Fox News anchor Brit Hume called “baloney” Monday on the notion that House Republicans must help approve the immigration reform legislation that just passed the Senate, arguing that Hispanic voters are still not as important to the GOP as white voters.
The right-leaning Hume was responding to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who warned Sunday that Republicans may never win another presidential election if they don’t help pass immigration reform.
“And I am absolutely convinced that this trope that you’re hearing that says that if the Republicans don’t go for immigration reform much as the Senate has done, they’ll never win another presidential election. Oh, baloney,” Hume said during an appearance on the conservative cable news channel. “If you look at the statistics, you find there was one significant bloc of voters who turned out in smaller numbers this time in a major way — way below expectations, below even their ’08 turnout — and that was white voters. Now, that doesn’t mean that if they turned out thatRomney would have gotten them all but it shows you that this Hispanic vote, which is I think now 8.5 percent of the electorate or something like that, is not nearly as important as, still, as the white vote, which is above 70 percent.”
Hume added, “So, if you look at it from an ethnic point of view, that addresses the question of whether you need to get right with the Hispanics.”
Mitt Romney claimed a mere 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, a factor cited by many analysts as a reason for the Republican nominee’s defeat. President Barack Obama, on the other hand, won a 71 percent share of the Hispanic vote.
