Nice job leaving out Colorado, Nevada, and Florida in your whole "Hispanics don't matter in swing states" shtick; it's quite telling.
I honestly couldn't bother to read what he wrote because it is just way too long (and I'm a total numbers guy), but the reality is...Latinos really
don't matter as much as we hear. Ten years from now, it'll be a different story.
I've said it a few times on here lately already, but Romney could have won anywhere from 11% to 43% of the Latino vote nationally in 2012 and it
wouldn't have flipped a single state (other than Florida, which was less than a one-point win and has a large Hispanic population, of which half are Cubans and don't express the same voting tendencies as most Latinos). On the upper end of that, Romney would have lost the popular vote by just a little less than two points and the EC would have been 303-235.
Colorado would have flipped at around 44%; Virginia and New Mexico at 45%. Even Bush didn't top those numbers in 2004. The reality is that the Latino vote as of right now is almost exclusively clustered in safe D/R states and therefore doesn't matter from the perspective of the Electoral College. Most states that are competitive have such small Latino populations that it'd have to be the thinnest of margins to make a difference...and even in the case of CO, NV & NM, if they vote anywhere near how they voted in 2008/2012, then the Latino vote doesn't make a difference in terms of the range of realistic turnout/support scenarios.
Obviously it is very short-sighted for the GOP to alienate Latinos, but alas. Unless it's 2000-close, it's not going make a difference in the overall outcome in presidential elections for another couple of elections (and even then, we're already winning in the states where that will largely be the case).
