From my article "New Republican Majority?"

in the May 8th American Conservative (subscribe here):

As veteran truth-teller Thomas Sowell pointed out recently, "Phony arguments and phony words are the norm in discussions of immigration policy." And no myth has become more entrenched in the media than that California demonstrates that cracking down on illegal immigration would be political suicide for Republicans.

For example, reporter Dan Balz proclaimed in the Washington Post following the Senate's April 6th immigration "compromise" (i.e., surrender), "GOP officials … point to California as the example they hope to avoid. Twelve years ago, then-Gov. Pete Wilson (R) pushed an anti-immigration ballot measure that sought to deny state assistance to undocumented immigrants. The initiative passed and helped Wilson win reelection, but it triggered a surge of new Democratic Latino voters in subsequent elections that have left Republicans deep in the minority in the state."

This conventional wisdom is actually a bizarrely demonological distortion of the history of America's largest, most visible state. Instead of one man somehow permanently warping the political destiny of 37 million people, California's shift from the Republican to the Democratic column reflects tectonic demographic shifts, largely driven by immigration, that are spreading nationwide, and thus demand honest study.

The truth is close to the opposite. California voted for Republican Presidential candidates in nine of the ten elections from 1952 through 1988. The collapse of the California GOP first became evident in 1992, two years before Prop. 187, when Republicans got skunked in California in the Presidential election and two U.S. Senate races. In the last dozen major contests for President, governor, or senator there, Republicans have won only the two times they appealed to voter anger over illegal immigration. The ten times they meekly avoided the topic, they quietly went down to defeat...

It's often said that angry Latinos made subsequent Republican candidates pay for Wilson's sins, but where are the numbers? According to the Census Bureau, California Hispanics cast 11.4 percent of the vote in 1994 and 13.9 percent in 1998. In both elections, the Republican gubernatorial candidate won 23 percent of the Hispanic vote, so the celebrated "Latino tidal wave of anger" accounted for less than a tenth of the Republicans' plummet from Wilson's 55 percent in 1994 to Dan Lungren's 38 percent in 1998.

The often-trumpeted Hispanic political ascendancy hasn't quite gone through the formality of taking place yet (for example, Latinos comprised only 6.0 percent of voters nationally in 2004), even in California.

The Achilles' heel of Hispanic electoral clout has always been turnout. According to a 2002 study by demographers Jack Citrin and Benjamin Highton of the Public Policy Institute of California, although non-Hispanic whites made up only 47 percent of California's population in 2000, they will still cast a majority of the votes in California more than a third of a century from now. The PPIC forecasts that in 2040 whites will comprise 53 percent of California's electorate, twice the Hispanic share. (Of course, changes in immigration policy, such as the Senate's decision to put millions of illegal immigrants on the path to citizenship, could change this.)

In truth, Lungren lost because whites didn't show up and vote for him. While the number of Hispanic voters increased by 160,000 from 1994 to 1998 (out of 8.4 million votes cast), the non-Hispanic vote total dropped by 975,000. Without Prop. 187 to bring them to the polls, the percentage of non-Latinos voting fell from 41.4 percent to 35.9 percent.

Yet, what truly doomed him in 1998 was that, while Wilson had won 61 percent of the white vote in 1994, Lungren took just 45 percent. When a Republican doesn't win the white vote, he doesn't win the election. Period.

Indeed, out of the last dozen major races in California, the GOP has only won a majority of the white vote twice: Wilson in 1994, and in the 2003 recall, when Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom McClintock garnered 67 percent.

All the GOP candidates in California avoided Wilson's winning anti-multiculturalist theme until the 2003 gubernatorial recall election in which the Democratic leadership foolishly handed the GOP its trump card by giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer