Going Democrat-Lite will make GOP a permanent minority

 

My latest is up at The Washington Examiner. Here's a slice:

Democrats smirk that the muscle of the Hispanic vote is going to make them a permanent majority and make the Republicans extinct, while much of the GOP consultant class pontificates that the 2012 election was a message for the Republican to embrace amnesty and to drop any vestige of conservatism.

Peter Wehner's recent piece in Commentary is fairly typical of the sort of pieces prophesying demographic doom. Are they right?

The entire concept of lumping a very diverse group of people into a convenient label should be a warning sign in itself that something's amiss here.

That is, after all, the sort of identity politics more commonly practiced by Democrats. But using figures that come from Pew,  the math tells us a different story altogether.

Hispanics are 9.07 percent of the current electorate (23.7 million voters). Of those, only 12 million or so of that 23.7 million voted in 2012 and they went for President Obama by 67.5 percent, a whopping eight million of the 12 million whom voted. That's just about one third of the entire Hispanic vote available.

In my universe, that means almost two thirds of the current Hispanic vote is either Republican or up for grabs.

That's what all the verbiage and punditry is about, a grand total of less than 3.5 percent of the entire electorate, much of it already living in blue states like California, New York and New Jersey. And that doesn't even account for voter fraud in places like California that are unfettered by voter ID laws.

There's a similar disconnect going on with Asians, another group that's been cited as a demographic Republicans are losing.

Asians are an even more diverse group than Hispanics, but the figures lump together East Asians like Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Koreans with Filipinos, Pakistanis, Indonesians and Indians (a fairly diverse group themselves).

Since they're not broken down but lumped together as a group, the best figure available is that Americans of Asian ethnicity constitute 3 percent of the electorate, about 6,450,000 voters.

I couldn't find the percentage of the Asian electorate that actually voted, but let's be very generous and assume a 40 percent turnout, a huge leap given how low the 2012 turnout was.

Obama got 73 percent of that Asian vote, so we're talking about 1,883,400 votes mainly concentrated in Blue states.

That's a grand total of 28 percent of the available Asian electorate if we're talking a 40 percent turnout. In any event, that means that 72 percent of the Asian electorate is either Republican or available.

I'm not suggesting that conservatives ignore Hispanic or Asian voters, although the thoughts of the Washington Examiner's Byron York' on the matter  are worth considering.

But the way to attract them is not to lump them together as a "group" but to appeal to their actual interests. A message of fairness, conservative principles, school choice, prosperity and economic growth clearly articulated is what's going to appeal to them.

Read the whole thing here at the link.