This was the kicker to Ronald Brownstein's piece on the racial composition of the American electorate in 2012, which I argued previews some rather ugly identity politics:
Given Latinos' growing electoral importance and the GOP's sharp right turn on immigration issues, some senior Democrats privately say they would not be surprised if Republicans try to solve their challenge in a single stroke by picking a Hispanic vice presidential nominee in 2012. In 2008, Obama became the first national leader truly thrust forward by America’s changing demography. In 2012, if Republicans look to also surf that wave, first-term Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American Republican from Florida, could be the next.
This is a cute idea, but it's probably not going to work. I was initially mistaken about this, but a report from the immigration advocacy group America's Voice shows that nominating Latinos with right-wing views on immigration didn't do much to get Latinos to vote Republican.
A candidate's position on immigration matters far more to Latino voters than her ethnic background. In fact, many of the 2010 Latino Republican candidates ran on anti-immigrant platforms and performed poorly with Latino voters. Neither of the Latino Republicans elected to governorships in 2010—Nevada's Brian Sandoval and New Mexico’s Susana Martinez—came close to winning a majority of the Latino vote.
What about Marco Rubio? Well, he did win a majority of the Latino vote, but Florida is different from other states because its large Cuban community means that the Latino vote skews heavily Republican. The report notes that "Rubio won 62% of the Latino vote, according to Latino Decisions, including 78% of the Cuban vote and 40% of the non‐Cuban Latino vote." The latter number is frankly more important in predicting whether or not Rubio's biography would mitigate the GOP's approach to immigration.
This is all academic, since Rubio has said he's not running -- I'm just trying to make a larger point about the limits of tokenism, which frankly should have been learned during the last presidential election. While Rubio is a much more shrewd politician, the Republican Party isn't going to be able to simply buy Latinos off after four years of nativist rhetoric by putting a Latino politician on the ticket.
