ELPAC Report January 2003

The ELPAC Report January 2003

Pandering Politics

Since the 2000 elections, it has been conventional wisdom in Washington that, in order to win, Republicans had to increase their percentage of votes in Hispanic and other minority communities. Matthew Dowd, head of polling for Bush's 2000 campaign, told the Washington Post, "Republicans have to increase their percentage among blacks and certainly among Hispanics." New data from the 2002 elections, however, suggest that Dowd's belief, and the resulting pandering politics of the Bush Administration, are far from the mark.

United Press International conducted an extensive analysis after the election and published the results on November 11. The results are incomplete because of a collapse of the regular exit polling system, but were based on extensive data nationwide. Steve Sailor, UPI National Correspondent, summarized: "The demographic headline on the 2002 election was expected to be either 'Democrats ride growing numbers of nonwhite voters to victory,' or 'GOP wins by attracting more minorities.' Instead, non-whites played an anticlimactic role."

In California, for example, according to the Los Angeles Times, only a little over half as many minorities showed up to vote in 2002 compared to 1998. Instead of becoming the dominant force in California politics, as many had predicted, Hispanics cast only ten percent of the votes in 2002.

In Texas, even after gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez spent $60 million of his own money on his unsuccessful campaign, Hispanic voter turnout "nudged upwards by four points," according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Republican pandering to language minorities in the prior two years did not pay off in any way. In fact, UPI notes, "Republicans may have done even worse among minority voters than they did in the 2000 Presidential election."

GOP officials tried to "spin" the election results, claiming that in New York, for example, George Pataki won re-election as governor with "nearly 50 percent" of Hispanic votes. The real number? According to John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York, about 38 percent.

So why did Republicans do better on Election Day 2002? According to UPI, "evidence has mounted that the Republicans triumphed not by broadening their tent to include more minority voters; rather, they motivated more whites to turn out and vote GOP."

What do these election results mean for both political parties? UPI's summary: "It seems likely that Democrats will need to find ways to motivate more minorities to vote, without further alienating the four-fifths of the electorate that is white. Republicans, despite their excellent showing among whites in 2002, will ultimately need to confront the realities that the current mass immigration system is slowly reducing their white base's share of the population, and that they have not yet shown an overall ability to win more minority votes. The GOP's choice would seem to be to eventually follow Pataki's path to the left, or to alter the immigration system so that it admits fewer potential Democrats."

The two bilingual education initiatives on the 2002 ballot (see accompanying story in this issue) demonstrate clearly the pitfalls for both parties on language issues: in both Massachusetts and Colorado, voters faced similar initiatives to require all children to receive instruction in English. In traditionally-liberal Massachusetts, the initiative won overwhelming support from both immigrants and the successful Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mitt Romney, best known for organizing the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics; the initiative passed by a two-to-one margin. Tackey Chan, head of Quincy, Massachusetts, Asian Resources, Inc., told the Boston Globe that "Everybody wants their kids to learn English, and that's the reason it passed. On that point, everyone agrees."

The Massachusetts results agree with earlier votes in California and Arizona, where minority support helped require English-language-instruction and end bilingual education. So Republicans have a proven ballot issue which attracts strong voter support in minority communities.

Yet the Colorado initiative failed. The reason Colorado's more conservative voters rejected the same initiative passed clearly illustrates the danger Republicans face in dealing with language issues. Armed with a huge contribution from a billionaire who wanted her daughter to have classmates who spoke Spanish, the anti-English forces in Colorado told conservative voters that if the initiative passed, there would be "chaos in the classroom," as non-English-speaking kids were forced to mingle with English-speaking students. The television ads featured pictures of many minority children who, presumably, would soon be sitting next to non-minority children. This overtly-racist pitch was highly-effective, driving support for the initiative far below 50%.

The dilemma for Democrats from this Colorado campaign, however, would seem to be horrifying, since they would have to be racists to defeat English-immersion legislation. Undoubtedly, Democrats will craft a new message with less overtly-racist terms, but with the same potential for scaring the white vote which is crucial for Republican success.

So will language legislation and policies become a rallying point for both the Republicans' desperate strains to pander to language minorities and Democrats' zeal to turn out loyal voters? Certainly the Bush Administration's policy preferences seem to swing in that direction. Will the now-Republican-led Congress go along? Only time will tell.