Trump’s very steep uphill climb
The Republican strategists and party bosses who say placing Donald Trump at the top of the ticket will lead to a political bloodbath for their party in November have very good reasons to worry. The immigrant-bashing billionaire is badly out of step with a nation that is growing more diverse every day.
“What’s amazing here is how much hate there is in the electorate. I’ve never seen this,” said pollster Ryan Tyson, whose employer, a trade group called Associated Industries of Florida, studied candidates’ popularity in the critical swing state. Tyson, a Republican, wasn’t talking about angry white conservative voters; he was referring to the opinions expressed by Latino voters polled in late April.
The group’s poll found that Clinton has a 13-point advantage against Trump in Florida, in part because 87% of Latino voters view Trump negatively, which is off the charts.
“It’s not like Hillary Clinton is strong, it’s that the Republican candidates are so weak,” Tyson said, describing why an ethnic group expected to make up 14% to 17% of the vote in Florida this fall — part of a record 27 million Latinos eligible to vote nationwide — are deeply wary of Trump.
You don’t have to be a lobbyist, elite insider or Republican establishment figure to be concerned about the political fallout from Trump’s immigration rants and threats; you just have to be able to count.
In the four years since the 2012 election, some 3.2 million Latinos nationwide have reached voting age, nearly all of them citizens — and every year, an additional 800,000 Latinos turn 18, a trend projected to continue until 2028.
That fact alone should be enough to keep Republican strategists from getting a good night’s sleep.
Add to that the large, often-overlooked population of 1.2 million Latino immigrants who became naturalized citizens in the last four years, and you have well over 4 million potential voters, clustered in California, Texas, Nevada, Arizona and the biggest swing-state prize, Florida.
As recently as the year 2000, Republican George W. Bush won 56% of the Latino vote in Florida. But by 2008 and again in 2012, Democrat Barack Obama carried a solid majority of Latino voters — and with it, the state and the White House.
With their presidential candidate now promising daily to build a wall on the Mexican border and ban Muslim immigrants, Republican leaders realize it will be hard to turn those numbers around — and fear the damage will hit one key state after another.
“If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30% of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life,” Republican Sen. John McCain recently told supporters. McCain’s uphill fight will likely be repeated in neighboring Nevada and Colorado, where Latinos may turn out in record numbers to vote against Trump.
McCain and other GOP establishment figures have warned for years about the long-term political folly of adopting harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, pointing out that simply getting a respectable 40% of Latino votes enabled Bush to carry Florida, Colorado, Nevada and Virginia and win the presidency.
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Obama, Trump called Romney’s “selfdeportation” plans “crazy” and “maniacal,” continuing: “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
\As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently wrote in a memo of warning to his fellow Republicans: “The challenge of Latino, Asian-American, Native American and African-American support must be met or the GOP will become a permanent minority party . . . . This challenge is so big, so hard and so central to our success that it should be one of the top three items at every meeting and have one of the larger budgets at the RNC.”
The 2016 version of Trump has shrugged off such warnings, arguing that he can redraw the political map and pull out enough new voters to win states (including New York) that Republicans normally write off.
That’s an uphill battle. Even if Trump were to carry all the states that Romney won in 2012, plus win the biggest swing states Romney lost — Florida, Ohio and Virginia — he would still fall short of the electoral vote total needed to win the presidency.
It’s a long way to November; Trump may yet find a way to flip a normally Democratic big state like Pennsylvania, which hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential race since 1988. But he has made an already tough campaign much harder by antagonizing a large and growing sector of the electorate.