Marco Rubio, the 33-percent Solution and The New York Times

Years ago, a city editor in the newsroom taped a piece of paper on the monitor on my desk with the proper spelling of the city’s mayor.  I consistently misspelled it.  The New York Times should do the electronic equivalent for whichever of its writers report on the HispanicLatino vote this year.

Individuals across the land who put out a daily newspaper 365 times a year make as many mistakes.  One of those 365 mistakes is when a newspaper gets wrong the share of the HispanicLatino vote that George W. Bush received in 2004.  It was not, as the Times said in a story last week, 44 percent but 40 percent. Aside from the editorial integrity involved, the difference is of interest in this year’s election.

An entire symposium of political scientists, pollsters, political consultants, hacks and journalists convened in Washington in the months after the election to ascertain the point.  A lot of press covered the dispute between HispanicLatinos and the consortium responsible for counting the national vote on election night. The consensus reached concluded that from faulty exit polling and sampling had come the 44-percent figure that is now an editorial bad penny circulating in the nation’s political currency.

How many HispanicLatino votes the Republican nominee needs to win in November is not alien to the minds of Marco Rubio and GOP political strategists. Given how many new women the GOP is offending daily, it might not matter. Whatever the figure needed to win, women – HispanicLatinas and otherwise – could trigger a political tsunami that would make the HispanicLatino vote irrelevant.  The more women antagonized by the Republican Party, the higher they cause higher Rubio’s stock to rise.  His nomination as vice president – in perhaps a dubious effort to attract enough HispanicLatinos to vote Republican – seems increasingly like one of the few buoys the GOP can float to survive the tide building against them.

Nominating Rubio would be an interesting political experiment.  Some HispanicLatinos want their vote to supply an obvious margin in the election in order to expand their political influence in both parties.  Others want a Democratic sweep to yank the country out of its prolonged political paralysis so as to not make a second Obama Administration a disaster waiting to happen at the hands of a gridlocked Congress.

However the election unfolds, the Republican nominee is not going to get 40 percent of the HispanicLatino vote much less the never-attained 44.  The GOP today could not break 30 percent, much less the 33 percent it think it needs to win. Rubio if nominated might be worth two to five points nationally.  Whatever the number, the Times has got to get it right.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.