Republicans can win 2016 pres. without Hispanics. Only 3 battleground states key in electoral votes have 5%+ Hispanic voters, Fla., Nev., and Col. Hispanic voters disproportionately concentrated in noncompetitive Texas and Calif. 2014 GOP wins in Iowa and Col. due to incr. in white, rural voters w/o college degree-NY Times

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"Improving among white Northern voters is the core of the GOP route to victory, regardless of whether the party makes gains with Hispanic voters....If the Republicans can't make gains among white Northerners...it just won’t really matter."...

11/20/14, "Hispanic Voters Are Important for Republicans, but Not Indispensable," NY Times, Nate Cohn

"President Obama's plan to defer deportation and grant work permits for up to five million undocumented migrants is having two utterly predictable results: outrage from congressional Republicans, and speculation about how the politics will play in 2016.

The country’s growing Hispanic population was widely credited with tipping Mr. Obama’s re-election in 2012. Just about every post-2012 analysis found that the Republicans needed to do better among Hispanic voters in 2016. Whether politicians agree with that assessment might shape their reaction to Mr. Obama’s decision, and might even underlie Mr. Obama’s decision itself.

Yet a close look at demographic data and recent election results suggest that the Republicans do not necessarily need significant gains among Hispanic voters to win the presidency. Yes, the next Republican presidential candidate will be making a big gamble if he or she doesn’t make meaningful gains among Hispanic voters, especially in Florida. But the Hispanic vote cannot single-handedly determine the presidency, as one could be forgiven for believing based on post-2012 election commentary.

The Republicans have a path to the White House without Hispanic voters. It’s just a harder one.

This idea may seem jarring, given that Mitt Romney took just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in his 2012 loss to Mr. Obama, according to the exit polls, while George W. Bush won about 40 percent in his 2004 victory.

But in 2016 Hispanics will represent just 12 percent of eligible voters, and between 9 and 10 percent of actual voters. That’s a lot, but it’s not large enough to grant or deny Republicans the presidency.

The math is simple: A 10-point gain among 10 percent of the electorate yields an additional point in the popular vote. Mr. Obama won by a 3.9-point margin in 2012. So even if the next Republican presidential candidate received the magical 40 percent of Hispanic voters that Mr. Bush received in 2004--which seems unlikely in a fairly competitive national election--it still wouldn’t erase Mr. Romney’s deficit in the popular vote.

Hispanic voters are disproportionately concentrated in noncompetitive states like Texas and California. This makes it even harder for the Republicans to claim the presidency by focusing on them, since there are relatively few Hispanic voters in the battleground states that determine who wins the Electoral College. Hispanics represent more than 5 percent of eligible voters in just three battlegrounds: 

Florida, Nevada and Colorado. 

As a result, the Republicans could have entirely erased Mr. Obama’s advantage among Hispanic voters and still lost the presidency in 2012,  

since Mr. Romney would have still lost states like Virginia and Ohio, where there are very few Hispanic voters.

Why, then, do so many assume that the Republican path to the presidency is through Hispanic voters? 

It was the result of an incorrect inference from Mr. Obama’s performance among white voters in national exit polls, which showed Mr. Obama losing the white vote by 20 points, worse than any Democrat since Walter Mondale in 1984. The implication was that Republicans had done all they could among white voters. The Republicans therefore had to make gains among Hispanic voters instead (another assumption being that Republicans couldn’t make big improvements among black voters).

But the national exit poll finding for white voters was misleading. Nearly all of Mr. Obama’s weakness was attributable to the South and Appalachia, where Mr. Obama suffered catastrophic losses compared with prior Democrats."...

[Ed. note: If people from "the South and Appalachia" gave Obama "catastrophic losses" in 2012, it must mean they voted for him in 2008. In Appalachia, Mr. Obama's well known views on coal flipped longtime democrat counties to republican (p. 2). A few years ago, Republicans didn't even bother to run in West Virginia. (p. 2)] 

(continuing): "Mr. Obama in fact performed quite well among white voters outside of the South, easily winning overwhelmingly white states like 

Iowa, 

Minnesota, 

Oregon, 

Wisconsin and 

New Hampshire, 

which were all extremely competitive in one or both of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The state exit polls most likely overstated Mr. Obama’s weakness among white voters as well, often supposing unrealistic levels of nonwhite turnout.

The next Republican presidential candidate could fare better than Mr. Romney among white voters by retaining Mr. Romney’s strength among Southern white voters and merely returning to Mr. Bush’s showing in many areas north of the Mason-Dixon line. 

The strong G.O.P. showing in the midterm elections was highly consistent with this pattern, with Southern Democrats barely outperforming Mr. Obama, and Republican candidates like Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner making big improvements over Mr. Romney’s performance among white voters, and particularly among white rural voters without a college degree.

Improving among white Northern voters is the core of the G.O.P. route to victory, regardless of whether the party makes gains with Hispanic voters. If the Republicans can’t make gains among white Northerners and hold Mr. Romney’s share of white Southerners, it just won’t really matter whether they receive 25 or 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.

But if the Republicans don’t make any gains among Hispanic voters, they will be taking a big risk. Hispanic voters are still important — and it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Republican gains among Hispanics are in fact necessary to win.

That situation turns on Florida. The Republicans don’t have an especially credible path to the presidency without Florida’s 29 electoral votes. The easiest alternative might be for Republicans to flip Virginia and Ohio, scale the so-called Blue Wall in Pennsylvania, and then pick up 12 additional electoral votes from some combination of Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. The G.O.P. path to the presidency all but closes if the Democrats combine Florida and Pennsylvania.

Florida was the closest state of the 2012 presidential election, and Hispanics will most likely represent 19 percent of eligible voters in 2016, up from 17 percent in 2012.

Florida’s Hispanic voters are somewhat more conservative than those elsewhere, in part because of the state’s distinctive enclave of Cuban-Americans. But Democrats gained ground among Cuban-Americans in the Obama elections and the governor’s race this year. And Florida’s Hispanic population has moved toward the left over the last decade, as non-Cuban Hispanics

have come into the state. For example, heavily Democratic Puerto Rican voters have transformed the once competitive Orlando-Kissimmee area.

Florida was so close in 2012 that even fairly modest Republican improvements would be enough to overcome Mr. Obama’s one-point margin of victory and the effects of four more years of demographic change, which will draw the white share of eligible voters down to 62 percent, from 65 percent in 2012.

But there are more reasons to question whether the G.O.P. has as much room to improve among white voters as it does elsewhere. Unlike in most of the battlegrounds, Mr. Obama really did fare unusually poorly among the state’s white voters.

According to the exit polls, Mr. Obama lost white voters in Florida by 24 points. If he had merely lost them by the same 15-point margin as John Kerry, he would have won decisively — a fact that highlights the tremendous importance of Democratic improvements among Hispanic voters and the pace of demographic change in a state that Mr. Kerry lost by five points in 2004.

The state’s (Fla.) white population was an unusual mix of nearly all of Mr. Obama’s weaknesses: older, Southern, Jewish. That same mix also means the state’s white voters might be more amenable to another Democratic candidate, like Hillary Clinton, who also represented a good number of the state’s New York expats when she was a senator last decade.

None of this is to say that the Republicans can’t do much better among Florida’s white voters than Mr. Romney. The point is that it’s easy to imagine a situation where it turns out that the G.O.P.'s opportunities for additional improvement are not enough to roll back Mr. Obama’s margin of victory and four more years of demographic change. In that event, Republicans would be very well served by gains, even modest ones, among the state’s Hispanics.

The question of what Republicans must do to appeal to Hispanic voters is an entirely separate one. It is possible that the same dissatisfaction with the Obama administration that might help Republicans among Northern white voters might also allow them to make gains among Hispanic voters, even if Republicans don’t make any substantive changes on immigration. On the other hand, immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship might be emerging as a litmus test for whether candidates are seen as hostile to the country’s growing Latino population.

This much is clear: Additional Hispanic voters could be a big help to Republicans, and the party’s position on immigration will make the effort to appeal to Hispanics far more challenging. If the Republicans don’t make gains among Hispanics, they’ll need to make up for it elsewhere. It’s not impossible, but it is harder — especially in Florida."

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11/8/14, "Dems may face long exile from coal country," Politico Pro, Erica Martinson   

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Added: "The Democrat Agenda Marches On Regardless of Election Results"

"Republicans..relying on the voters to get mad and throw the Democrats out...is not enough. They've got to be stopped."...
 
11/20/14, "Don't Live in a Time Warp! The Democrat Agenda Marches On Regardless of Election Results," Rush Limbaugh

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GOP E had no agenda during 2014 midterms:

11/4/14, "For Republicans, the hard part is about to begin," Washington Post, Dana Milbank, opinion

"Because Republicans didn’t run on an agenda other than antipathy toward all things Obama, they created a policy vacuum--

and it’s about to be filled by a swirl of competing, and contradictory, proposals."...

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Comment: A few years ago we had to shut up because we were alienating independents. Now we have to shut up about a border fence and not wanting to be raped or murdered because we're alienating Hispanics. Constant personal attacks by the GOP E on its "hard-liner" base divert attention from the fact that the GOP has no agenda and no ideology separate from democrats.

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11/20/14, Washington Post: Republicans Confront Own Worst Enemy on Immigration - Robert Costa 

11/21/14, New York Times: Some in G.O.P. Fear That Their Hard-Liners Will Alienate Latino Voters - Jackie Calmes

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