We’re going to hear all over again about how crucial the Hispanic vote was to Obama’s win. It’s bunk.
You know—how the GOP killed itself by not favoring open borders abjectly enough, and so forth and so on. Hysterical pundits will announce that the Hispanic tidal wave accounted for 8 or 9 or even 10 percent of the vote!
Then, a year from now, the Census Bureau will quietly announce the results of its huge post-election survey of voting, the gold standard of ethnic voting shares. It will show that the Hispanic share of the vote, which was 5.4 percent in 2000 and 6.0 percent in 2004 actually was only 6.9 percent in 2008, or whatever.
And nobody will pay any attention at all because the fallacious conventional wisdom (10 percent!!!) will already be carved into everybody’s brains.
Moreover, you’ll hear all about how the GOP share of the Hispanic vote dropped from 44 percent in 2004 to, say, 30 percent on Tuesday.
First, as I’ve shown repeatedly, it wasn’t 44 percent in 2004. The exit poll company admitted the mistake several months later. It was about 40 percent.
Second, the reason the GOP even got 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 was because Bush and Rove bought the Hispanic vote via the Great Hispanic Housing Bubble. In part due to Bush’s jihad against down payments on home loans, mortgage dollars borrowed for home purchases by Hispanics increased an insane 691 percent from 1999 to 2006. In 1999, less than 7 percent of first time buyers in California, the black hole of the Bubble, put no money down. By 2004, it was 33 percent, by 2006 a ludicrous 41 percent.
Democrats appealed to Hispanics by being the Tax and Spend party. Bush and Rove resolved that Republicans would win Hispanics over by being the Borrow and Spend party.
And debauching credit standards for Hispanics debauched them for everybody. So there was a huge amount of unneeded construction and remodeling, carried out in large part by Hispanics workers, making Hispanics unusually pleased with the Republican incumbent in 2004.
In 2008, though, as made clear by a recent LA Times article on how Hispanic voters in Las Vegas are trending toward Obama because so many have defaulted on their mortgages, the firehose of Other People’s Money has finally been turned off. And Latinos are returning to their natural political home. [Economic strife drives Latino vote, By Marjorie Miller, October 26, 2008]
The Mortgage Minority Meltdown. The Diversity Recession. And landslide losses anyway. How did the Bush-Rove experiment work out for the GOP—let alone America?
(Cheerful footnote: To combat all this confused thinking, I’ve written a new book about Obama’s life story. As the two parts of the title imply, it contrasts the recent Axelrodian hagiography of Obama as the biracial transcender with the man’s own evasively written but ultimately quite clear autobiography. Thus I call it, in tribute to the upcoming Harry Potter movie, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s "Story of Race and Inheritance."
If McCain loses (and I'm writing before any of the polls close), the main demographic reason will be that his share of the non-Hispanic white vote (which will make up 3/4ths or more of the total vote) will have fallen versus the GOP's 58 percent in 2004. Bush lost the overall popular vote in 2000 because he only got 54% of the white vote. He won the overall popular vote in 2004 fairly easily because he got 58% of the white vote.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer