Katie’s Dad 2.0

Today, I had the displeasure of reading yet another easy-to-refute ethnocentric column from one of America’s most accomplished Hispandering columnists, Linda Chavez. This time she’s in full fear-monger mode, and has a supposedly “conservative” study to back her up.

I’ve gotten out my low-grade flyswatter for the task.

But before I dispense with her nonsense, I have some Cadillac-sized nits to pick with the study. Its shortcomings are obvious but revealing them requires overcoming political correctness and juxtaposing Hispanic vs. White interests. As I see it. fairness requires that ethnocentric propositions for the benefit of one cohort be met with ethnocentric responses on behalf of another cohort, no matter how contemporarily painful it is to get there.

I downloaded and read the study behind Chavez’s article, Border Wars: The Impact of Immigration on the Latino Vote by a group called Americas Majority Foundation.

Let me summarize my thoughts about this claptrap AMF is trying to pass off as “objective analysis” by addressing my disagreement directly to AMF’s president, Richard Nadler:

Mr. Nadler, I’ve been studying election returns and doing voter targeting analyses for political campaigns for 20 years. I know my stuff, and I can smell devious intent in a collegue from a mile away. Your intent is transparent.

If you myopically study the effect of support for any policy or political proposal upon any small minority vote in any election without explicitly considering how the same policy proposal might affect a gargantuan majority that might be predisposed to oppose it, you’re being disingenuous.

Your method appears solely to be an attempt to induce fear in the majority by producing skewed statistics in order to get what you really want: Amnesty for whatever corporate interests you actually represent.

I refuse to believe you don’t know the numbers are stacked extraordinarily toward the contrary of your “objective conclusions.” So I must conclude you’re trying to pull the wool over the eyes of those most easily susceptible to study-spin: The Media. The vast majority of mainstream reporters, columnists and editors are incapable of plumbing the details of a study like yours to find and expose its errant premises.

It’s pretty clear to me you have a hidden agenda that is anything but “conservative,” and it’s probably anti-American. Chew on that for awhile.

Now, let’s take a look at the way the study was conducted. According to its executive summary, the methodology was this:

“With the help of Aristotle Consultants, an election data-management firm, we isolated 145 heavily Hispanic voting blocks – generally precincts — in three Congressional districts of the Southwest where an enforcement-only candidate faced off against an advocate of CIR ["Comprehensive" Immigration Reform]. To distinguish trends apparent in these precincts from national Latino voting patterns, we separately analyzed canvas results from Hispanic areas of three Congressional districts where the CIR consensus was unchallenged.”

It’s clear that Mr. Nadler funded a study methodology that assured the specific outcome he desired. By focusing on what basically amounts to 145 statistical outliers, he constructed a house of cards and is trying to pawn it off as a mansion. Unfortunately a lot of Americans are going to buy into the deception because it’s the only side that will be presented by the mainstream media and ethnocentrists like Linda Chavez masquerading as “objective” pundits.

Another little tidbit from the executive summary reaffirms its disingenuous myopia:

“I will state my subjective conclusion here. Any policy that induces mass fear in illegal aliens will induce mass anger in legal aliens.”

Mr. Nadler, what about its opposite corollary conclusion, also subjective but equally as valid?

Any policy that promotes the destruction of its 400-year dominant culture will induce mass anger in America’s traditional majority.

If I were consulting any of the current presidential campaigns, I’d be making damn sure that plans were in place to ethnocentrically court an additional 3% to 5% of America’s traditional majority, “white ethnic,” vote. It represents a trememdous opportunity chunk of more than 70% of the total vote. Dollar for dollar, spending campaign cash to go after this bigger cohort makes far more sense than groveling for additional 20% or even 50% of any minority vote that represents only 10% of the total vote.

To make my point easy to understand, I’ll use the most simple, rounded math I can.

If in 2008 the GOP loses 50% of the roughly 4 million Hispanics that voted GOP at the top of the ticket in 2004, this unlikely scenario can be offset by targeting and attracting merely 2% of the White ethnic vote.

A more likely scenario here is that some candidate is going to be foolish enough to try to peel away 5% more of the Hispanic vote (500,000 votes) and in the process lose 1% or 2% of the white vote (1 million to 2 million votes). Even if half of these ethnic-interested white voters feel disenfranchised enough by ethnic pandering that they don’t vote at all, the result will still represent a terrible loss for anyone who overtly executes a Hispanic strategy based on “comprehensive immigration reform.”

It’s laughably ironic that in a nation constantly chided by the left and its allies in the media and in academia that there is racism, which almost always means “white racism,” lurking in the shadows every American Main Street, nobody seems concerned that some significant percentage of White voters might actually take a politically ethnocentric stance in response to the increasing levels of ethnocentric pandering to Hispanics. It doesn’t make sense that nobody sees the wedge-issue threat represented by a scenario in which a small percentage of whites, previously unconcerned with its own ethnic interests, is compelled for the first time to consider its own ethnicity and race when deciding how it will vote.

This leads up to my main contention that refutes the AMF study: If conservative pundits, think tanks and other general political know-it-alls persist in trying to create ethnocentric wedges within the American polity, at some point they’re going to stir up a broad level of ethnocentric activism within the White Ethnic population. Considering that there have been unprecedentedly huge, mostly white, populist uprisings against “comprehensive immigration reform” in recent months, my contention here may already be moot. What if the recent annihilation of legislated illegal alien amnesties represents a new ethnocentric tipping point, portending a future in which a growing percentage of America’s traditional majority ethnicity makes political decisions based in large part upon its own ethnocentric consciousness?

Why did AMF go to such lengths to create, publish and promote a rigged study? It really doesn’t matter. The real question is this: Why aren’t supposedly “conservative” organizations like AMF studying to see if those of us with pasty white derrières are starting to congeal around our own brand of ethnic identity politics? Smart politics suggests they should. What are they afraid of learning?

It seems to me that it would require a pretty high level of sellout to special interests with agendas that run contrary to majority desires for any political party or national campaign not to be doing in-depth studies of America’s largest voting cohort. Perhaps they are conducting them, but just not publishing them.

My guess is that King Nadler has documentation behind lock and key that proves he actually is wearing no clothes.

Okay, now that I’ve dispensed with the “study,” let’s perform a little Fisk-Ginsu on Linda Chavez:

SignonSandiego.com Will immigration sink Republicans?

By Linda Chavez

September 29, 2007

“Republicans need all the votes they can get next November if they are to have any hope of retaining the White House and winning back control of Congress. But one group of voters – among whom the GOP has gained considerable ground over the last few elections – now seems about to slip away, perhaps permanently.”

Fear mongering is so unbecoming.

“Hispanic voters are poised to turn several red states blue come 2008, virtually guaranteeing a Democratic presidential victory and a pickup in congressional seats as well, according to a new analysis of Hispanic voting behavior. “Border Wars: The Impact of Immigration on the Latino Vote,” released by the conservative group Americas Majority Foundation, demonstrates that congressional Republicans’ ham-handed approach to immigration will cost them dearly at the polls.”

As I have exhibited above, it’s probably better to lose half of the Hispanics that might vote for you than it is to lose 2% of the White Voters that always used to vote for you.

“Richard Nadler, the study’s author, analyzed 2006 voting patterns in 145 Hispanic precincts or voting blocs in three congressional districts in the Southwest. In each district, candidates who favored an enforcement-only approach faced opponents who favored comprehensive immigration reform, including a guest-worker program and a path to legalization for illegal immigrants. Nadler found that the enforcement-only approach significantly eroded support for the Republican candidates among Hispanic voters from their 2004 levels, and in each case the Republican lost the seat.”

Hey Linda, why don’t you ask Nadler why he didn’t study the effect that supporting amnesty had on 145 Ethnocentric-Leaning White precincts?

“In Arizona’s 5th district, six-term GOP incumbent Rep. J.D. Hayworth actually switched positions on immigration from being a sponsor of guest-worker legislation to becoming one of the most outspoken opponents of immigration, even advocating a moratorium on legal immigration from Mexico. In 2004, Hayworth received almost as many Hispanic votes as his Democrat opponent, with each receiving about 48 percent; but in 2006, Hayworth lost 59 percent to 36 percent in Hispanic precincts.”

Of course Linda isn’t going to tell her readers that anti-illegal-alien ballot initiatives passed overwhelmingly in Arizona, which calls into question the true meaning of Hayworth’s defeat.

“In the 8th district of Arizona, a pro-comprehensive reform Republican, incumbent Jim Kolbe, retired, and the Republican nominee, Randy Graf, made illegal immigration the centerpiece of his campaign. In 2004, Rep. Kolbe won nearly 43 percent of the vote in Hispanic precincts. In 2006, Graf won barely 18 percent of those precincts’ votes – and Republicans lost the election 54 percent to 42 percent.”

Here, Linda won’t tell her readers that Kolbe was abandoned by the GOP because President Bush, Karl Rove and the pro-amnesty forces they favor felt it better to have a Democrat ally in that seat instead of a contrarian conservative.

“Perhaps most illuminating of all, Nadler’s analysis of Texas’ 23rd district shows how divisive the immigration issue can be even when the Republican candidate is Hispanic. Henry Bonilla, a seven-term incumbent, was defeated in 2006 after redistricting produced a more heavily Hispanic and Democratic district. Nadler’s analysis showed that even in those heavily Hispanic counties included within district lines in both 2004 and 2006, Bonilla lost ground, winning 59 percent of the vote in those Hispanic precincts in 2004 but only 30 percent in 2006. Nadler attributes the erosion in support among Hispanics to Bonilla’s support for an amendment to impose criminal penalties on illegal immigrants.”

Both Nadler and Chavez are remiss in clearly informing their audiences that Bonilla lost in a runoff, a special election, on December 12, 2006, not in the November general election. Such apples to asparagus comparison is an additional example of how far some will go to carry out a con job. That race was so anomalous that including it invalidates the study.

“Nadler predicts that an enforcement-only approach to immigration would cause Republicans serious problems in 2008. Extrapolating from his Hispanic precincts study, Nadler projects that, all other factors being equal, Latino voters alone could cost the GOP presidential candidate the election if their turnout increased equal to their percentage of eligible voters.”

Again, where’s the study about what this means in corollary regarding the portion of the White vote that is similarly self-interested as is the Hispanic vote?

“Hispanics represent about 15 percent of the population, but only about 8 percent of voting-age citizens, and barely 6 percent of those persons who actually voted in the 2004 election. But Democrats could easily target Hispanic voters and significantly increase their numbers, just as they have blacks in previous elections, increasing their turnout between 2000 and 2004 from 10 to 12 percent of all votes cast.”

Firstly, this is an overly optimistic spin on what might happen. People like Chavez and Nadler have consistently been overestimating the Hispanic vote percentage in the “next election” for about two decades. Secondly, both the 2004 at 2006 elections represented interesting anomalies as far as turnout trends are concerned.

In 2004, turnout was hyperinflated in many precincts. Blowback from the 2000 election and the increasing propensity of early voting were two factors. The 2006 election was unusual to the other extreme, with an overall depressed turnout that may well have included a new low percentage turnout for middle-class white males; while the the post-election numbers I studied only covered a small sliver of the total population (at least I’m honest about it), I was surprised to find this to be the case.

What I haven’t found, but would like to find, is a comparison breakdown of the national White middle class vote between the 2002 and 2006 midterm elections. Such a comparison is vital to any analysis regarding whether or not we are on the cusp of a seismic ethnic vote trend shift.

But all is not lost for Republicans – if they manage to stake out more moderate ground on immigration. A number of Republicans did just fine among Hispanic voters, even if they favored some tough approaches to illegal immigrants.

What number of ethnocentric Hispanics increased their share of the White Vote by opposing amnesty and comprehensive immigration reform? You mean you didn’t study that? Why not? Were you afraid to find out?

Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico’s 2nd district, the most heavily Hispanic district (47 percent) in the most heavily Hispanic state (42 percent) in the nation, actually increased his support slightly among Hispanic voters between 2004 and 2006 (from 39.5 percent to 40.1 percent) even though he advocated deporting criminal aliens, building 700 additional miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border and creating more secure identification cards. But Rep. Pearce also supported comprehensive reform and opposed criminal penalties against illegal immigrants, and he voted against an amendment that would have required mass deportation of recently arrived illegal immigrants.

First of all, correlation does not equal causation. Second of all, this is still projecting results from a statistical outlier upon a general population in a nonsequitur manner.

Other Republicans who supported comprehensive reform also did fine, including Rep. Heather Wilson in New Mexico’s 1st district and Rep. Jeff Flake in Arizona’s 6th district. Flake won 75 percent of the vote in heavily Hispanic precincts in 2006.

Again, how did Republicans who opposed comprehensive immigration reform do in heavily White precincts in 2006?

The Republican presidential hopefuls would do well to follow Nadler’s advice as they craft their message in the upcoming primaries: “Participants . . .needn’t like this conclusion. But they better understand it.”

Surely they’d be far better served by studying what it might mean to their future prospects with paler constituencies if they keep pointing out that race really does matter in elections, through their incessant pandering to Hispanics.

American Kernel, american tradition, Conservatism, Demographics, elections, Fisking, GOP, hispanderfest, illegal alien, illegal immigrant, Immigration, political correctness, Politics, Racism, straight talk