Steve King stopped by The Janet Mefferd Show yesterday where he dismissed claims that a major reason Mitt Romney lost is due to his lopsided defeat among Latinos. According to King, it wasn’t that Romney did a poor job in winning over Latino voters; it’s that he wasn’t able to turn out enough conservatives to the polls.
King: John McCain got 31 percent of the Hispanic vote and Mitt Romney got 27 percent, so it dropped off four points between McCain and Romney. Romney didn’t reach the low water point; the low water point was 1996 with Bob Dole who got only 21 percent of the Hispanic vote. So when you look at the balance of this and you think, why didn’t Mitt Romney win the election? There are a whole number of other things. A lot of Republicans and conservatives didn’t turn out. Just plain constitutional conservative were not motivated in numbers as one would’ve expected, even compared to the McCain race.
So King thinks that Romney lost because dedicated conservatives didn’t bother to show up in a presidential election in which right-wing leaders put anti-Obama hysteria into overdrive and warned that Obama’s re-election will literally destroy America?
Let’s see.
According to exit polls from this election, 35 percent of voters identified themselves as conservatives. That number was 34 percent in 2008 and in 2004. While the percentage of self-described conservatives who turn out for presidential elections is rather stable, Latinos have steadily increased their share of the electorate as their population continues to grow.
King and Mefferd later agreed that working on immigration reform with Democrats is pointless as it won’t help the GOP win any votes because, in King’s words, “Democrats will find a way to hand deliver citizenship papers along with a great big check.”
Mefferd: How in the world do you out-left the left anyway? If we go to the left on amnesty, do you think the Democrats are going to sit still and just go ‘oh I guess that they’re more caring than we are’? It’s a zero-sum game. I don’t know how in the world the Republicans expect to get votes when the Democrats are already farther along than we are.
King: There’s no possible way. Whatever we might say we are going to do, reduce the enforcement of the rule of law, waive the rule of law, Democrats will find a way to hand deliver citizenship papers along with a great big check from money borrowed from the Chinese.
If King really thinks it is best for the GOP to maintain their hard line stance against immigration, he may want to ask his fellow Republicans in California how that worked out for them.
