Inside The Beltway With Michael Green

Cómo se Dice Hispanic Voters?

If you want to understand Senator Dean Heller and Hispanic voters,
consider John Adams, Buck Owens, and Timothy Dolan. Yes, that’s a
diverse trio, and we’ll come back to them later.

But first, in Las Vegas, Heller addressed a meeting of Hispanics in
Politics. Reporters and pundits covering the event made it sound as
though the Republican was the modern equivalent of Daniel in the
lion’s den, which is a little much.

Latinos are—as if you didn’t know—a crucial group of voters,
especially in the Sunbelt, and predominantly Democratic. In 2004,
George W. Bush’s pollster said he needed 40 percent of the Latino vote
in several key states to be reelected, and he got them. Four years
later, John McCain didn’t get to that total and struggled with the
issue of immigration, legal and illegal.

As for being elected to the Senate from Nevada, it’s harder to say
what percentage of the Latino vote a Republican would have to win.
But Heller knows he is in a tough race with Democratic Representative
Shelley Berkley (again, no news there, to him or her). He has as
great a desire to cut into the voting blocs expected to go her way as
she does to cut into his support.

So, Heller went before HIP (one of the great acronyms, to be sure).
Here are the basics of what emerged:

--Heller said he opposes the DREAM Act, which is designed to create a
path to citizenship for illegal immigrants’ children who graduate from
college or serve in the military. He argued that illegal immigrants
would benefit from it in ways not available to U.S. citizens, and its
passage would mean rewarding illegal immigrants. According to a
recent poll by the firm Latino Decisions, about 85 percent of
Hispanics support the DREAM Act. Heller didn’t exactly thrill his
audience, but he was willing to make his case.

--Heller wants to improve the system for becoming a legal U.S.
citizen, but that doesn’t mean he supports amnesty for the illegal
immigrants (estimated to be somewhere around 11 million) in the U.S.

--Heller told Otto Merida, who is both head of the Latin Chamber of
Commerce and a fellow Republican, that he would speak to that group
and meet with him to discuss possible immigration reform. Whether or
not Heller and Merida can settle the immigration issue this was a wise
and nice political move by Heller. He had canceled an earlier
speaking engagement before the Latin Chamber, apparently because a
staff member from the campaign of Representative Shelley Berkley, who
is running against Heller, would be present and another Democratic
staffer would be videotaping his appearance, doubtless hoping for
fodder for a campaign commercial.
--Heller argued to the Hispanic audience that they agree with him on
about “80 percent” of the issues, including the need for more jobs and
such subjects as faith and family values.

And that brings us back to Messrs. Adams, Owens, and Dolan, each of
whom has a connection to Heller’s situation and what might be done
about it.

You’ve heard of Adams, the most querulous and in some ways most
interesting of the founding fathers (he also was married to the most
interesting of the founding mothers). A few years ago, David
McCullough’s marvelous biography reintroduced him to many Americans
who had been more focused on other members of that vaunted crew—George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, to name a few.
Adams could be lovably irascible, and McCullough didn’t overlook the
warts.

But McCullough did make less than he might have out of an episode that
wasn’t to Adams’s credit: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which
essentially made it a crime to criticize the president and took aim at
immigrants, especially from France, by making citizenship harder to
achieve.

The point of mentioning that episode is not just to have the chance to
invoke one of Adams’s great lines—“Power always thinks it has a great
soul”—or to point out that even the most admirable among us are
flawed. It’s also to note that immigration and immigrants have been a
political issue in the United States from Day One. It’s a reminder
that once it was the French. Other groups whose immigration has
caused controversy have included southern and eastern Europeans,
Asians, and Hispanics, meaning arrivals from the east, south and west;
if Canadians have caused a comparable ruckus by immigrating, the news
hasn’t reached this far yet.

Also, it’s worth remembering that not everybody sees the issue from
the same perspective. That seems obvious enough, but it’s even deeper
than that. Illegal immigration wasn’t the big issue behind the Alien
Act of 1798, nor did it guide the reaction to the Irish influx after
the potato blight of the 1840s. The same may be said of the response
to the Hispanic community’s growth in the last three decades.
But as the old gospel song says, walk a mile in your neighbor’s
shoes. What strikes one person as a reasonable response to law-
breaking may be racist to somebody else. For that matter, a
significant number of immigrants resent illegal immigrants, whether
from their part of the world or from another, for breaking the law or
bringing unwanted or unfavorable attention to them. Many a politician
has to walk on eggshells here, not just Heller.

As for Buck Owens, he’s here not for being on Hee Haw but for one of
his hit songs: “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail.” That is indeed what
Heller has in this case.
More than a quarter of Nevada’s population is Hispanic. That’s a
large voting bloc, if indeed it is a bloc. Too many politicians and
political commentators—and add any expert you want to that list—think
of groups like “Hispanics,” “African Americans,” “women” and “gays,”
for example, as monolithic when they are no more so than, say, “men.”
But Hispanic voters have been largely Democratic, which means Heller
either wants to pick up the rest or thinks he can win some of them
away from Berkley.
That puts Heller in something of a Catch-22—appropriately enough,
since that novel’s author was Joseph Heller (no relation, apparently,
though the senator may appreciate the irony). The GOP has mostly
opposed the DREAM Act and similar measures. Some of its members have
gone further, talking about border fences and their admiration for Joe
Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who has become famous or infamous,
depending on your point of view, for his pursuit of illegal immigrants
(Arizona has had its own share of controversy as a state on that
issue, of course).

To stake out different ground would risk offending a chunk of the
GOP. That’s a lot to ask of any politician, even in a seemingly safe
congressional seat, which Heller had, and especially when a Republican
is in a battle royal to keep his Senate seat. And if you think that’s
no big deal, think of a Democrat campaigning against choice or gay
rights.

But Heller’s record on this subject doesn’t put a bullseye on him.
And he certainly wants to avoid offending a significant voting bloc
that doesn’t know him very well, given that he has spent the previous
four years as a congressman representing all of Nevada outside of
Clark County and the parts of the state’s most populous county with
fewer Hispanic residents.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this is Heller’s first statewide race
for federal office. He served two terms as secretary of state, a
position that includes such topics as elections. Heller never ran
into serious trouble on the question of immigration, legal or illegal,
in relation to voting. Nor have Hispanic population growth and the
immigration debate materialized since he moved to Capitol Hill in
2007. Nor, for that matter, has Heller been particularly vocal in
either house on these issues.

No one would deny Berkley and her party have a significant advantage
with Hispanic voters, and not just in registration. She has
represented District #1 since 1998, when—let’s test your memory bank—
she defeated Don Chairez, then a Republican, who came closer to
defeating her than any Republican since. She has had more than a
decade to cultivate the Hispanic community in southern Nevada, and of
course she has done that. Heller hasn’t and couldn’t, given the
offices he has held.

How does Heller hold onto that tiger’s tail and get the cat under
control? One suggested way has been to appeal to concerns about the
economy. But will Hispanic voters decide the solution to economic
problems lies with the Democrats they more frequently have voted for,
or with Republicans? The smart money says Republicans could pick up
some votes but not a huge number—although Heller may not need a huge
number so much as he would welcome any number. After all, another
Buck Owens hit included the line, “I’m gonna make it big in Vegas.”

Heller’s reference to “80 percent” of the issues and “faith” and
family” suggests how he hopes to do that, and now we come to Cardinal
Dolan.

He’s of Irish heritage, and the Irish were at the center of
immigration debates in many cities, including New York, where Dolan
has been archbishop, but, more importantly, his appointment as
cardinal was one of many announced recently. One new cardinal came
from South America, one from India, one from Hong Kong, and none from
Africa, which has twice as many Catholics as the United States does.
This prompted one observer to tell The New York Times, “No one ever
said that the Catholic Church is a one-man, one-vote operation, but it
looks strange when Brazil, the biggest Catholic country in the world,
has so few cardinals and Italy has so many.”

This leads to an important point that many don’t stop to think about.
The pope chooses the cardinals. Just lke a president appointing a
federal judge, he seeks people of like or similar mind. John XXIII
and Paul VI, being more liberal, took the church in that direction.
Since 1978, the popes —John Paul II and now Benedict XVI—have been
more conservative than their predecessors, and their appointments have
reflected their conservatism.

This leads to another important point: the fastest-growing American
parishes have been almost uniformly in heavily Hispanic areas,
including southern Nevada. The new cardinals are not Hispanic or in
mostly Hispanic areas, prompting John Allen, a veteran journalist for
The National Catholic Reporter, to proclaim “this obvious disjunction
between the Catholic Church on the ground and the Catholic Church at
the top.”
Well, maybe and maybe not. But all of the above ties in with Heller’s
campaign, based on this question: How much influence does the church
itself have on the voting habits of its members?

That’s hard to say, just as it is for any group influenced by
religion. Historically, black churches have influenced voting, but in
Democratic primaries more than in partisan general elections. The
Mormon Church’s membership is far more Republican than Democratic, but
the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate is a Mormon Democrat, so, go
figure.

Meanwhile, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition is trying to
register more of the estimated 10 million young Hispanic evangelicals
to vote in several swing states, including Nevada. They talk not
about traditionally hot-button social issues, but about the DREAM Act
and economic matters.

However, Heller’s campaign has to hope that the conservative cast of
the Catholic church’s leadership trickles down to the flock. And that
the part that trickles down wouldn’t be the more liberal economic
views Pope Benedict has voiced recently, and that go back to 1891 and
Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which supported the right to
unionize and opposed unfettered capitalism. Ideally for Heller, what
would filter down would be conservative social views.

Adding to or subtracting from the difficulty, the Hispanics Heller
wishes to reach are almost entirely in southern Nevada, where he has a
substantial population to which to introduce himself. That means
he’ll be reaching out to everybody anyway. But it also means that if
he wants to attract the Republican base in Clark County, he has to be
careful not to be too attractive to Hispanics on immigration policy.
If he and Otto Merida actually came up with their own plan, that might
help in the Hispanic community, but whether it would do Heller much
good in other parts of Clark County and the state is debatable.

Heller also can hope for a conservative coattail effect. Despite his
denials, Senator Mario Rubio of Florida seems to be almost every
Republican’s favorite possible vice-presidential candidate (Governor
Brian Sandoval’s name popped up, too). If that happened, Republicans
would hope to attract Hispanic votes to their whole ticket. And in
House District 1, where Dina Titus and Ruben Kihuen are in a
Democratic primary, the first announced Republican candidate is a
former school principal, Miguel Rodrigues. Could he affect Heller’s
vote?

Maybe, but as crazy as it sounds, is the Hispanic vote that important
for Heller to reach? Berkley is very much a Las Vegan and slightly
left of center. Heller has every reason to expect to run strong in
northern Nevada, but it’s reasonable to expect that those factors
would help Heller bring in a stronger vote out of northern Nevada than
he might have anticipated in the first place. And recent trends show
that he may need it, and Hispanic votes will be hard for him to pluck.

Just after the 2010 election, Latino Decisions reported that Senator
Harry Reid earned more than 90 percent of the Hispanic vote in
Nevada. Granted, that was in an election against Sharron Angle, who
told a group of Hispanic students they looked “a little Asian” to her.

One Latino Decisions pollster told the Review-Journal at that time,
“In Nevada the Republican candidates have to absolutely court the
Hispanic vote or they are doomed,” and that if the trends from 2008
and 2010 continued, Nevada Republicans “may never win another Senate
or presidential contest.”

That seems overstated. But Hispanic registration in recent years has
been overwhelmingly Democratic, at least in part because Democrats
have made outreach to the Hispanic community a key activity. Then add
in that the senator’s son, Rory, wasn’t far behind his father in the
number of votes he won in the Hispanic community in the race for
governor.

Making matters more interesting, Rory Reid’s victorious opponent was
Sandoval, who strongly supports Heller and endorsed Rick Perry in the
Republican presidential race. That’s the governor of Texas who
sounded a little soft on immigration in the opinion of some hard-
liners, so he announced that his Arizona campaign chairman would be …
Joe Arpaio.

You could bet the house that Heller won’t sound like Sheriff Joe or
try to. But to win over Hispanic voters, he has the hurdle of also
needing support from those who like the sound of what Sheriff Joe has
to say. Can he do it? That may be why they call it politics.