In the last few days I've done a slew of interviews with reporters discussing the politics of SB1070 and the decision by the Department of Justice to declare the law unconstiutional. The national GOP has gone into big time spin mode on this, declaring from the reporters I've spoken to the DOJ suit is political death for "Democrats in the West." While that scenerio is possible of course, lets look at what we know about how this debate has played out in recent years. There two things we know for sure:
1) When Latinos are demonized by the GOP there is a backlash. In California in the 1990s, and in national politics in this past decade, when Republican leaders launch a sustained anti-immigrant, anti-Latino Latinos respond, applying for citizenship in higher numbers, registering in higher numbers, voting in higher numbers, and voting aggressively against the Republican Party. Given that Latinos now make up 15 percent of the national population, and large percentages of the voting population in major states - CA, FL, TX and key Presidential states - AZ, CO, NM, NV - a big shift in the Hispanic vote can dramatically alter the politics of a community, state and the nation.
2) The Republicans have not shown that their anti-immigrant position works outside a Republican primary audience. The polling on immigration has been consistent over the past five years. About 15-20 percent of the country want the undocumenteds to leave and consider immigration a voting issue. They are largely base Republican voters. Hispanics too view immigration as a voting issue. The rest of the country sees immigration as a second tier issue, trailing way behind more important issues like the bad economy, need for better health and foreign policy matters. And for most of those who view it as an issue of secondary importance they are comfortable with the solution Congress has been proposing called comprehensive immigration reform (in this recent WaPo poll, for example, 57% support allowing illegal immigrants to stay in the US permanently while also giving majority support to SB1070).
So what this means in campaign terms is that a hard-line anti-immigrant stance can work well in a contested Republican primary - think Jan Brewer - but has not shown the capacity to motivate non-Hispanic general election voters in battleground races. The Republican Party will have a hard time naming a single race the last several elections where a hard-line anti-immigrant candidate won purely on this issue, and virtually no GOP campaign has spent money on the issue in the last month of any race we've studied. In fact, I've argued before, that the emphasis the GOP has put on immigration has actually been a big negative with swing voters for it reinforces the worst attribute of the GOP of recent years - their willingness to put poliitics over problem solving. For many their obsession with anti-immigrant politics looks feckless, partisan and helps reinforce their lack of seriousness as a party. For while immigration matters, of course, it is just not as important as some of the more wild-eyed immigrant haters want to believe it is. Most Americans are just way too smart for that.
Sometimes ithe anti-immigrant stance doesn't even work in a Republican primary audience. In the 2008 Presidential election, the most liberal Republican on immigration, John McCain, won his party's nomination. The anti-immigrant candidate, Tom Tancredo, never received more than 1% in any poll taken during the primary season. And of course Senator McCain was then beaten by someone much more liberal than he on immigration reform, Barack Obama, who despite his pro-immigration reform stance received the largest vote share a Democratic Presidential candidate had received in 44 years.
Unfortunately, Politico bought this GOP spin about how the GOP candidates will turn support of SB1070 into a winning regional issue and published this largely unsubstantiated and disapointing piece yesterday. Already, this morning we have a clear repudiation of the national GOP narrative in the largest state in the West, California, where Republican Gubernational candidate Meg Whitman has launched billboards in Spanish proclaiming her opposition to SB1070. Newsweek has published this thoughtful essay making the case that the DOJ suit is smart politics for Obama. My gut is that this piece is closer to the truth than Politico's slightly hysterical initial take.
Whatever the politics of the DOJ suit are I think the government did the right thing. Once SB1070 was passed, the federal government had to act. If SB1070 succeeds we could end up with 50 different immigration policies in the US, not a single federal one. The President was right last week to challenge Congress to quit kicking the can down the road on immigration reform and step up to build a better immigration system. The Department of Justice was also right to challenge SB1070, a serious threat to the integrity of our federal immigration system.
So what do we know about the politics of SB1070? Here is my take:
1) It will make it more likely that there is a large Latino vote against anti-immigrant candidates in the heavily Mexican-American West.
2) Outside of Arizona, I have serious doubts that a hard-line anti-immigrant stance will work for the GOP. Most anti-immigrant voters in the West have already been motivated by many of the anti-Democratic messages of this cycle, and there just isnt a lot of data or experience to indicate that in this tough economy the GOP will be able to make the issue pop with non-Hispanic audiences beyond their base. There is evidence and experience, however, which shows that if GOPers continue to talk about the issue deep into the fall it can actually hurt them, as it will help brand the GOPer as one those "more extreme" Republicans, a political brand which has been serially rejected by the American people over the past five years, and a positioning that today remains remarkably unpopular.
3) As the legal, economic and societal costs of SB1070 become better understood, it is very likely that the popularity of SB1070 - an extreme approach to a very real problem - will begin to drop. From a policy standpoint SB1070 is a bad idea, and overtime I think most folks "in the West" will come to agree.
4) The way the issue plays in each race in the West will, as Meg Whitman has shown, be determined by how each candidate plays it. Democrats would be smart to hold firm on demanding a comprehensive national solution and not give into the early politics of this new post SB1070 environment.
That's it for now. Thoughts welcome of course. For more on these matters check out my first cut reaction to the DOJ suit and this backgrounder on NDN's work on immigration reform.
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