The election of 2008 proved catastrophic for opponents of comprehensive immigration reform. Republicans lost seven Senate seats — eight if the courts sustain Al Franken’s lead in Minnesota. On June 28, 2007, each of the eight previous office-holders (Republicans, all) voted to block the Bush administration’s immigration bill. Replacing these eight immigration hardliners are five new senators clearly favorable to a comprehensive approach — six, counting Franken — and two whose positions are unclear. All, of course, are Democrats.

In the House, comprehensive immigration reformers picked up at least 14 votes, and “enforcement-only” advocates lost 14. Ten incumbent members of the restrictionist House Immigration Reform Caucus were defeated. The “enforcement first/enforcement only” cause lost such major spokesmen as Tom Feeney, Virgil Goode, Thelma Drake, Marilyn Musgrave, Ric Keller, Bill Sali, and Nancy Boyda. ~Richard Nadler

This is a weaker argument against restrictionist politics than we usually see. Last year’s rising Democratic tide drowned Republicans of every kind. Chris Shays drowned right along with Virgil Goode. For the record, Goode was something of a special case, as he had been a fence-jumper from the Democratic side back in the ’90s and finally registered as a Republican during the height of the Bush Era. His district, where I happened to live for a few years, remained more heavily Democratic by registration and turned against him as it soured on Mr. Bush. Perhaps someone from the Fifth District can correct me, but my impression is that immigration policy did not figure as a major point of contention there, and it seems highly unlikely that Goode was being punished in Southside Virginia for being too interested in limiting illegal immigration.

It’s not as if immigration policy was a top issue in most, or any, of the races mentioned. The only reason why Kanjorski (PA-11) was even in danger as a Democratic incumbent in a “blue” state in an overwhelmingly Democratic year was because Barletta opposed him with specific focus on immigration policy. Barletta could not overcome the wave, and his campaign proves yet again that a candidacy largely founded almost solely on restrictionism cannot win, but there was no other reason that it was as close as it was (52-48). Barletta significantly outperformed McCain in that district. For example, Barletta lost Lackawanna County by 20, but McCain lost it by 26; Barletta won Luzerne County, which Obama carried by 9. Opposition to amnesty (oh, right, I mean reform) was the main reason why Barletta improved on his earlier 2002 run against Kanjorski. That is as close to indisputable as one can get in finding “lessons” from electoral politics.

Nadler may as well say that the Republicans lost the last election and so lost many seats in both houses. Nadler’s findings that Democrats have been winning competitive House races do not tell very much at all. There have been a relative handful of Democratic seats that have gone to Republicans in the last two cycles. If one wanted to “prove” that voters had rejected any position in a candidate’s platform, all you would need to do is cite the last two elections and say, “Republicans keep losing–it must be because of [insert pet issue X].” In reality, the exit polls do tell us that the war and the economy were most responsible for the respective electoral defeats in ’06 and ’08. That is, one does not need to work very hard to figure out why voters threw out Republicans–they were quite clear as to why they were doing it, and they have told us. Naturally, the official GOP response has been to escalate the war and preach austerity and a crusade against earmarks, as if they have been determined to reduce their numbers in Congress still more.

The mythical 44% apppears yet again in Nadler’s column. It has been demonstrated time and again that Bush won at most 40% of the Latino vote in 2004, so it is even harder to believe that the GOP’s share of the Latino Congressional vote was even higher. The flawed 2004 Bush figure has consistently been used to make GOP results in subsequent elections look worse on this question than they were (and always for the purpose of “proving” that amnesty is an electoral necessity). Ponnuru explained this some time ago:

As proof that their strategy works, the comprehensivists point to exit polls that showed Bush getting 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. That figure was, however, debunked within a month of the election. The pollsters had overestimated Bush’s support among Texas Hispanics by 10 points. NBC News lowered its national estimate to 40 percent. The Velazquez Institute did a survey that found that only 35 percent of Hispanics had supported Bush.

Of course, assuming McCain underperformed Bush does not help Nadler’s argument. McCain’s underperformance of Bush’s numbers would simply drive home the point that a Republican candidate’s position on amnesty has no meaningful effect on his electoral fortunes with Latino voters. If McCain, the most ardently pro-amnesty Republican in office, cannot win as many Latino votes as Bush, anti-GOP sentiment among Latinos comes from somewhere else or is a function of the general anti-GOP public mood.

P.S. It is also telling that Nadler has to claim that Latino voters are against enforcing the law. Not only is this a doubtful claim, but it is exactly the sort of pandering argument that makes clear how little the advocates of “outreach” politics understand about the voters they think the GOP needs to win. There is also no evidence to date that shows that Republicans who favor amnesty can prevail over Democratic candidates who support the same, which means that there is unlikely to be much to be gained by adopting such a position. Not only will Republicans always lose in such a contest, but it is entirely possible that pro-amnesty Republicans are pursuing these voters by changing their stance on an issue that will have marginal effect on voting patterns. If two-thirds of Latinos voted for Obama the first time around, does anyone really think that this share of the vote will decrease in 2012? If the GOP shifted entirely to a pro-amnesty position between now and then, would it make any difference? Of course it wouldn’t, because the GOP’s woes with the general electorate are to be found elsewhere and cannot be solved by becoming more like President Bush in a way that alienates and demoralizes the vast majority of rank-and-file voters. Indeed, I can think of no other issue where we still hear arguments that the GOP must become more like the administration that just left office.