Burnt Orange Report

Republican Minority Outreach A Failure

By Byron LaMasters

Take a look at the race for governor of Louisiana. Bobby Jindal aggressively courted Black voters. He was endorsed by New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, by Black Leadership Organizations (here and here), and Black Ministers. What good did it all do? Well, Jindal got twice the average vote for Republicans in Louisiana... A whopping 9%!

Republican Bobby Jindal's bold push to win over African-American voters with high-profile endorsements succeeded to a point: He got 9 percent of the black vote, almost twice what most Republicans typically get in the state.

There's a reason why most Republicans don't expend time and money on trying to get votes in the Black community. The votes simply aren't there. Even in this race where the Democrat was probably the third choice of the Black community and the Republican was a minority himself who agressively courted Blacks, the Republican only got 9% of the vote. Essentially it says that fewer than 5% of Blacks should be considered swing voters. Why? Because it's not in the self-interest of most Blacks to vote Republican. Republicans can try to convince Blacks otherwise, but as I'll explain below, the more minorities learn about Republicans the less they like them.

That brings us to the Houston mayoral race. The most shocking thing for me from the returns was the huge drop in Hispanic support for Orlando Sanchez from the 2001 runoff to the 2003 race:

A trip through Houston's Hispanic communities illustrates the dilemma: Yard signs for White, an Anglo Democrat, are often more visible than those for Sanchez, a Cuban-American Republican.

Exit polling and other analysis of the Nov. 4 vote shows that White and Sanchez each got just under half the Hispanic votes. State Rep. Sylvester Turner, who finished third, got less than 4 percent.

That is a stark contrast with 2001, when Sanchez got almost three of every four Hispanic voters in his narrow runoff loss to Mayor Lee Brown. That year, Sanchez benefited from excitement among Hispanics who thought Sanchez might be the city's first Latino mayor.

This is huge. Sanchez went from 72% of the Hispanic vote in the runoff in 2001 to 48% in the election this month. That's a 24 point drop. Now we can speculate as to why. One could argue that Bill White has spent much more time and money to appeal to Hispanics (Lee Brown basically ignored Hispanic voters). But maybe, just maybe it has something to do with Orlando Sanchez. Maybe Hispanics in Houston have figured him out. He's a Republican. The Houston Press reports:

Mayoral contender and former councilman Orlando Sanchez came in second behind front-runner Bill White, but the real shocker was his poor performance in Latino neighborhoods. Whereas Sanchez had carried a majority of Hispanic voters in his losing 2001 runoff against Lee Brown, an Insider survey of eight key precincts in last week's election showed a dramatic reversal.

In Magnolia Park's Box 11, Sanchez had beaten Brown by 294 to 183, a 63 percent majority. Last week Bill White took the same precinct 279 to 160, a 58 percent majority for the leader. Likewise, in Denver Harbor's Precinct 560, a Sanchez majority of 77 percent over Brown was reversed with White receiving 127 votes to 103 for Sanchez. Sanchez carried only two of the key precincts surveyed.

"The Hispanic community figured out that Orlando is a Republican," analyzes [political consultant Craig] Varoga.

"I think the Republican outreach effort to Hispanics has a lot of explaining to do," agrees Marc Campos, who worked for Sylvester Turner's mayoral campaign.

Bingo. Hispanic voters are smarter than Republicans give them credit for.

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Posted by Byron LaMasters at November 16, 2003 10:25 PM | TrackBack