Did Hispanics catapult Brown to Massachusetts Senate win?
By John A. Tures
Associate Professor of Political Science
LaGrange College
January 28, 2010 — In my columns, I pride myself on being “the political mythbuster.” Though I don’t strap a jet engine to a car or toss a grenade in a refrigerator to see if it will absorb the shock of the explosion as the guys on the Discovery Channel do, I’m about to drop a shocking bomb of evidence that will change the way you think about Hispanic voters. As Politico notes, there were no exit polls in the special election for the Massachusetts Senate race. But there was a good poll put out by Politico/Insider Advantage just before the contest that should rattle most folks. In that Politico/InsiderAdvantage poll, Brown won 76.9% of the Hispanic vote to Coakley’s 23.1%. For many, that’s perhaps more shocking than Brown’s overall victory. After all, we tend to assume that Hispanics are a Democrat Party lock. Obama won 67% of the Latino vote, according to CNN’s 2008 exit poll , roughly split among men and women. And the same Politico/InsiderAdvantage poll revealed that 70% of Hispanics self-identified as Democrats. I know what you’re thinking…Coakley must have run some anti-immigrant policy, while Brown was soft on immigration. But Coakley was the one with the pro-immigration policy. “Immigration policy needs to be resolved on a federal level, and the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants need ‘a path to citizenship,’ Attorney General Martha Coakley said” in November during the Democrat Party primary. As for Brown, his campaign website said “I welcome legal immigration to this country. However, we are also a nation of laws and government should not adopt policies that encourage illegal immigration. Providing driver’s licenses and in-state tuition to illegal immigrant families will act as a magnet in drawing more people here in violation of the law and it will impose new costs on taxpayers. I oppose amnesty, and I believe we ought to strengthen our border enforcement and institute an employment verification system with penalties for companies that hire illegal immigrants.” The first question is whether Hispanic defections really provided the decisive edge. I noted that Brown won 85.5% of the GOP, while Coakley took 71.2% of the Democrats. Had she kept her base intact (winning the same percentage of Democrats as Brown did of Republicans), she would have won that poll 49.31%-45.895, even with independents breaking so heavily for Brown. So the notion that it was “all about independents” isn’t necessarily the case. Independents kept the race in play, but failing to energize the Democrat base did more to undermine Coakley. And the biggest percentage point source of Democrat defection was the Hispanic vote. The next question is why. Why would a group that we all take for granted as a Democrat lock swing so far to the Republicans in this special election? And what does it mean for immigration reform, the 2010 election, 2012, and the political landscape for the next 40 years? I’ll reveal that in part two of my columns on the Hispanic voter. John A. Tures is Associate Professor of Political Science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. |
