Ralston Reports: Hispanic vote drives election strategy

In 2010, Brian Sandoval lost the Hispanic vote by a 2-to-1 margin after embracing Arizona's infamous racial profiling measure. In 2013, Gov. Sandoval supported comprehensive immigration reform, and he now gets a majority of the Latino vote in recent polls.

In 2012, Sen. Dean Heller lost the Hispanic vote by a 2-to-1 margin after opposing the DREAM Act and talking about "anchor babies" in his campaign. In 2013, Heller, too, backed comprehensive immigration reform, having seen the exit polling light.

If you want to understand why Hillary Clinton has come to Nevada twice and scurried left of President Obama on immigration reform, if you want to understand why Republicans have a Sisyphean feat in winning the state in 2016, if you want to know why last week's National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials convention in Las Vegas induced Bernie Sanders to finally talk about immigration reform, the Sandoval/Heller experiences are instructive.

Both Nevada Republicans won their races despite being crushed in the Hispanic cohort, with Heller barely winning by 12,000 votes. But if both had not faced severely flawed candidates – Sandoval had a foe named Reid and Heller an opponent under a House ethics probe – those races could have had a different outcome (or at least, in the governor's case, been closer).

At some point, elections are not about politics or policy; they are about math. He or she who gets the most votes wins, and Hispanics arguably are the most potent rising bloc in both Nevada and American politics.

All other things being equal – and they rarely are – that demographic, which votes overwhelmingly Democratic, presages trouble for Republicans up and down the ticket. The best hope for the GOP to mitigate losses in a year where turnout will be much higher than the miraculous red wave of 2014 is Latino Numero Uno. Sandoval's popularity, which crosses party and ethnic lines, could save some Republicans.

Maybe.

The numbers – and the candidate matrix – augur well for the Democrats. Consider:

According to the Pew Research Center, Hispanic turnout as a percentage of the overall electorate in Nevada was 10 percent in 2004, 15 percent in 2008 and 18 percent in 2012. Some Democratic strategists think it could pass 20 percent in 2016, which would prove decisive in some contests, including some of the more important ones on the ballot.

Remember that Catherine Cortez Masto, the former attorney general, is running to become the first Latina ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. In Cresent Hardy's congressional district, the congressman could easily confront a Hispanic challenger as both state Sen. Ruben Kihuen and ex-Assemblywoman Lucy Flores are competing. If 2016 is not a year for Hispanics to get excited, no year is.

There is a danger here in being overly simplistic. Candidates matter. Campaigns matter. Atmospherics matter.

And it's also true that the Hispanic community, like any subset of the electorate, is not monolithic. Cubans are not Mexicans are not Puerto Ricans.

But figures released at NALEO showed 54 percent of Latinos in Nevada are registered Democrats and only 18 percent are Republicans. That's stark. Three-to-1, if you are not dexterous at math.

Add the ability of Hillary Clinton's campaign to mobilize the Hispanic vote and the Culinary union, which has something to prove after the 2014 debacle, and I'd be worried if I were a Republican candidate. (I wrote about some of that for Politico Magazine this week: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/hillarys-plan-to-win-nevada-119187.html#.VYSduRNViko.)

Interestingly, Cortez Masto's likely foe, Rep. Joe Heck, has run strongly with Latinos, although that's partly because his Democratic challengers the last two cycles have been so inept. But Hardy is all but a Dead Man Walking in a district that is almost a third Hispanic. That's not a mountain to climb; that's Everest.

All of this makes the GOP presidential candidates' snub of NALEO – none came except Ben Carson – very puzzling. Yes, it's June 2015, and yes, the concomitant Faith and Freedom Coalition meeting is more in their wheelhouse.

But NALEO has thousands of elected officials who could have gone back to their homes and told colleagues and constituents: "Hey, Jeb Bush speaks our language" or "You know, Marco Rubio really gets our issues."

Instead, they left the playing field open for Clinton (and Sanders), and she took full advantage, piggybacking on her immigration reform roundtable last month in Las Vegas. Clinton repeated everything she said in May, which included saying she would use even more executive orders than President Obama.

"You can have the discretion to exercise deferment, to prevent deportation, which gives people more of an opportunity to be able to take a deep breath," she told me later on "Ralston Live." "Now that does require shifting resources within the immigration system, but I would do that for example."

Clinton knows the numbers, too, here and in other swing states, including Florida and Colorado. And she knows Obama garnered 70 percent of the Hispanic vote in Nevada when he won re-election.

Yes, Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama of 2008. But she may not need to be. Whatever her baggage, whatever the campaign may bring, at some point it's all about the math.

Jon Ralston has been covering Nevada politics for more than a quarter-century and also blogs at ralstonreports.com.