U.S. News & World
Report political reporter Lauren Fox wrote recently wrote
an article with the headline “Jeb Bush Won’t Be an Outlier on
Immigration by 2016.” Earlier this month Bush said that illegal
immigration is often “an act of love.”
While many Republicans may disagree with Bush’s assessment,
Fox’s reporting highlights the reasons why Republican presidential
contenders in 2016 may end up adopting less hard-line rhetoric when
it comes to immigration than the rhetoric displayed in 2012 and
2011.
Fox quotes Republican strategist Lionel Sosa, who said that
Republican 2016 contenders need to take Bush’s lead on
immigration:
“They should be taking Jeb’s lead if they want to win in 2016,”
says Lionel Sosa, a Republican strategist who has worked on Latino
outreach for a series of presidential campaigns. “I just don’t know
if we will see the Republican environment changing in the immediate
future. We may need to lose another election to get it.”
In 2012 Mitt Romney received only 27 percent of the Latino
vote.
Another Republican strategist quoted by Fox dismisses the idea
that Republican 2016 hopefuls will need to move to the right in
order to secure the nomination:
“Not only is the primary going to have a different tone in 2015,
[but] if Republicans win the Senate, you might even see
conservative members leading the charge on immigration reform,”
says Alfonso Aguilar, a GOP strategist. “This idea that you have to
move to the extreme right on immigration to win the primary in 2016
is bunk and nobody buys it.”
Sen Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a possible 2016 contender, has said that
Bush “might
have been more artful” when discussing immigration and added
that “we can’t invite the whole world.”
It might be the case that Republican rhetoric on immigration in
the 2016 primary season will be different than in the 2012 primary
season, but it remains to be seen how voters will prioritize
immigration during the next presidential campaign.
Polling from
Pew shows that between 2008 and 2012 the percentage of voters
who said that immigration was “very important” to their vote
dropped from 52 percent to 41 percent. According to Gallup
polling released earlier this year 50 percent of Americans say that
it is either “extremely” or “very” important that President Obama
and Congress deal with immigration.
Fox points out that while there are still immigration
hard-liners in the Republican Party members of the GOP should take
seriously comments on immigration from a former governor of a swing
state who was backed by 56 percent of Latino voters in 2002:
There are certainly still immigration hard-liners in the
Republican Party. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, and Sen. Jeff Sessions,
R-Ala., are not going to soften their stance. This past weekend,
Donald Trump appeared to be the most critical of Bush and he found
many who agree with him during a tea party event. He got a big
laugh for suggesting immigrants come for sex, but not for love.But the Republican Party might not be laughing in 2016 if it
fails to field a candidate that can make up what’s been lost
between the Republican Party and the Latino community. If the
Republican Party wants to do better than the 27 percent of the
Latino vote it got with Romney in 2012, it will need to take
seriously the words of a candidate who won 56 percent of the
Hispanic vote in his 2002 re-election bid to be the governor of
Florida – a major swing state to boot.
More from Reason on immigration here.
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