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The Republican Nomination and the Politics of Immigration

Immigration is a bigger weakness for both Rubio and Bush than their boosters would like to admit.
immigration sign

A recent YouGov survey asked what policy positions would make a candidate unacceptable to voters. This is what the survey found on Republicans and immigration:

73% of Republicans say that supporting a path to citizenship, as Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush do and Scott Walker once did, makes a candidate unacceptable, though only 35% say that a candidate who supports a path to citizenship is totally unacceptable.

That’s not a surprising result. This has long been an unpopular position inside the GOP, and it has probably become more so in the years since McCain won the 2008 nomination. It’s true that McCain won in spite of his support for an immigration “reform” bill, but in 2007 the issue nearly destroyed his candidacy. Since then, we have seen that Republican primary voters have been even less forgiving of these views than they were in the 2008 cycle. While most Republican nominees have been pro-immigration going back decades, it appears that being identified as a supporter of anything that could be construed as amnesty has become a much larger liability than it used to be. That could explain why Walker has been lurching so dramatically towards a more restrictionist position over the past few months. We have seen that he is eager to pander to what his audience wants to hear, and it’s likely that he’s found that they don’t want to hear what Bush, Rubio, et al. have been saying on this issue.

These survey results stood out because just yesterday we were being told that this wouldn’t be a serious obstacle for Rubio’s candidacy. David Brooks assures us:

His weaknesses are not killers. Rubio’s past support for comprehensive immigration reform irks activists. But it’s not clear if it will hurt him with the voters who are more divided on reform.

Whenever someone wants to talk up Rubio’s chances or warns against underestimating him, he dismisses the idea that the senator’s record on immigration could be a major problem. But there have already been surveys from early states that show that two-fifths of Republicans considered Jeb Bush’s immigration views to be a deal-breaker. Why would it be any different for Rubio or any other candidate that has held similar views? Immigration is a bigger weakness for both Rubio and Bush than their boosters would like to admit, and the supporters of these candidates fail to see this because they don’t want to accept that their preferred immigration policy is deeply unpopular with most other Republicans.

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