Pundits often look at “the Hispanic vote” and then talk a lot about immigration, but as Tom Scocca wrote earlier this week the real niche vote is the non-Hispanic white vote. Other groups of people—be they Hispanic, black, or Asian—seem to like the Democratic Party a lot while Republicans rely on a narrow demographic base.
You can see that, for example, in Latino Decisions’ finding that 61 percent of Latino voters like the Affordable Care Act. If non-Hispanic whites felt the same way, Obama would be cruising to re-election. But they don’t. And this clearly isn’t about immigration—in order to avoid getting mau-maued on the subject, Democrats made sure to write the law so as to be not so friendly to immigrant interests. It’s just that on a basic economic policy question with no particular ethnic or interest group angle, non-Hispanic white people have a much more conservative view than Latinos and other minority groups.
