Chris Christie: Republicans must welcome Latinos

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the GOP needed to do more to include Latinos on Thursday while campaigning for his gubernatorial reelection, saying Republicans should make Latinos “feel welcome and important” within his party.

“We cannot expect to get support from the Latino community if we don’t make the Latino community feel welcome and important in our party,” the possible 2016 presidential candidate said in a Hispanic community in New Jersey, according to The Star-Ledger.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/chris-christie-republicans-must-welcome-latinos-88242.html#ixzz2McPdJDDp

California Republicans Recognize The Need To Connect With Hispanic Community

From The Huffington Post:

California Republicans acknowledged this weekend that the party needs to recruit more Hispanic candidates as well as extend an olive branch to Latinos to have any political future in the Golden State.

No Republican has been elected to statewide party in seven years, and that was Arnold Schwarzenegger whose movie star celebrity may have accounted more for his win than any GOP connection.

So at their state meeting in Sacramento, Republicans had to swallow the bad news that read like something out of a supermarket tabloid: “Go Hispanic or Die!”

“Latino outreach is the greatest challenge for the Republican Party today,” GOP activist Ruben Barrales said at the convention where the GOP began preparing for the 2014 mid-term elections.
“(But) It’s not about (only) outreach — it’s about inclusion. If we want more Latinos in the Republican Party we have to bring more Latinos into the Republican Party.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/04/california-republicans-re_n_2802308.html

TheHill.com: RNC chairman stakes his legacy on winning over minority voters

TheHill.com: RNC chairman stakes his legacy on winning over minority voters

Reince Priebus is staking his legacy as Republican National Committee chairman on improving the party’s performance with minority voters.

"I just sort of reached a boiling point on the issue," Priebus told The Hill in an interview at RNC headquarters on Friday. "I want to fix these problems."

In the 2012 election, President Obama won 93 percent of the black vote, 71 percent of the Hispanic vote and 73 percent of the Asian vote, helping him coast to a victory over Republican Mitt Romney.

As the first black president, Obama’s success with black voters is no surprise, but the rising margins he won with all three demographics is a warning sign for the GOP. Obama only won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008 and 62 percent of the Asian-American vote.    
        

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Republicanos se reúnen con líderes latinos en Denver

Obama: The Marketer-in-Chief

 

Politics offer us clear insight into the formulation of marketing. Very rarely, outside of bikini-clad or football-related beer ads, is the marketing so blatantly transparent. Throughout the 2012 Presidential Election, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s campaigns vigorously targeted particular demographics by appealing to certain internal and external forces that influence a voter’s choice. In the end, it was the ability of Barack Obama to connect with these factors that allowed him to retain his incumbency.

“Obama was the better marketer and if the Grand Old Party wants to have a chance of resetting the electoral map they need to respect marketing” (Tantillo, 2012). This statement is especially true when we look at two if the most decisive issues: Healthcare and Reproductive/Women’s Rights.

Healthcare

Almost immediately after it was passed in 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) had its detractors and some pretty prominent ones at that. Fast forward nearly two years and “repeal Obamacare” became a rallying cry for the Republican Party. This was intimated by numerous candidates during the primaries and by Mitt Romney as the eventual nominee.

Outside of trying to appeal to those who are against big-government and rational thinkers who are aware of the bureaucratic nightmare this may become, Mitt Romney’s message was largely ineffective. This was because a majority of Americans, although not necessarily in favor of the ACA were not willing to simply repeal it (Jones, 2012). Barack Obama’s camp kept close watch on polling data that allowed them to tailor their message effectively to the trends currently impacting the public, thus they were easily able to appeal to those who the ACA was intended to benefit (lower income, pre-existing conditions, unemployed recent college graduates) and come off looking compassionate and keeping the public’s best interest in mind.

Democrats Enjoy 2-1 Advantage Over GOP Among Hispanics

From Gallup: WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Hispanic adults are more than twice as likely to identify as or lean Democratic than Republican, according to Gallup Daily tracking data collected throughout 2012. In total, 51% of Hispanics identified as or leaned Democratic, while a little less than a quarter (24%) identified with or leaned toward the GOP. Twenty percent were wholly independent, with no preferences for either party.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/160706/democrats-enjoy-advantage-gop-among-hispanics.aspx

Former Bush aide heads effort to elect Latino Republicans in California

The California-based PAC GROW Elect, which launched in 2011 with the goal of increasing the ranks of Latino Republican elected officials in California, is expanding.

   
GROW Elect has brought on its first president and CEO in former George W. Bush aide Ruben Barrales, and in the wake of an abysmal showing among Hispanic voters nationally for GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, the PAC is pledging an “aggressive expansion” of its political plan.
 
The hiring of Barrales is the first step in expanding the PAC, which recruits and trains potential candidates at the state and local level.

Read more: http://www.campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/365092/former-bush-aide-heads-effort-to-elect-latino-republicans-in-california.thtml

Obama’s Minimum Wage Gambit

 

The President’s proposal to raise the minimum wage is as politically clever as it is economically meaningless. The proposal is pointless in practical terms since it can’t become law and wouldn’t help the economy if it did. It is only significant because of what it says about President Obama.

The President is clearly learning how to use Republican dysfunction to his advantage. This gambit invites Republicans to put their most serious weaknesses on display. So far we are giving him what he hoped for and more. Any Republican response ought to begin by acknowledging the merits of the minimum wage.

While it’s true that a wage floor eliminates some jobs, that’s what it is meant to accomplish. In extreme circumstances, people can find themselves without negotiating leverage in the wage market. A wage floor, along with the rest of the social safety net, legislates out of existence certain jobs which are inherently exploitative.

  Along the way it incentivizes technological development, supporting careers in fields like computers and robotics which might not exist if the poorest in society could be starved into submission. Eliminating the wage floor entirely would do more than make the poor poorer. It would pull some of the momentum out of higher-paid industries, sucking wages downward for everyone.

While a minimum wage serves a purpose, it needs to be handled with care. An increase in the minimum wage moves the range of available careers higher up the value scale. However, if we shift it too far then lower-skill workers begin to suffer, seeing the opportunities to launch careers fade. For example, if the minimum wage were hiked to $20/hour, then the window of available careers will no longer include, as an example, the McDonalds restaurant. McDonalds might still provide drive-through service, but they could not afford to pay humans to do the work.

 Such a high minimum wage might make fast-food automation economically viable eliminating millions of entry-level jobs. Perhaps your Big Mac would be cooked and served by a mostly-automated restaurant. Your meal would cost a bit more and you might be less likely to get ‘screwed at the drive-through,’ but such a high wage floor could eliminate the entire concept of student employment and make unskilled work almost entirely redundant.

It makes sense to hike the minimum wage significantly if the mass availability of desperate workers is causing technology investment to lag. However, that is the opposite of what we are experiencing. Rapidly accelerating technical advances have created a long-term paradigm shift away from manual labor.

This has spawned twin problems, a frustrating talent drought in knowledge careers (unemployment for IT professionals is around 3%) and vast structural unemployment in less skilled jobs. Raising the minimum wage by a meaningful margin would exacerbate both problems at the same time. The modest increase Obama is proposing is probably too small to have any effect at all beyond its political value. According the Labor Department, in 2011 about 2% of American workers earned at or below the minimum wage. Most of them were under 25 and white. A tiny minority (3%) of hourly workers over 25 earn at or below the minimum wage.

The wage floor does little more than d etermine how many summer jobs the economy will support. That’s why there is little difference in the unemployment rates between states with a higher minimum wage and those that stick with the Federal rate. Our economy has developed to the point that the minimum wage is largely irrelevant.

The wage floor has no relationship to the most serious problem affecting low earners – our systemic failure to prepare workers to meet the exploding demand for technical fields. It takes years to prepare workers for knowledge careers. Those jobs are going unfilled and businesses are doing their best to adapt to the labor drought. All told, Obama’s proposal would probably eliminate a few thousand student jobs while doing nothing about our core problems.

Democrats are once again using the working poor as a backdrop for campaign photos. And Republicans can’t do anything about it. This would be the perfect moment for Republicans to unveil a rational, realistic program to address the collapse in upward mobility among the working poor and minorities. We can’t do that because we don’t have one.

We cannot develop sensible responses to real world issues while locked in an ideological fantasyland in which every problem is solved by cutting taxes, deporting Mexicans or humiliating pregnant teenagers. Jack Kemp is gone and no one has yet emerged with the courage or insight to continue his legacy. So, the gambit will probably succeed. President Obama and the Democrats are positioned to score a few more political points while struggling Americans languish.

For Republicans, it’s yet another opportunity missed.

About the Author: Chris Ladd is a Texan who is now living in the Chicago area. He is the founder of Building a Better GOP and has served for several years as a Republican Precinct Committeeman in DuPage County, IL, and was active in state and local Republican campaigns in Texas for many years. (Email: chrladd AT gmail DOT com)

Marilinda Garcia For New Hampshire House of Representatives

State Representative Marilinda Garcia was first elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2006, at 23 years of age. Elected to her fourth term in 2012, she currently serves on the Finance Committee and as Majority Whip for the Committee on Legislative Administration, and as a co-chair of the House Republican Alliance. She has previously served on the Committees on Children and Family Law and Election Law respectively.

http://elect-mari.com/