海角大神

Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine argues that House Republicans seem to be acting as if they want whomever happens to win the Republican nomination in 2016 to lose the election:

Scott Bland and Alex Roarty at听National Journal make a similar observation:

This isn鈥檛 a new story, of course. Republicans have gone fairly far downhill since 2004 when George W. Bush got 44 percent of the Latino vote听 after getting 38 percent of that vote in 2000. Four years later, Sen. John McCain saw that number drop to 35 precent, which was lower than Mr. Bush had garnered but still somewhat respectable. By 2012, though, the number had dropped even further as Mitt Romney received just 27 percent of the Latino vote, nearly 20 percentage points less than a Republican nominee had received just eight years earlier. It鈥檚 not too hard to figure out what happened during that time period. Bush鈥檚 last term saw a large segment of his own party revolt against him in the effort to put together a comprehensive immigration reform package with the help of senators such as Ted Kennedy, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham. To some degree, McCain鈥檚 support for immigration reform, which nearly cost him the nomination in 2008, was the reason that he still managed to maintain a respectable level of support among Latino voters.

After McCain, though, and especially more recently, the Republican Party has adopted policy positions that are clearly not helping them with Latino voters. On the broadest level, of course, the party鈥檚 inability to pass anything resembling immigration reform in the House stands as a pretty strong demonstration of where the party stands on something that Latino voters strongly support. More recently, the public statements that have come from Republicans regarding the Central American migrants that have arrived at the southern border over the past year or so, as well as the recent moves to try to repeal DACA which will go nowhere but are clearly intended mostly to just placate a Republican base that has become increasingly anti-immigrant, will no doubt only further serve to alienate Latino voters from the Republican Party. As it did in 2012, that will cause problems for whichever candidate wins the nomination in 2016 in states such as Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia, and it will make it much harder for a Republican nominee to win in any of the other states that President Obama did in 2012, which they will have to do if they are going to get to 270 votes in the Electoral College.

If the actions of the House Republicans are any indication, it will be next to impossible for a candidate to win the Republican nomination in 2016 without taking an even harder line than Mitt Romney did in the 2012, when he made a name for himself by attacking Rick Perry for things such as supporting in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants and suggesting that people here illegally should 鈥渟elf-deport鈥� rather than expect to obtain any kind of legal status. Perhaps the best signal of that is the fact that someone such as Jeb Bush, who has been calling on his party to moderate its positions on immigration for years, has already been written off by most conservatives. Even Sen. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida, who was a darling of the tea party in 2010 when he took on then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist for the Senate nomination, has seen his stock among the tea party crowd decline significantly since he supported the Senate鈥檚 comprehensive immigration reform bill. With those two examples in front of them, along with the strong pressure that the base has applied toward Congress on issues such as immigration reform and DACA, does anyone actually think that a candidate for the GOP nomination in 2016 is going to even try to hint that they might be supportive of anything other than 鈥渂order security鈥� when it comes to immigration form?

Of course not. If anything, the Republican nominee will most likely be even more more strongly opposed to immigration reform, and therefore even more of a turnoff for Latino voters, than Romney was. Exactly how that is supposed to be the key to electoral success is beyond me.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.