Republicans need more than a Marco Rubio primary win to win over Hispanics

Ledyard King | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Republicans who assume Marco Rubio could successfully woo large blocs of Hispanic voters in 2016 could be in for a rude surprise.

The Florida senator, dynamic and bilingual, seems to embody a new generation of Latino leaders. But even if he wins the Republican presidential nomination, experts say, Rubio faces two daunting hurdles: the GOP's anti-immigrant rhetoric and his own retreat from comprehensive immigration reform two years ago.

“I just don’t see his ethnic background as a thing that (alone) manages to win Hispanic voters,” said Ali Valenzuela, an assistant political science professor for Latino Studies at Princeton University. “Hispanic voters are smarter than that. They actually care about policy. As long as he’s not willing to move some distance towards the middle, he’s not going to get the Hispanic vote any more than another (GOP) candidate will.”

It’s a math problem that’s bigger than Rubio, the 44-year-old son of Cuban immigrants.

When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, he captured an estimated 40% of the Hispanic vote – a high-water mark for the modern GOP.

But the upswing didn't last. Sen. John McCain of Arizona captured 31% of the Hispanic vote in the 2008 presidential election, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney pulled in 23% in 2012, according to estimates.

At the same time, Hispanic political clout has grown steadily. The 5.9 million Hispanics who voted in the 2000 presidential election made up 5.3% of ballots cast, census records show. In 2012, 11.2 million Hispanics voted, making up 8.4% of the total.

With white non-Hispanics declining as a share of the electorate, Republicans must capture 42%-47% of the Hispanic vote, an analysis by Seattle-based polling firm Latino Decisions concluded in July.

Rubio’s own pollster agrees. Whit Ayres, president of North Star Opinion Research, told reporters earlier this year the GOP nominee “is going to need to be somewhere in the mid-40s, or better, among Hispanic voters.”

Experts say that seems increasingly unattainable, given the harsh language and strident policy positions adopted by some GOP candidates.

Front-runner Donald Trump has described many Mexican immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” and says Mexico should pay to build a wall along the Southwest border. Such rhetoric will damage the GOP among Hispanic voters in November 2016, even if the nomination fight is won by Rubio or former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the two candidates seen as having the best shot with those voters, said Sylvia Manzano, a former assistant political science professor at Texas A&M University who has studied Hispanic voting patterns.

Significantly, Trump has pledged to support whoever wins the GOP nomination.

“Whoever the nominee is, the Democrats can say this person is Trump-approved and they can use all that language to hang around the nominee’s neck,” Manzano said. She now works at Latino Decisions,a firm recently hired by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Manzano is not doing any work for the campaign.

During last month’s Republican presidential debate in California, Trump criticized Bush for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. Rubio weighed in, describing how his Spanish-speaking grandfather instilled in him a sense of patriotism about the United States.

“And so, I do give interviews in Spanish, and here's why – because I believe that free enterprise and limited government is the best way to help people who are trying to achieve upward mobility,” Rubio said. “And if they get their news in Spanish, I want them to hear that directly from me, not from a translator at Univision.”

But Rubio also supports tightening border security before even considering other changes to immigration policy, such as creating a pathway to citizenship for people in the country illegally.

It wasn’t always that way. In 2013, Rubio was part of the “Gang of Eight,” a bipartisan group of senators who crafted a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included tougher border security, increased monitoring of immigrants who had overstay their visas, and a pathway to citizenship.

The bill passed the Senate but went nowhere in the House. Rubio abandoned the effort after Tea Party conservatives blasted him for his participation.

Valenzuela said he doesn’t think that reversal by itself will hurt Rubio’s standing among Hispanics. More damaging, he said, is Rubio's opposition to the Affordable Care Act, environmental regulation, and proposals to increase the federal minimum wage.

In poll after poll, Valenzuela said, Latino voters say they're fine "with big government and government providing a safety net for citizens, and creating a level playing field."

"Government is perceived as good and helpful, not as an evil thing that needs to be dismantled,” he said.