Poll: Immigration Hatin’ Hurts GOP Chances

Flickr/ <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4564044575/">Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com</a> (Creative Commons)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Right-wing conservatives retrogressives in the American West have been so preoccupied with illegal brown people, that they forgot to worry about the legal ones. So says a new analysis by Public Policy Polling, anyway: Since the passage of Arizona’s draconian “Papers, Please” law, likely voters in Arizona and Colorado have shifted their support to the Democratic candidates in a “very substantive way,” bucking the alleged national mood of Obama-hatin’. That shift is largely due to energized (and probably angry) Latino voters. According to Tom Jensen, PPP’s director:

When we polled Colorado in early March Michael Bennet and Jane Norton were tied. Last week we found Bennet with a 3 point lead. One of the biggest reasons for that shift? Bennet went from leading Norton by 12 points with Hispanic voters to a 21 point advantage. That large shift in a Democratic direction among Hispanics mirrors what we saw in our Arizona Senate polling last month– Rodney Glassman went from trailing John McCain by 17 points with them in September to now holding a 17 point lead.

Hispanics in the Mountain West are leaning much more strongly toward the Democrats since the Arizona law was passed. The big question then becomes whether there are white voters who are going to go Republican this fall who wouldn’t have if that bill hadn’t been passed. We don’t see any evidence of that happening yet- Bennet and Glassman are both doing better with white voters than they were before as well, although not to the same degree that they’ve improved with Hispanics.

I called up Jensen to shed some more light on these developments. He said that yes, indeed, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is leading in Colorado, and in Arizona, challenger Rodney Glassman (who’s still a longshot), who once trailed John McCain by 30 points, has cut that margin in half. (McCain’s popularity, the poll says, has “plummeted” in Arizona.) Has Jensen ever seen anything like this? At this stage in an election cycle, he says, “Most movement in races don’t have that much to do with the candidates, they have to do with a change in the national political climate.” What’s weird, though, is that “there hasn’t been a movement in that political climate towards Democrats. They’re not doing better; they’ve largely stayed where they are.”

The takeaway, according to Jensen: At least in these races—and perhaps later on in Nevada and New Mexico—”If the immigration bill is having any effect, it’s to shift Latino voters in large numbers to the Democratic candidates”—but there’s no concurrent migration of more white voters to other side.

In short, nativists and neo-Know-Nothing candidates may succeed in squeezing past fellow conservatives retrogressives in primary races, but come November, they may taste the pain, courtesy of the minority voters threatened by their policies. That is, of course, unless the right succeeds in rounding up or scaring off all those voters before election day.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate