George Will’s Sabermetrics

Florida

Will semi-boosts Jeb:

Bush is fluent in Spanish and accomplished at courting the 17 percent of the Florida electorate that is Hispanic: He won 61 percent of their votes in 1998 and almost that much in 2002. The time is ripe for Republicans to do as well with Hispanics as Jeb Bush’s brother did in 2000.

George W. Bush, conversational in Spanish, won 35% of the Hispanic vote in 2000 and 40% in 2004.  That’s called losing.

Getting the Hispanic vote for a state Governor is way different than getting it for President.

Michael Barone writes:

It is jokingly said that I am Michael Barone’s illegitimate son.  (Coincidentally, Barone and my mother were born in the same year.)  Strange I didn’t even get a happy birthday e-mail from  “dad” on Monday.

“By my estimate, about one-third of the homeowners foreclosed on in the years just after the housing price collapse were Hispanics.” And since the ObamaCare rollout, during which the Spanish-language version of the Web site was completely inoperative for weeks, “the president’s job-approval has declined more among Hispanics — 23 percentage points — than among any other demographic group.” It should be possible for Republicans to find a nominee who can do as well as George W. Bush did in winning 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.

The irony is that one of the main reasons Bush got even 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004 was because of all the free candy affirmative action giveaway subprime mortgages to Hispanics that his policies ordained, which in turn was the cause of the housing bubble then subsequent bubble burst that “hurt” Hispanics.

In spite of all the functional problems with ObamaDontCare, hablamos and otherwise, Hispanics still have a high approval rating of ObamaDontCare in general.

Republicans can’t be too frequently reminded that their problem in presidential politics is the “blue wall” — the 18 states and the District of Columbia that have voted Democratic in at least six consecutive elections, and have 242 electoral votes. So Republicans should welcome to their nomination competition any candidate who might remove from the blue wall such bricks as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The last six Presidential elections means 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012.  A Bush was the Republican nominee for three of those.  Yet Will expects yet another Bush to be able to break through the blue wall that his brother and father could not.

Ironically, the three blue wall states Will mentions by name, MI, PA and WI, are part of the blue wall NOT because of Hispanics, which outside of some parts of Philadelphia are political non-entities in all three states, but because of working-middle class whites, that they don’t give the Republican big enough margins to overcome the reliable Democrat voting blocs in those states, blacks in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee and the Scandinavians in good chunks of Wisconsin.  C’mon, Jeb Bush is going to change that?