WSJ: "The crucial role of Hispanics:"

A reader writes:

The Wall St. Journal in its news pages points to the "crucial role of Hispanics" in this election? Can you find me a few where that was the case?

Oh, jeez, that again. If you prodded a Washington political reporter awake from a deep sleep and told him to start typing, his fingers would automatically punch in "the crucial Hispanic swing vote." He probably has it on a macro.

Compared to the 2002 midterms, the GOP's Hispanic share of the vote dropped from 38% to 29%, 9 points down, while the GOP's white share dropped from 58% to 51%, or 7 points down. (Those numbers have changed slightly since my VDARE blog item of last night.) Since the Hispanic vote follows the white vote up and down, just about 20 points shifted toward the Democrats (it's not a swing vote, it's a vote that goes with the flow of the white vote), the relative loss for the GOP among Hispanics versus the last midterm was 2 percentage points, which it would be reasonable to attribute to the Fence. Multiply that 2 percentage point relative loss by the approximate 6 percent share of the vote that Hispanics made up in this electorate, and you've got an itsy-bitsy number: 0.12%.

In most of your big Hispanic states, California, Texas, Florida, New York, there weren't too many close major races. Schwarzenegger lost the Hispanic vote almost 2 to 1, but still won overall in a near landslide.

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