This is the latest GOP argument against immigration reform. It's that they're all these missing whites out there that the GOP should coax back out. If only they can do this they can win the Presidency in 2016 and forget all about the Hispanic vote.
As Krugman shows, however, the "Trend'-as in Sean Trende who has been peddling this theory-isn't your friend.
"Well, Alan Abramowitz sends me to new analysis saying, no, missing whites aren’t a real thing. When it comes to serious political science, it seems, Trende is not your friend (sorry, couldn’t help myself):
As Krugman shows, however, the "Trend'-as in Sean Trende who has been peddling this theory-isn't your friend.
"Well, Alan Abramowitz sends me to new analysis saying, no, missing whites aren’t a real thing. When it comes to serious political science, it seems, Trende is not your friend (sorry, couldn’t help myself):
So what starts out looking like a mysterious epidemic of “missing” white voters becomes mostly a reflection of the simple fact that 2012 was a low turnout election. This unremarkable outcome is then hyped by Trende as the big demographic development of 2012 by doing something that is really quite misleading. He adds back in all the missing white voters to the 2012 electorate while leaving out all the missing minority voters.
"But this probably won’t stop the GOP from going with the story anyway. Empirical failure hasn’t changed their minds about economics, or for that matter anything else, so why should this be different?"
Indeed, it may well not do anything to change their minds. So much the better. After all, ignoring 'fact checkers' sure helped Romney in 2012. Oh, wait.
Meanwhile, Karl Rove of all people has done a pretty slam dunk job in showing the fallacy of the Missing White Hypothesis:
"Some observers, including Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Buchanan and the Center for Immigration Studies, argue that if Republicans want to win back the White House, they should focus on white voters (who comprised 72% of the electorate in 2012) rather than worrying about Latinos. After all, new Census Bureau estimates are that 100,042,000 whites voted in 2008 but only 98,041,000 did in 2012. Wouldn't it be better to get those two million whites back into the polling booth?"
"This argument is incomplete. If as many white voters turned out in 2012 as in 2008—and if Mitt Romney received the 59% of them that he got last fall—then his vote total would have increased by 1,180,590. But President Obama's vote total would have increased by 780,390, and Mr. Romney still would have lost the election by 4.6 million votes."
It's also incomplete in the sense that no one considers that maybe 2008 is not a year the GOP should seek to emulate: after all they lost by a bigger margin in 2008 anyway.
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