Winning the Hispanic vote is not as important for the GOP as the media is making it seem, Byron York wrote in a Washington Examiner column published Thursday.
York used a statistical tool created by the New York Times’ Nate Silver to determine the difference the Hispanic vote could have made in the 2012 presidential election.
It turns out, even if Mitt Romney had won an astounding 70 percent of the Hispanic vote (he only received 27 percent), he still would have lost the election 270 to 268 electoral votes.
According to the Times' calculator, Romney would have had to win 73 percent of the Hispanic vote to prevail in 2012. Which suggests that Romney, and Republicans, had bigger problems than Hispanic voters.
York suggests immigration reform and voter outreach will not be enough to shift Hispanic votes in the GOP direction. Voter turnout is a much larger problem, according to York. Republicans are not addressing voter concerns and voters are not showing up to the polls.
The most serious of those problems was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off by the campaign that they abandoned the GOP and in many cases stayed away from the polls altogether. Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day. If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won. [...]
If the next Republican candidate can address their concerns effectively, he will win. And, amazingly enough, he'll win a lot more Hispanic votes in the process. A lot from other groups, too.