“It’s like a virus that you get and you don’t feel like you’re unhealthy for the first few days, but after that you have a fever and you’re really sick,” says Matthew Dowd, former President George W. Bush’s chief strategist in 2004. “You can’t win a national election and you can’t win certain states without the Latino vote. And Republicans already had a problem.”…
Ninety percent of Hispanics under 18 in Arizona are U.S. citizens, and the explosive growth of the Hispanic population this decade has been driven by U.S. births. That’s a switch from the 1990s, when most of the Hispanic population’s increase was due to non-citizen immigration.
“This law and potential copy cat laws have the ability to seal the fate of the Republican Party with Hispanics in the exact same way that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act did with African Americans,” said Matt Barreto, a pollster for Latino Decisions and an adjunct political science professor at the University of Washington.
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