Years ago as a young boy in the small town of West Texas where I grew up, I would daydream along the railroad tracks in the shallow valley below our home. I would wait for the high, mighty trains that I imagined came roaring from Los Angeles from the west or Atlanta from the east. The trains would slow down as they sped by an old salt lake but even so would displace enough air to create a powerful force that on occasion sent my thin, reedy body reeling and crashing into the brown dirt. While other boys were sniffing glue, I was getting off on sudden blasts of air from caravans of steel that the day before might have sat idling near the Pacific or come from the other side of the country where Sherman ran roughshod over the Confederacy.
One day, one of the trains slowed to a pace slower than usual. A clump of rail yard workers not far from me waited. One of the crew stood by a thick iron stick that he pushed away from his body. As he did, the tracks moved and separated in part. I watched with fascination. A new set of tracks appeared suddenly and diverted the massive train to another set of tracks. That decades-old image came to mind as I sat with my old college roommate watching the returns of the election of 2012 that some observers have characterized as a status-quo election. It was anything but. In fact, it was a shattering election – far more important than the pedantic conclusion that Democrats retained control of the White House and the Senate and that Republicans maintained their majority in the House.
The 2012 election instead of being just another installment in the politics of the nation smashed old stereotypes and strategies and set up new expectations. For starters, if the results of the election lead to real and inclusive immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship, then the ongoing restructuring of the elemental composition of the electorate will continue – and perhaps accelerate. Not totally unrelated is that the Republican party will have to change its world view, forged by Richard Nixon’s southern strategy. It was only a matter of time.
Lyndon Johnson feared that the civil rights laws he signed into law would push the South out of the Democratic coalition and crimp his party badly. He was right. Nixon exploited southern anxiety. But Johnson also had spent enough time with the large Mexican-American families of the Southwest to figure out probably that in the long run demography would revive Democratic prospects. The growth of the HispanicLatino population and the modernization of American society have killed the Nixonian cornerstone of the modern-day Republican party. The sociological and demographic maturing of America has rendered the southern strategy moot.
Personifying the historic breakthrough the election wrought was the realization – at last – by progressive and Democratic strategists that their new growth market going forward is the HispanicLatino voter. Only 58 percent of all eligible HispanicLatinos voted last week. With a prodigious 42 percent still to be cobbled into action, it is, of course, a growing population whose potential is especially promising if Democrats approach the 2014 midterm elections like they did 2012. Otherise, they risk a repeat of the Tea party sweep of 2010. The triumphant Obama strategists and technical team – bless them – that pulled off an organizational miracle in the 2012 swing states surely can target 30 congressional districts next year in order to pull Democats into the majority in the House and the rest of the chamber into the 21st Century.
HispanicLatino voters again can complement last week’s winning coalition and capitalize on the collateral damage from the all-out war now erupting over the soul of the Republican party. The first massive salvo in the battle consuming the GOP was fired, appropriately, in Spanish on Al Punto, Jorge Ramos’ Sunday morning news program on Univision. Indeed, Carlos Gutierrez, former Commerce Secretary in the Bush Administration, came quickly and angrily to the point, blaming the ‘atrocities’ perpetrated against HispanicLatinos during the Republican primaries as one of the reasons his party lost.
Uncharacteristically unreserved, Gutierrez decried the ‘crazy’ and ‘xenophobic’ rhetoric that riddled the party and ‘scared (a) population’ that sees the Republican party as ‘antiquated’. Punching his hands as if against the racial specters of Nixon’s southern strategy, the Cuban-American Gutierrez said he wants to be part of ‘a new party’ that presumably does not kowtow to the moralistic threats of a Gary Bauer or the tax thuggery of Grover Norquist – whose views of the world were rejected by an electorate that was greater in number in 2012 than voted in 2010. The idea that House Republicans – many of them products of the abnormal election of 2010 or of gerrymandered politics – and the idea that 30 Republican governors – also largely the byproducts of an anomalous election – represent the country is the kind of delusional thinking that stunned Republicans last week.
This is especially so when the elections of Gov. Brian Sandoval in Nevada or Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida in 2010 – and now, Senator-elect Ted Cruz of Texas – are held up as HispanicLatino Republican triumphs. HispanicLatinos had little to do with their elections. They are accidental Tea party success stories – something intelligent men like Gutierrez realize. He wants a new Republican party, but whether it comes to pass is a different matter if the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress deliver on what most HispanicLatinos want.
Gutierrez wants immigration legislation enacted not because it is at the forefront of HispanicLatino concerns but because anti-immigrant rhetoric poisons our political culture and holds back HispanicLatinos and the country from more important business at hand. HispanicLatinos want more Cabinet positions, more seats at the table and all the usual manifestations of their new power. But they want more: They want continued investment in their educational, economic and political development so that the country can feed off their success. They do not want wild, liberal change so much as moderate progress so that they can take advantage of the opportunities that a free market system affords.
The 2012 election should be the last for which the term Reagan Democrat – derived artfully from and for the southern strategy – has currency or audience. The country does not want to hear the archaic voices of Ralph Reed or Newt Gingrich or anyone named Bush. Even Cuban Americans, the last redoubt of the Republican party within the HispanicLatino population, voted in the majority for the re-election of President Obama.
This train is on a new set of tracks, and it is nowhere near standing still.
Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.