14 HE AMERICAN CONSERVAIVE
OCTOBER 2011
Politics
portant actor in gaining him the presidential nomi-nation in 2000. Although Bush’s national Hispanictotals were much less impressive in the 2000 race,and the vast unds he invested in a quixotic attemptto carry Caliornia were totally wasted, Rove and hisallies redoubled their eorts during the 2004 reelec-tion campaign, and buoyed by the continuing patri-otic aermath o the 9/11 attacks, largely succeeded.Although the percentages have been much disputed,Bush seems to have carried somewhat over 40 percento the Hispanic vote nationwide in 2004, although hewas once again trounced in Caliornia.
P
art o the Bush/Rove political strategy was to takea leading role in passing a sweeping immigration-reorm measure, aimed at legalizing the status o many millions o (overwhelmingly Hispanic) illegalimmigrants, easing the restrictions on uture legalimmigration, while also tightening border enorce-ment. Leaving aside policy matters, the political the-ory was simple: i the Republican Party changed thelaws to benet Hispanic and other immigrants, thesegroups and their children would be more likely to vote Republican, thereby helping to solve the GOP’sdemographic dilemma. Rove endlessly pointed to 40percent as the necessary GOP level o uture Hispanicsupport—score above that number and political vic-tory was likely, score much below it and deeat wasnearly assured. Although this precise quantitativetarget was obviously intended or rhetorical eect, itdoes seem to represent the dominant strain in con-servative thinking, namely the need to combine astrong white vote with a solid minority o Hispan-ics and Asians, thereby allowing the Republicans tosurvive and win races in an increasingly non-whiteAmerica. (Meanwhile decades o ruitless eorts toattract a signicant share o the black vote would bequietly abandoned.)But does this political strategy actually make any sense? Or are there ar more eective and more plau-sible paths to continued Republican political success?Although almost totally marginalized within Repub-lican establishment ranks, the anti-immigrationistwing o the conservative movement has maintaineda vigorous intellectual presence on the Internet.Over the years, its agship organ, the VDare.comwebsite run by Peter Brimelow, a ormer
National Review
senior editor, has been scathing in its attackson the so-called Rove Strategy, instead proposing acontrasting approach christened the Sailer Strategy,aer Steve Sailer, its primary architect and leadingpromoter (who has himsel requently written or
Te American Conservative
). In essence, what Sailerproposes is the polar opposite o Rove’s approach,which he oen ridicules as being based on a mixtureo (probably dishonest) wishul thinking and sheerinnumeracy.Consider, or example, Rove’s o-repeated mantrathat a Republican presidential candidate needs to winsomething approaching 40 percent o the nationalHispanic vote or have no chance o reaching theWhite House. During the last several election cycles,Hispanic voters represented between 5 and 8 per-cent o the national total, so the dierence between acandidate winning an outstanding 50 percent o that vote and one winning a miserable 30 percent wouldamount to little more than just a single percentagepoint o the popular total, completely insignicantbased on recent history. Furthermore, presidentialraces are determined by the electoral college maprather than popular-vote totals, and the overwhelm-ing majority o Hispanics are concentrated either insolidly blue states such as Caliornia, New York, Il-linois, and New Jersey, or solidly red ones such asexas and Georgia, reducing their impact to almostnothing. Any Republican earul o a loss in exas orDemocrat worried about carrying Caliornia wouldbe acing a national deeat o epic proportions, inwhich Hispanic preerences would constitute a triv-ial component. Pursuing the Hispanic vote or itsown sake seems a clear absurdity.Even more importantly, Sailer argues that once wethrow overboard the restrictive blinkers o modern“political correctness” on racial matters, certain as-pects o the real world become obvious. For nearly the last hal-century, the political core o the Repub-lican Party has been the white vote, and especially the votes o whites who live in the most heavily non-white states, notably the arc o the old Conederacy.Te political realignment o Southern whites ore-shadowed by the support that Barry Goldwater at-tracted in 1964 based on his opposition to the CivilRights Act and that constituted George Wallace’swhite-backlash campaign o 1968 eventually becamea central pillar o the dominant Reagan majority inthe 1980s.
Karl Rove endlessly pointed to 40 percent as the necessary GOP level o Hispanic support. Score much below that number and deeat was nearly assured.
precinctchair
