Marco Rubio’s Un-American Dream

In the run-up to 2016, one of the key questions for Republicans will be how to frame, market and package the issue of immigration reform. How can they make reform palatable to the party’s dominant right wing while substantially lessening Hispanic animosity?

There is a growing body of evidence that those intent on moderating the party’s ideological rigidity, including Karl Rove and Reince Priebus, face opposition from Republican primary voters, the most powerful force in the party.

Primary voters now exercise ultimate authority. In many states and districts, Republican incumbents are more concerned about challenges from within their party than they are about winning the general election against a Democrat.

In early maneuvering for the Republican nomination, Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, and Marco Rubio, a current Florida senator, represent the Hispanic outreach wing of the party.

For a pro-immigration-reform candidate to win the Republican nomination requires an extraordinary balancing act. He (or she) must mask the core source of conflict — his support of a path to citizenship — with tough-sounding additional provisions that signal to carefully targeted opponents of immigration that the government is actually on their side despite the advent of reform.

Advocating policies advanced by hard-liners like Senator John Cornyn of Texas — a biometric entry-exit system tracking immigrants that aims to prevent visa overstays; a trigger requiring a 90 percent apprehension rate of illegal aliens; drone and other electronic surveillance to detect illegal border crossings; and prohibition of benefits for unauthorized aliens — are essential to this approach.

Polling in New Hampshire suggests that threading this needle will not be easy. The WMUR Granite State Poll, conducted with the University of New Hampshire, found that from April to July support for Rubio among Republican voters collapsed as he moved to the left, first endorsing and then voting for a relatively lenient Senate immigration bill that was supported by President Obama. Rubio went from being favored by 15 percent of Republican voters to being favored by 6 percent.

Similarly, a tally by RealClearPolitics of 11 national surveys of Republican voters taken from late November 2012 to early August of this year, found an impressive drop in the backing for Rubio as he expressed increasingly pro-immigration views. Rubio was the leading candidate in six of the first seven polls but not in any of the four most recent. The average level of support for Rubio fell from 18 percent in the earliest seven polls to 11.5 percent in the next four.

Rubio’s prospects would look even bleaker if the polling were limited to those Republicans who consistently turn out in primaries, a far more conservative group than Republicans who only occasionally cast primary ballots. Solid majorities of these more activist voters require the politicians they support to move further right on immigration.

On July 31, the Pew Research Center released a report, “Whither the GOP?” based on a poll of 1,480 Americans, including 497 respondents who are Republican or lean Republican. Among the Republicans, Pew found, 54 percent called on the party to move in a more conservative direction; 41 percent said it should become more moderate, a 13-point difference.

More important, Republicans who say that they always vote in primaries (and whose views consequently carry more weight) are much more in favor of their party’s turning in a more conservative direction. Data provided to the Times by Pew shows that 58 percent of Republicans who always vote in primaries advocate more conservative stands, while 37 percent call for moderation, a 21-point split. Republicans who do not always vote in primaries are more evenly divided, 50-44.

Insofar as support or opposition to immigration reform is a proxy for more or less positive attitudes toward Hispanics, the Pew study shows a decided tilt among Republicans. Thirty-six percent of Republican voters say that the party’s stance toward immigration is not conservative enough, compared with 17 percent who say it is too conservative. Crucially, among Republicans who always vote in primaries, the division shifts further to the right, 41-14.

The dilemma of the Republican Party as it struggles to pick its way through the immigration minefield and build Hispanic support is further complicated by the fact that polling data suggests that the most fruitful source of new voters for the party’s candidates is not  Hispanics, but the white working class. It is already a Republican constituency, but the discontent of these voters with the Obama administration has been growing sharply.

Demographic data on President Obama’s favorability ratings from January 2012 to July 2013, supplied to the Times by the Pew Center, shows that among white non-college voters, Obama’s positive ratings fell sharply, from an average of 35 percent in the first 10 polls to 26 percent in the survey last month. The nine-point drop was driven heavily by white non-college men, whose rating of Obama fell 11 points, from 33 percent to 22 percent. The decline among white non-college women was 36 to 30.

This stands in sharp contrast with Obama’s favorability rating among college-educated whites, which averaged 48 percent through all 11 Pew polls.

These trends have encouraged conservatives who want Republicans to reject immigration reform and Hispanic outreach — and to instead further mobilize white voters. While not advocating this approach himself, Sean Trende, an elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, has suggested that it could prove viable. Trende wrote a four-part series discussing alternative approaches for the party. I wrote about the debate over missing white voters in a column earlier this summer.

I e-mailed Trende asking whether he agreed that the Pew polling data cited above suggested that the future course of the Republican Party may have already been decided by the depth of the conservatism of its most active voters. He replied:

There are larger forces at work here. The outsized Republican share of the white vote in 2010 – almost certainly the best showing for either party among whites in congressional races since 1822 — isn’t accidental. Whites are sliding toward minority status, and becoming more internally homogenous at the same time.

Ruy Teixeira, who specializes in analyzing political-demographic trends, has written perhaps the best description of the weaknesses of the white Republican strategy: the core target, the white working class, is “declining precipitously as a share of voters, down from 54 to 36 percent between 1988 and 2012.” At the same time, young white voters make up “the most liberal generation in the overall electorate by a considerable margin.”

Even if the Republican white strategy results in continued defeat in presidential elections, there are tactical reasons not to adopt a more liberal stance on immigration reform. The most important of these is the likelihood that geography and gerrymandering will keep the House in Republican hands through the end of this decade. In addition, the odds are even that Democrats will lose control of the Senate later this year. For many Republican politicians, shifts in Hispanic voting have little relevance to their individual re-election prospects, and the importance of Latinos in presidential contests is a secondary concern.

The real issue facing the Republican Party in presidential elections is that it needs new blood. Mitt Romney lost to Obama by a 3.85 percentage point margin, 51.06 to 47.21 — that’s 5 million votes. The party can try to boost its backing among whites, a steadily declining share of the electorate, or it can try to boost margins among Hispanics. The truth is that a winning Republican candidate will probably have to do both.

Projections of the impact of immigration reform range from Jeb Bush —  “immigrants are particularly important to help create more taxpayers to fund the safety net for the large, retiring baby boomer generation” — to the Heritage Foundation’s argument that immigration reform “would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion in new spending on entitlements and social programs.”

A path to citizenship can be construed in different ways depending on who’s offering what. A green card tomorrow or “end of the line” status, which could amount to a decade in legal limbo? A requirement that “undocumented aliens” pay all owed back taxes – a possibly prohibitive sum? Fines for illegal entry ranging from $2,000 to $10,000?  The need to demonstrate proficiency in English? Eligibility for health care? Public education? Student loans? What else?

A pro-immigration-reform candidate along the lines of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio will have to figure out how to balance the conflicting interests and values of a white and Hispanic coalition, just as the Democrats from 1968 onward have struggled to maintain — and win with — a biracial coalition, white and black. It’s a tough row to hoe, as Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and the one-termer Jimmy Carter can testify, but as Bill Clinton and Obama have more recently demonstrated, it’s not an impossible one.