the Republican vote among Latinos crashed to 26%, and the Democrats got 73%, a full 20-point improvement on the 2004 figure.
The national Congressional exit poll indicates the election result was 54% Democrats, 46% Republicans. The increase in the Latino vote for Democrats was about 1-1/2%, which would have left the Democrats shy of the 53% that election wonks had calculated the Democrats would need to take the House (53% because "structural advantages" --gerrymandering-- give the Republicans in effect a built-in lead).
Of course, in any close election any number of groups can claim that they were the ones who made the difference. But even a 10% party shift in any demographic group on a national scale is virtually unheard of in the United States, where normally elections are decided not by who people decide to vote for, but by which people decide to vote. Yes, there are sometimes changes in the electorate as a whole, but these tend to be spread across many sections of the population and tend to be either episodic [like Goldwater's crushing defeat in 1964] or gradual [like the consolidation of Republican dominance in the South].
So clearly this was an exception. In state after state, many tens of thousands of Latinos who for whatever reason had gone Republican in 2004 went Democrat instead. Moreover, this is a significant shift from the pattern well before the 2004 elections. In the three previous elections, the percentage of the Hispanic vote for the Democrats had been 63%, 62%, and 65% in 1998, 2000 and 2002. This cut into not just the "new" Hispanic Republican voters of 2004, but habitual Hispanic Republican voters.
And the shift if even a little bigger than it seems because the Cubans traditionally vote Republican and would not be directly affected by the changes in immigration law. This shift is almost entirely among non-Cuban Latinos. In other words, the Republicans start out with something on the order of 8% or 10% of the Latino vote from the Cubans. So of the additional 34% they go in 2004, from the non-Cubans, they lost more than half.
For a party that's already a single-digit fringe party in the Black community, to relegate itself to the same status in the rapidly growing Latino community is likely to be suicidal.
As I write this, the control of the Senate is still up in the air. The two parties are tied, with 49 seats each, and two states --Virginia and Montana-- still to be "called," although Democrats have razon-thin leads in both. Given the number of close Senate races, it is obvious the *shift* in the Latino vote has made the difference in giving Democrats a very significant victory, and in this case whether they achieve full control of the Senate or not. Because there, 60 are votes needed to pass major legislation or confirm judges and high-level executive branch appointees. In the Senate, it takes a super-majority to end debate, so each additional Democrat makes things that much more difficult for the Republicans.
Andres Oppenheimer, a Miami Herald columnist appearing as an election-night commentator on CNN en Español, had a ready explanation, indeed, an obvious one, for the change in Latino voting patterns.
This was the Latino community's punishment of the Republicans for having spearheaded a racist, anti-immigrant offensive since the 2004 election.
At the beginning of 2004, President Bush put forward the sketch of a plan for immigration reform that offered at least temporary legalization to millions of undocumented workers in the country. In presenting his proposal, Bush heaped praised on immigrants:
"As a Texan, I have known many immigrant families, mainly from Mexico, and I have seen what they add to our country. They bring to America the values of faith in God, love of family, hard work and self reliance -- the values that made us a great nation to begin with....
"As a nation that values immigration, and depends on immigration, we should have immigration laws that work and make us proud. Yet today we do not. Instead, we see many employers turning to the illegal labor market. We see millions of hard-working men and women condemned to fear and insecurity in a massive, undocumented economy."
That helped Bush achieve his relatively high vote among Latinos (although many experts believe flaws in the design and execution of the 2004 poll exaggerated Bush's support, which was probably 40%, they said).
But after the election, the Republicans thanked the Latino community by spearheading a campaign of repressive, anti-immigrant laws, the most notorious of which was the Sensenbrenner Bill in the House of Representatives which would have declared all undocumented immigrants to be criminals. The White House specifically endorsed the Sensenbrenner Bill after the House passed it at the end of 2005.
The bill seemed set to sail through the Senate with one or another cosmetic change when a series of mass mobilizations shook the country from March to May, the largest sustained series of such protests ever in U.S. history.
This stopped the Sensenbrenner all-immigrants-are-criminals bill. It was DOA in the Senate, so hasty efforts were made to cook up a phony "compromise" which sought to find the middle ground between those who sought to criminalize immigrants and those who claimed to be for legalizing them. This, of course, came to nothing legislatively, but it did have the effect if dividing the immigrants rights movement and stopping the mega-marches.
Then at the last minute of the legislative session, snuck through in the middle of the night, the Republicans passed and sent to the president one provision of the Sensenbrenner Bill, to build a 1150 kilometer Great Wall of America along much of the U.S.-Mexico border. The Anglo press largely dismissed this as election-year grandstanding, since the bill called for the wall to go up post-haste but did include the requisite funding.
But in Latin America and especially Mexico, as well as in Latino media throughout the U.S., it was seen as one more gratuitous insult, and one more reason to give the Republicans a thrashing.
I know some people will say, this mass Latino repudiation of the Republicans is meaningless, since many of the Democrats are just as bad. In Georgia, for example, the Democrat gubernatorial candidate said he would have signed the same anti-immigrant bill that Rep. Gov. Sonny Perdue used as a centerpiece in his re-election campaign.
But when someone attacks your community they way that Republicans have been attacking Latinos, people are going to do something about it. And if some Democrat politician is the only thing to hand that can be used as a club, that's what people will use.
Yes, I know all the problems and limitations with it. But I can't help feeling good about it.
And a word to Democrat politiqueros: you don't own us, you owe us. If you think you can stab us in the back with impunity, just look at what happened to Bush and his friends this time around.
Joaquín
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