It is probably fate that on a grim morning, when Republicans find themselves groaning after another glum Election Night, that a piece that had been percolating for a while runs…
My friends, all is not lost for the GOP. In today’s NRO column, I lay out all the data suggesting good opportunities for candidates on the right in 2008. And despite what I said about the mild response from the illegal immigration issue in New York and Virginia below, I think the section on securing the border holds up well:
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Immigration: This is an issue that has only gotten bigger and more passionate for the past five years. It mobilizes the Republican base like nothing else — witness the grassroots efforts against the amnesty deal this year — and the Democrats are absolutely split on this; Democratic pollsters/strategists Stan Greenberg, Al Quinlan, and James Carville call it “a real wedge issue.” They found that “even with the reassurance on [border] control and [denying] benefits, 40 percent of Democrats and a majority of African Americans favored the tougher Republican alternative that provided no path to legalization.”
While Iraq and Katrina are fading as issues, this one only gets bigger: Independents rank “the border left unprotected” their top concern, higher than “Doing nothing about dependence on oil/global warming” by nine points, higher than “losing jobs to China and India” by thirteen points, higher than “government is running record budget deficits” by fourteen points, and higher than “bogged down and spending billions in Iraq” by 17 points.
Why did Hillary equivocate and dance so much when she was asked about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to offer driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants? Because she knows the issue is political nitroglycerin, and she and Spitzer are on the wrong side of three quarters of Americans.
Read the whole thing.