I know this is a blog about legal immigration, but every once in awhile we throw in some stories about the illegal side of immigration. This one about the Presidential election may give us a hint of what could come should McCain be elected or if Obama is elected. From Politico:
Despite championing immigration reform in 2007, John McCain is poised to lose the Hispanic vote by a landslide margin that is well below President George W. Bush’s 2004 performance.
Polls show Obama winning the broadest support from Latino voters of any Democrat in a decade, while McCain is struggling to reach 30 percent, closer to Senator Bob Dole’s dismal 1996 result than to Bush’s historic 40% four years ago.
McCain seems to have wound up with the worst of both worlds: He appears to be getting no credit from Latino voters for his past support for immigration reform, while carrying the baggage of other Republicans’ hostility to illegal immigration.
And he’s been unable or unwilling to attack Obama—who was once thought to have taken a lethally liberal stance by supporting granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants—from the right.
So when McCain joined Kennedy in the summer 2007 and sought to ramrod a bill through Congress that would have given amnesty to millions of Hispanics living illegally in the US, he got nothing for his pains.
Also, note the last sentence in the quote above and go back and read how Hillary Clinton’s people thought that Obama’s support of driver’s licenses for illegals was his death knell. And, of course, it is unlikely that McCain is going to bring that up in light of his own stance on immigration.