Hispanics did not decide 2012 election for Obama

Byron York:

After moments of panic in the immediate aftermath of Mitt Romney's defeat, some Republicans and conservatives are regaining their equilibrium on the issue of what the GOP should do about immigration and the Hispanic vote.

They're looking at key questions from the campaign, like how much of Barack Obama's victory was attributable to Hispanic support. They're also looking at the Hispanic electorate itself to see how big a role immigration, versus a wide range of other issues, played in voting decisions. The goal, of course, is to win a larger portion of the Hispanic vote, but first to take a clear-eyed look at what actually happened on Nov. 6.

And the lesson for Republicans is: Take your time. Calmly reassess your positions. Don't pander.

The first question is whether Hispanic voters gave Obama his margin of victory. In a recent analysis, the New York Times' Allison Kopicki and Will Irving looked at vote totals in each state, plus the percentage of the vote cast by Hispanics, to see what the outcome would have been had Hispanics voted differently.

For example, they looked at Wisconsin, a state the Romney-Ryan team hoped to win. Hispanics weren't a huge part of the total vote -- about 4 percent, according to the exit polls -- and Obama won big among them, 65 percent to 31 percent. But going through the totals, Kopicki and Irving concluded that even if every single Hispanic voter in Wisconsin had cast a ballot for Romney, Obama still would have won.

They found the same result for New Hampshire and Iowa, two other swing states Romney looked to win.

Then there was Ohio. According to the exit polls, Obama won 53 percent of the Hispanic vote there. But given how decisively Obama won other voting groups, Kopicki and Irving found that the president would have prevailed in Ohio even if he had won just 22 percent of the Hispanic vote. Put another way, even if Romney had won a stratospheric 78 percent of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost Ohio.

In Virginia, Obama won the Latino vote 65 percent to 33 percent. Kopicki and Irving found that if those numbers had been reversed -- if Romney had won an unprecedented 65 percent of the Latino vote -- Obama still would have won Virginia.

Even in states where the Hispanic vote played a bigger role, Romney could have made significant gains among Hispanics and still lost. In Colorado, for example, the president won Hispanics by a huge margin, 75 percent to 23 percent. Kopicki and Irving found that Romney could have increased his margin to 42 percent -- a major improvement for a Republican -- and still come up short in Colorado.

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The immigration issue should not be that important to Hispanics who are already citizens.  They may have some tribal affinity for those who are not citizens, but it should not be a core issue.  What York found was that in the swing states their votes were not decisive anyway.  In Texas Romney actually got betrween 10 and 15 points higher with Hispanic voters than he did nationwide.  I think that is because the Texas culture has effected the way they vote.  There are many Hispanic Republicans and over time I think more Hispanics will become Republican because they see how much better off Texas is with hits red state values.