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Memo to Republicanos: Reach out to minorities or lose
By LESLIE SANCHEZ
San Diego Union Tribune, September 30, 2007

The gaggle of Republicans vying for the GOP presidential nomination certainly represent the party's varying ideological shades. As a group, they aren't radiating “bold colors,” as Ronald Reagan famously advised was an important quality for a national leader. But they do reflect the many divergent groups within the broader Republican coalition.

That coalition – when it holds together – has won five national elections since carrying Reagan to office in 1980. When it split, as it did in 1992, it allowed the Democrats to win the White House. Lee Atwater, the political consultant who became national party chairman under the first President Bush, coined the phrase “the big tent” to refer to the ideological diversity among the party faithful. Over time, however, the phrase became political shorthand for keeping intra-party peace between conservatives and those who espoused a more socially moderate policy agenda.

It's time to have a meaningful conversation about the big tent. But not about the various strains of conservative orthodoxy that may be contained beneath; no, the conversation that needs to happen is about for whom party leaders and activists will make room.

The Republican Party has a problem with minorities. In the 2000 presidential election, African-Americans voted 9-to-1 against George W. Bush. His numbers were a bit better in 2004, but not by much. And few if any of the black Republican candidates running with him that year or in 2006 managed to win. This is in sharp contrast with the Clinton/Gingrich years in which minority Republicans such as J.C. Watts and Ken Blackwell were winning election and re-election by comfortable margins.

Some Republican strategists counter that, though the party has failed to make inroads with African-American voters, they are doing much better with Hispanics. According to projections, Republicans need to garner more than 25 percent of the Hispanic vote to win national elections past 2008. Sure, George W. Bush was popular with Hispanics; he won better than a third of their votes each time he ran for president (35 percent in 2000 and 44 percent in 2004). But what many fail to understand is that this reflects personal popularity with Hispanics – some of whom like him in spite of the fact he is a Republican, not because of it. He earned that support. He worked for it for years as a friendly face that was visible and accessible.

The sad reality is that Hispanics in the United States are just as likely to think of former California Gov. Pete Wilson and Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., as the face of the GOP as they are President Bush. And there are plenty of Democrats working hard to make this so and keep it so.

There is a false perception among voters that Republicans don't care about minorities – a perception they feed, unfortunately. And Democrats are more than happy to package the GOP as anti-Latino.

“In terms of occasional and swing [Hispanic] voters, they are more likely to go to the polls on the basis of what the GOP would do to them as opposed to what the Democrats would do for them. That was the theory that we used” to drive the vote, Democratic National Committee Latino Outreach Director Andy Hernandez told Stacey Connaughton for her book, “Inviting Latino Voters” (2005).

In reality, Hispanic voters are breaking with their traditional Democratic past, proving they are not monolithic in the voting booth and still settling on a political party.

Where the GOP fails is in its inability to consistently reach out to these Latinos in an effort to make them part of a winning political coalition. It's not just the lack of black and brown faces on the campaign trail – either as candidates or as senior advisers. It's the lack of understanding they project of certain issues and experiences and the lack of desire they seem to show toward the prospect of earning minority votes. Have they forgotten that many of these voters are part of their core constituency?

It's true that most of the GOP presidential candidates turned a blind eye to Univision's invitation to appear on a televised debate. And it's true that the turnout of GOP candidates was somewhat lackluster for the debate hosted by Tavis Smiley, formerly of BET.

One could argue, as folks inside the Bush White House did early on about invitations to participate in Julian Bond-led NAACP forums, that these were nothing more than an effort by liberal-leaning organizations to embarrass the GOP on race. And that might be true for Univision or Smiley, except that the failure of the current GOP presidential field to address minority audiences and issues extends to right-leaning groups as well.

When the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce brought 3,000 small-business leaders together in Puerto Rico this month, nary a Republican presidential candidate showed. Not even the second-tier folks such as Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and former United Nations Ambassador Alan Keyes – who made sure to attend the “Values Voters” debate held in Fort Lauderdale.

And none of the Republicans invited to the meeting of the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting – 2,000 upwardly mobile, politically active people in vote-rich Florida – made time to go.

OK, so maybe it's a conflict with travel schedules. Gov. Mitt Romney did go to the Republican National Hispanic Assembly convention, and Sen. John McCain is still waving the flag of comprehensive immigration reform before GOP audiences. But next Wednesday the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute will host a presidential candidates forum in Washington – at the convention center, an easy cab ride from Capitol Hill – while Congress is in session; the only candidates coming thus far are Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, former Arkansas Sen. Mike Gravel and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“The Latinos have not heard from Republican candidates,” says Esther Aguilera, the CHCI's president and CEO. “The last thing the Hispanic community wants is to be taken for granted and not taken seriously.”

It's true here as well that, in the past, the CHCI suffered from a left-leaning reputation. This lead several corporate sponsors to seek Hispanic groups offering an alternative voice, according to Octavio Hinojosa-Mier, executive director of the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Insititute, a conservative-leaning nonpartisan entity founded by GOP congressional Hispanics in 2004. Since formation of the new group, corporate sponsorships have more than tripled from six to over 20. Nevertheless, the CHCI forum is still a legitimate undertaking, involving 800 to 1,000 people, many of whom are probably just as undecided about who they want to be the next president of the United States as polls suggest many others are.

The failure of the GOP field goes beyond the candidates seeming unwillingness to make appearances for show at special-interest cattle calls. The changes in demographics, something the GOP leadership seems all too willing to ignore, argue for greater inclusion. Between 2000, when Bush was first elected, and 2009, when his successor will be sworn into office, the American Hispanic community will increase in size by more than 30 percent, 10 times as much as the white community and more than twice as much as the black community.

And this increase in the size of the Hispanic community isn't happening in a vacuum. You have to connect it to rising purchasing power, rising living standards and rising interest in community issues. Hispanics are the nation's largest minority group; they're also increasingly culturally conservative and business-minded.

Hispanic evangelical and charismatic Catholic leaders in California came out in force this month behind efforts to keep marriage between a man and a woman. “Our families need to stand up. The 'barrio' cannot be quiet anymore,” said Felix Posos of the Northern Pacific Latin American District of the Assemblies of God. And one Hispanic Business Roundtable survey shows that 43 percent of Hispanics surveyed have an IRA or 401(k); 69 percent favor an IRA-type Social Security reform plan that includes personal accounts; 56 percent think taxes are “too high”; and 53 percent said reducing taxes was “very important” in deciding how they would vote.

It's a very poor political calculation to think you can win the presidency without courting the votes of minorities – especially those that seem predisposed to stand with you on issues the liberal establishment has decided are thorny and politically risky.

The accelerated 2008 primary calendar increases the influence of early battleground states such as Florida, California, Michigan and Nevada, all of which have substantial Hispanic populations that play a bigger role in determining the GOP nominee.

Timing is everything. In 1999, George W. Bush was running print ads in Spanish and had a Hispanic coalitions director who delivered nearly 400 Hispanics to the Ames, Iowa, straw poll. Fast-forward seven years. Any strategist who suggests doing either of these things now would find their effort falling on deaf ears. The reasons vary. Some political consultants think that any effort to reach out to Hispanics invites a backlash from party activists concerned about illegal immigration. Spanish-language ads, rather than projecting inclusiveness, could be seen as an affront to those who support English only.

“I can't see us doing Spanish ads in Iowa because I don't think they would play well,” one senior GOP presidential strategist told me recently. “It's a different environment now. Back [in 1999] it was considered innovative and new. Now it's risky.”

Democrats recognize the potential political power to be found in a successful marriage of political elites and Hispanic interest groups that can mobilize the community. If the Republicans once knew this, they've forgotten it – or they're just running scared. The answer for the GOP is a bigger tent, not a smaller one.

“The Republican Party is treating us like bill collectors,” said U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Michael Barrera. “They can't keep ignoring us because the bill – our vote – will come due.”

Sanchez was director of the White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001-03 and is now owner of the Hispanic communications research firm Impacto Group LLC. She is also the author of “Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other.”

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