California Latinos Turn Their Back On The GOP

Doug Mataconis · · 13 comments

Bad news for the GOP as the fastest growing ethnic group in the most populous state continues to reject the party:

A new poll out of California found little hope for Republicans among the nation’s fastest-growing electoral demographic. Latino voters across the state hold widely negative views of the Republican Party, according to the survey, which was conducted by a GOP pollster and consultant and conceived as a tool to help the party make inroads with Hispanic voters. Many respondents said they see the GOP as too conservative and don’t trust it on the issue of immigration reform. And while California won’t likely be in play in the 2012 presidential election, the poll has implications for more competitive Western states where Hispanics’ political voice is growing: Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona. Republican consultant Marty Wilson, who worked with pollster Bob Moore on the poll, tried hard to find reasons for GOP optimism in the numbers, but acknowledged: “The short answer is, it ain’t going to be easy.”

Indeed, it won’t be easy at all, because the numbers are grim:

Just 26 percent of those polled had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, compared with 62 percent who viewed Democrats favorably. Asked how the GOP could win them over, 32 percent said they would never vote for a Republican, while 30 percent suggested moving to the center and nominating less conservative candidates. Just 22 percent said sticking with conservative values was the way to go. As the pollster put it in his own presentation of the findings, “The GOP candidate is not going to win many Latino voters by emphasizing Conservatism.” Immigration, the poll found, is “the elephant in the GOP living room”: 67 percent of Latinos favored a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, including 51 percent of Latino Republicans. Asked which party they trusted to reform immigration, 57 percent of those polled said Democrats, versus just 21 percent who trusted Republicans.

The GOP stands on the verge of losing the fastest growing ethnic group in the country for at least a generation, all because the conservative base continues to cling to a restrictionist, anti-immigrant policy on immigration and refuses to even discuss the possibility of compromise on issues like amnesty for people already in the country illegally. To these conservatives, the answer to the immigration problem is an easy one but the truth it that it isn’t easy, and they’re leading the GOP down the road to electoral disaster.