Roger Ailes is kvetching. “The president likes to divide people into groups,” he huffs into the phone. “He’s too busy getting the middle class to hate rich people, blacks to hate whites. He is busy trying to get everybody to hate each other.” With that off his chest, Ailes gets back on message. “We need to get along,” he says.

It’s an unexpected plea from the Fox News CEO considering his impressive record of provocation. But recently, “getting along” has become an imperative for the conservative movement. Mitt Romney lost the Latino vote by nearly 50 points, and now almost everyone agrees that the Republican Party needs to improve with Hispanic voters to have a shot at the White House in 2016. That could also be Ailes’s last year at Fox News: His contract expires then, when he’ll be 76 years old. So if Roger Ailes wants to see a Republican win what may be his last presidential election as a major player, he’ll need to try to make conservatism more palatable to Latinos. Which, of course, he will.





“The fact is, we have a lot—Republicans have a lot more opportunity for them,” Ailes says. “If I’m going to risk my life to run over the fence to get into America, I want to win. I think Fox News will articulate that.”

There have already been signs of evolution. Sean Hannity, long a staunch opponent of “amnesty,” recently came out in favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. And Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the GOP’s immigration Moses, has been putting in lots of face time on the network. Rubio’s fans include Bill O’Reilly, who called his immigration plan “fair.”

Old habits die hard, however, and some of the delicacies of the immigration debate are lost on these recent converts. Just after the election, O’Reilly chose as one of his show’s best moments a clip of himself saying: “I’m not committing a hate crime by saying ‘illegal aliens’ are just that.” Similarly, Hannity tells me: “I’ve used ‘illegals’ all these years I’ve been on TV....I don’t see it as an offensive term.”