The post David linked to by Simon Rosenberg pretty comprehensively explains how the GOP’s focus on immigration as a wedge issue has blown up in the party’s own face. It failed in Virginia, it failed here in New York — ground zero of the “giving licenses to illegals” controvery — and there’s no reason to expect it will do anything but fail next year.
So it’s funny that Rudy Giuliani’s people appear to be completely ignoring the message. Maybe it’s because he thinks he has to make up for his past “softness” on the issue. Maybe it’s because his New York connections make the ordeal of Eliot Spitzer loom larger in his sight than it really should. Whatever it is, Rudy still seems to think that nativism is political winner for him, or at least that what the Chicago Tribune implies:
Among voters who call immigration a “very important” issue in the next election, polling indicates that Giuliani holds an advantage over Clinton in a theoretical match-up. And for most of the Republican field, being against any form of illegal immigration has been a winner. [...]
This is the opening that Giuliani sees at a time when he and Clinton hold the greatest advantages in early election polling.
The problem with nativism as a strategy is really simple: it wins you votes, but in the bigger picture it costs you more votes than it wins you. That’s why it has been the Congressional wing of the GOP pushing the issue — it only makes sense, if it makes sense at all, on a very narrow, retail basis. As the article quotes Pew pollster Andrew Kohut explaining:
“The history of this particular issue is that it is so spotty in terms of where it has an impact,” he said. It plays “in only some areas of the country, the areas where people are overwhelmed by immigrants, or where they are not overwhelmed and there is a lot of nativist sentiment … . As a national issue, this doesn’t rank very high because it is focused in a relatively small set of places.”
Why has the Bush White House failed to join the nativist crusade? Because it has had to look at the big political picture, and Karl Rove, for all his blundering, understood how immigration works in that context. If Giuliani wants to be president, he’d do well to avoid being tempted by narrow calculations on the issue, and look at the matter through Rovian eyes.
1 Response to “Scaling the Immigration Issue”
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There was a story today on CNN about Thompson pissing off Iowans by showing up half an hour late for a campaign event. It pushed me over the edge. I cannot take four more months of Romney flip-flopping, Thompson being lazy, and Giuliani being a crazed autocrat who lies all the time and panders to the extreme right EVERY SINGLE DAY. They are just going to keep doing the same things over and over till we all want to jump off a bridge. There are just no angles left to cover, no jokes left to make, no snark left to unleash. The Hollywood writers are on strike, and now the political news is in re-runs as well. It’s too much. Is this a strategy — so that when the general election comes everybody on the left will be too bored attacking the candidate for the same damn things they’ve been attacking them for since the primary campaign began?
Left by The Sleep Thief
November 11, 2007 at 1:23am