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What interests me most about the whole immigration rigmarole is what I can only describe a lack of will to power on the part of these right wing parties. Surely they don't expect these immigrants (or, more to the point, their kids) to actually vote for them, right?
This to me is the most baffling part of the Reagan-Romney era GOP, their seeming total lack of concern for preserving their power base. Reagan '84 lost the Hispanic vote by 28 points, he signs an amnesty in '86, and the GOP is rewarded by Hispanics voting for Dukakis by a 40 point margin. At this point the GOP was freshly sniffing power (never mind that they couldn't win the House) after having been wiped off the map by the Ellis Islanders for half a century. '92? Same story, 36 point loss. '96 was outright comical, a 52 point loss. Goodbye California! I bet Pete Wilson was regretting his vote for the '86 IRCA at that point. W in 2000? Another over 30 point loss. W '04, the best a Republican has ever fared with the Hispanic vote? A 9 point loss if you're optimistic, more like 20 points if you're not. Meanwhile, as refugees from Communism have become less represented in the Asian-American vote they've done nothing but trend left and now vote Democratic almost as strongly as Hispanics. From McCain onward, the story has been the same, 33-36 point losses in the ever-growing Asian and Hispanic vote. At no point in this time did the GOP above the House level see a problem with this.
Worse yet, the economic winners of Reagan/present-era neoliberalism and free trade have been blue cities while Republican-leaning interests constitute an ever-shrinking portion of the American economy. The Republicans conserved next to nothing (They did relatively well with gun rights, but IMO this is massive cope relative to everything else they lost.) and their voter base is now outnumbered and relatively poorer than their opponents. What was the point of it? They've converted precisely zero leftists and shit on their own voters so long that they are now hated and lose their own primaries to whatever populist loon rolls into town. I get that big business thinks they're winning and can just cozy up to the Democrats, but what happens when they no longer have credible opposition? Surely a half-century of being taxed and bullied by the FDR coalition wasn't the plan.
The only thing keeping the GOP going since 1988 is that their base has become more geographically efficient faster than it shrank, and REDMAP and Trump 2016 were probably as far as that was going to work. It's going to take an epic act of self-sabotage by the Democrats, one such that they outright lose the Mexican-American vote, to bail out the GOP, and I don't see it happening. Nixon/Reagan arguably only happened because the Irish and Italians hated black Great Migrants enough to start voting Republican, and there isn't another Great Migration in the cards.
Good points and I've wondered the same thing. Yet I think there's a certain kind of mildly autistic right-winger who keeps trying to show charts and tables to GOP functionairies saying "See! if you continue on this path, you'll be permanently out of power. Look at California!". The thing is.. they know and they've already heard that pitch 50 times. So ignorance cannot be the answer here.
So why don't they care? I suspect it may simply be due to donor influence. The rich people donating to the GOP want the gravy train to go on and ultimately the voters don't matter much.
Additionally, even very diverse states like Texas or Florida are now fairly red so the "demographics is destiny" argument is weaker today than in the past.
Texas and Florida are dealing with very particular situations enabled by the exact ethnic mixes(Cubans in Florida, or in Texas the ability to exploit the centraco/Mexican divide) showing up, quirks of the local economy(Texas in particular has a GOP that benefits strongly from being able to fearmonger about democrats enacting stringent oil and gas regulations), an absolutely incompetent opposition, ideologically compatible immigration, and probably on some level a willingness to play less than 100% fairly.
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FDR did much better in the old South than he did in those parts of the US which were most subject to immigration. For example, in 1940 he won about 85% of Alabama and Georgia but only about 50% of Massachusetts and New York. Ellis Islanders do not seem to have been the core of New Deal Democrat power. The immigrant / Democrat alignment seems to have come later than that.
It's not so much that the Ellis Islanders were the nationwide core of Democratic power, as that they were decisive for FDR in the northeast. The New Dealers are littered with the names of Ellis Islanders and their descendants, people like James Farley (who did much to build on Al Smith's strength in cities are solidify the Democrat/Immigrant marriage) and Robert Wagner. Al Smith got nominated in '28 for a reason, and it was that he'd flipped New York at the state level, very nearly took it in '28, and did take Massachusetts (something Woodrow Wilson failed to do in '16, and only did in '12 thanks to the Roosevelt/Taft split). Not bad against a popular almost-incumbent in the form of Herbert Hoover. You can't tell the story of 20th Century politics in Massachusetts without talking about James Curley any more than you can tell that of Michigan without Coleman Young (first black mayor of Detroit, born in Alabama, and whose brand of politics probably drove Michiganders to vote for another politician from Alabama in the '72 Democratic primary, the infamous George C. Wallace).
FDR (and Harry Truman) was wildly popular with Southerners and lavished much patronage on the region, such that contrary to popular conception the South remained Democratic-leaning long after their temper-tantrum over civil rights. IMO the strength of Nixon and Reagan's coalition gets somewhat overrated by big electoral victories against generally mediocre Democratic candidates when in fact neither ever won the House. The GOP would have to wait for all the Southerners who came of age under FDR and Truman to start dying of old age before they really took over the South.
Great comment.
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DeSantis seemed to do well in Florida with Hispanics (granted Cubans as unique). Maybe covid changes things up?
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