The GOP’s Latino connection

In the long-running contest to win Latino voters’ hearts and minds, the Republican Party jumped out to a stunning lead this month.

And for a party saddled with leaders displaying more than a few retrograde impulses these days — on immigration and even the landmark Civil Rights Act — that’s no small accomplishment.

Consider the recent string of Latino Republicans to triumph in GOP primaries in three states over the last few weeks: In California, appointed Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado won his six-way Republican primary with 43% of the vote and the right to fight for a full term this fall. In Nevada, former federal judge Brian Sandoval — a George W. Bush appointee — knocked off incumbent Gov. Jim Gibbons to win the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

And in New Mexico — perhaps the most illustrative proving ground for this new Latino Republican winning streak — not only did local prosecutor Susana Martinez win a hard-fought GOP primary for governor, but businessman and former state Rep. John Sanchez easily defeated the primary competition for lieutenant governor.

“It is historic from the standpoint that never before have there been two Republican Hispanics running for governor and lieutenant governor at the same time,” former Interior secretary and former 10-term GOP New Mexico Rep. Manuel Lujan Jr. told me in an interview. In practically the next breath, Lujan added, “We’ve had Hispanic governors for years here in New Mexico, for decades.” That’s true, but you have to go back nearly nine decades to find the last Latino Republican elected governor.

Today, tiny New Mexico (population: 2 million) is the state with the largest percentage of Latinos (45%) most of whom are native-born. As Lujan points out, the state has elected numerous Latinos to top jobs for a very long time. In 1928, New Mexico sent the first elected Latino U.S. senator — Chihuahua-born Octaviano Larrazolo, a Republican — to Washington. But since then nearly every Latino to win statewide has been a Democrat.

The newly minted Martinez-Sanchez ticket threatens to upend that history.

In part, the recent GOP Latino winning streak can be explained by simple strategic considerations: Latino Republican candidates have obvious crossover appeal to Latino Democrats, and GOP leaders know it.

“I think there is considerable political calculation,” said Margaret Montoya, a University of New Mexico law professor and scholar of critical race theory. “It seems that the Democrats require people to move up the ladder through the party ranks. So we see [New Mexico Gov.] Bill Richardson do that. I think that’s been true for Latino Democrats in California. But that hasn’t been true for Susana Martinez, who goes from being D.A. to being a credible gubernatorial candidate.”

Martinez happens to be a party switcher; she was a registered Democrat just before her first run for office in 1996. But what’s more significant is this Latina’s triumph in a crowded Republican primary for a major office, a virtually unheard-of feat up until now.

Even if Republicans are practicing irony-coated affirmative action, the rise of candidates like Maldonado, Sandoval and Martinez is no doubt giving their Anglo Democratic opponents fits.

But does this year’s warm embrace of Republican primary voters and high-profile Latino Republican candidates signal social progress beyond the short-term politics? Montoya says no.

“I’m really slow to reach that conclusion because I would never conclude that having Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court has been an achievement for the African American community,” she said by way of analogy.

Yet this year’s match-ups in influential states such as California, Nevada and New Mexico hold the potential for molding a newly competitive two-party contest for Latino votes in way that has never really taken shape in the African American community.

Of course, many Cuban American Republicans have found electoral success in Florida over the years. But in the Southwest, where Mexican Americans dominate Latino politics, Latino voters have never been wooed by the GOP quite like today.

Arizona may temporarily be moving in the opposite direction with the state’s recently passed immigration law and its anti-immigrant political fallout for the Republican Party, but the basic political calculus remains.

“Republicans feel they have to go way to the right on immigration to win the primaries. [But] if they want to get elected, they’ll need the Hispanic vote,” Lionel Sosa, a prominent Republican media strategist, recently told the Wall Street Journal.

Beyond a more moderate approach on immigration policy, Lujan, the New Mexico Republican stalwart, suggests that having more Latino GOP standard-bearers is clearly good for the party.

“If you have a wide representation of people, you will attract more voters,” he said.

Republicans are testing that theory like never before this year, and the results may prove to be nothing short of revolutionary for the nation’s fastest-growing swing vote. It almost seems secondary that the revolution may come in the form of squeezed social spending and skewed tax cuts for mostly wealthy non-Latinos.

David Alire Garcia, a former columnist for the Albuquerque Journal, is a writer in Corrales, N.M.