Marco Rubio would be a smart veep pick for Romney
Rubio is a charming young congressional freshman and son of Cuban immigrants, is a popular conservative and once-darling of the once-great Tea Party, and he’s taking Romney’s side in the Romney-Gingrich Florida fight:
In a Spanish-language ad airing in Florida paid for by the Gingrich campaign, Mitt Romney is called “the most anti-immigrant candidate.”
Sen. Marco Rubio blasted Newt Gingrich today for describing Romney that way. “This kind of language is more than just unfortunate,” Rubio told the Miami Herald. “It’s inaccurate, inflammatory, and doesn’t belong in this campaign.”
“The truth is that neither of these two men is anti-immigrant,” Rubio added. “Both are pro-legal immigration and both have positive messages that play well in the Hispanic community.”
Rubio has indicated he has no plans to endorse.
No plans to endorse, but this is still picking sides. Rubio would make a smart pick for Romney’s VP for numerous reasons. He’s more reliably conservative than Romney. He’s a good speaker, likable and eloquent. He’s young and good-looking. And he’s a minority who would appeal to that much-alienated Hispanic vote.
Is this his first move to position himself in Romney’s good graces? What happens if Newt wins Florida?
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m just crossing my arms and making “I told you so” faces right now. Basically like that picture of Rubio but a couple standard deviations less dreamy.
Then again he still might pick someone else. Like Sarah Palin.
I don’t think a Cuban-American would necessarily appeal to most hispanic voters…given that Cuban-Americans are a very distinct minority group on their own… in fact it might back-fire.
Backfire how?
It’ll look like you’re trying to appeal to hispanics with tokenism (“look, we don’t hate Hispanic’s!), but by giving the spot to a Hispanic who’s a protected class in this country. Or to put it bluntly, if a Honduran or Dominican got to Miami the same way Rubio’s (grand?)parents did, they’d be kicked back to their home country.
Worth remembering: VP picks are largely irrelevant to the outcome of presidential elections. Even a historically awful pick like Palin didn’t move McCain’s numbers by more than a point or two according to most post-election analysis, and I’m not aware of any evidence of a VP pick making a significant positive difference.
Also, too, what Nob said above. A hard-right Cuban-American isn’t going to play well in Latino communities outside of south Florida. Years of increasingly strident anti-immigrant rhetoric combined with all the “papers, please” state laws patterned after Arizona’s AB1070 are going to have a much greater effect.
The GOP is doing a masterful job of turning Hispanic voters from being a 55-45 or 60-40 Democratic bloc into a 90-10 bloc. If you want to see a preview of 2012 across the Southwest, look at the crosstabs from Harry Reid’s 2010 re-election in Nevada.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2010/results/polls/#val=NVS01p1
Latinos went 69-30 Democratic in the 2010 NV Senate race . . .
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/NV/S/01/epolls.0.html
. . . and went 67-27 Democratic in the 2004 NV Senate race (the last time Harry Reid was up for re-election.) So, the margin actually closed by one point toward the Republicans in those 6 years.
What did change was that Latinos went from being 10 percent of the vote to 16 percent of the vote between the two elections. However, the Republican margin among whites went from 58-40 deficit in 2004 to a 52-42 victory in 2010. It’s a midterm versus a presidential year, so the usual caveats apply.
It will eventually be a big problem for the GOP to lose Latinos 2-to-1 in future elections, especially if it makes pulling in Florida or Texas more difficult. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see what economic mobility does to the Latino vote — e.g. if eventual economic success for Latinos translates into an erosion of old voting patterns, the way it did for white Catholics over the course of the 20th century. Also, there are probably a lot of arenas/jurisdictions in which the GOP would gladly take the boost among working-class whites that this sort of electoral positioning entails, even at the cost of some Latino voters.
Excellent points. Thanks.
Re: Romney-Rubio. Not gonna happen. A Mormon-Catholic ticket strikes me as unlikely, and Romney’s overriding trait is to overcompensate when he detects any possible form of weakness. His running mate is going to be a white, Southern, religious-right dude so as to provide him with “one of them” to vouch for him. Which makes Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell the overriding choice.
It’s not entirely clear that Rubio is a Catholic.
That’s new to me. Interesting.
The religion thing is way overblown, but McDonnell makes a lot of sense. Especially given that he’ll be out of a job after 2013 anyway.
I’m not so sure. I think there will be enormous pressure from inside the party for Romney to pick a running mate with impeccable mainline Protestant credentials.
I don’t think the “Southern” part will be as important this cycle with Obama as the opponent; it’d be different if there were a Southern Democrat running.
Maybe not. Some species of Bible-thumper though.
After Palin and Quayle, I would think the GOP might have learned that using “young & attractive” as a strategy for VP selection doesn’t always pay off the way they think it might.