Cruz rails at Republicans who ended shutdown: Expect to be challenged from the right (via Raw Story )
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is clinging doggedly to the notion that the shutdown of the federal government would have worked if only his fellow Senate Republicans hadn’t colluded with the Democrats and agreed to end the impasse. In an interview with Robert…
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Cruz may be seen at home, as standing up to the white establishment as the hispanic (finally) asserting control of the political process. I think that is why the Dems are so afraid and see a Republican shadow behind every leaf that falls from a tree. They don't understand their adversary and why their rhetoric and tactics don't work to divide the electorate.
Texas was a Democratic state until the Whites became a minority in the 90s. Hispanics, are now by far the majority. They are far more socially and economically conservative than whites and appears that they vote with Republicans. As they have taken power in Texas since the 90s, the Dems are virtually unelectable except in inner cities where blacks and liberal whites and liberal hispanics vote can cobble a majority for dems.
The Dems are living in the past and trying to appeal to Hispanics as if they weren't the majority. They think they need to throw them one or two policy bones. It now works the other way: Hispanics will throw the white elites a bone or two but the policies are no longer white elites to dictate. The Dems need to examine not only their rhetoric for bigotry as they have in the past but also the systems they design for their discrimination. Self serving actions speak louder than words. So far immigration policy is the only system Dems have supported that isn't more racist than Republicans.
I think the Hispanic voters might associate the white liberal democratic establishment with racism (in the formal, social science definition, not the common meaning of bigotry) where as the Republican libertarian institutions were color blind. Repubs gave them a chance to start business and get green cards and generally get ahead in the past while Dems generally talked about opportunity but supported exclusive policies to protect business from competition, licensing, unions and trade groups that serve as barriers to entry.
Government in Texas is expected to be helpful, competent and stay out of the way. Any deviation from that model gets punished by voters. Cruz is definitely not following that path. The Wendy abortion drama pissed off alot of women. Maybe the Dems can get their act together and rise from the dead as this all presents an opening right now. Nationally it is significant because Texas plays an outsized role in national politics and is decades ahead of the old fashioned 1960s style race rhetoric goggles used by academics on the midwest and east coast.
Interesting post for a, non-american, outsider Ryan. Thanks for that.
But I'm not sure about hispanics being more conservatives in general... maybe the immigrants but is not what you would think looking at South America, and even other US states.
@Ryan Harris, your analysis of the Hispanic vote in Texas is off. In 2012, Texas Hispanics who do vote favored Obama (70-30) and Elliot Sadler, Ted's Cruz's (white) Democratic opponent (64-36), by large margins. Texas has become a GOP state over the past 20 years because Texas whites turned hard Republican and whites are the only group that consistently shows up to vote. The Hispanics who do vote tend to vote Democratic; the problem is the large number of them who don't show up to vote at all.
http://blog.chron.com/kuffsworld/2012/11/did-ted-cruz-do-better-in-latino-areas-than-other-republicans/
The chron article focuses on the race of the politician and how that affected the Hispanic votes. The poll data appear to suggest that Hispanic people vote for anyone with a traditionally Hispanic name, even crazy candidates like Cruz, in respectable numbers. So maybe it is as simple as the chron article suggests: latino-identity and loyalty commands a decent portion of the vote? I don't know about that dynamic. It seems like there are so many countries and backgrounds in Latin America alone that appealing on racial identity won't work as well as it did for Obama and black voters where he obtained 95+% of the vote.
I wasn't thinking about the race of the candidates in particular but rather how politicians are forming their coalitions of support from their positions to win elections and how that favored Republicans because of their historical support for issues.
It is no longer possible to win an election without Hispanic voters in most of Texas: They are the majority. The democrats have failed to win most elections in Texas since Hispanics became the majority of the population and Republicans have won most elections. I was trying to think of why Hispanic voters are supporting Republicans in elections. All else being equal, it would seem that they should vote Democrat out of self interest, surely a large percentage are, but there is also enough that are voting Repub. Republicans already have a large part of the bible voters, white, men and rural voters, so they really only need maybe 1/3 or more of the Hispanic vote to win and they are getting it, regardless of the race of the candidate. I wish the chron article showed more about the sex and age of support for Cruz versus Sandler. A bit of analysis might help explain the demographics of the Hispanic republican voters.
The Hispanic voter turnout in Texas is abysmally low. They make up a far, far smaller percentage of the electorate than they do of the overall population. Without even altering the current D/R percentage splits, their vote could turn Texas into a purple state if they just went to the polls in the numbers seen by Hispanics nationally.
There's been much written about the curiously high voter apathy in the state, and there haven't been any definitive conclusions as to why its happening.
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