Dave Weigel offers an interesting article on the Ron Paul campaign, but unfortunately we are going to clash again over his claims about the alleged inefficacy of anti-immigration politics.  When longshot candidates who have little realistic chance of gaining traction take up immigration as an issue and then fail to gain traction, it seems as if this is frequently attributed to the adoption of the immigration issue rather than a function of the longshot, marginal candidacy itself or the result of a more general failure of political strategy that Weigel has described elsewhere. 

It is fair to say that there were more competitors for the anti-amnesty, anti-immigration vote in the GOP primaries, which made any attempt to poach voters from the crowded field unlikely to result in smashing success, but there is a flaw in the following conclusion:

This lunge for the Minuteman vote didn’t work. According to exit polls, Paul won only 8 percent of Republican voters who want to deport all illegal immigrants. That was 16 points less than immigration compromiser John McCain, six less than amnesty waffler Mike Huckabee, and even one point less than “sanctuary city” mayor Rudy Giuliani. Paul finished a poor fifth among voters who cared about immigration but came in a strong second place among voters angry at the Bush administration. In other words, he came in second among his natural constituency and fared poorly on an issue every candidate was already scrapping over.

But consider that he also finished behind McCain among anti-Bush voters.  In state after state, he routinely fell behind both McCain and Romney among antiwar voters, when both stated clearly their intentions to prolong the war.  This means that there was something very strange about Paul’s natural constituencies–they may have been against Bush and the war, but they did not place a terribly high prioritiy on opposition to either one.  It also means that a restrictionist electorate that could bring itself to back McCain, Huckabee and Romney in large numbers is either generally poorly informed or fairly irrational in its candidate preferences, and the same could be said for antiwar voters.  When restrictionists refuse to vote for one of only two candidates (the other being Hunter) who had any real credibility as a restrictionist by the time of New Hampshire, there is not much that a campaign can do. 

Unlike the restrictionist voting pool, which could sometimes swell to 50% or more of the primary electorate, anti-Bush and antiwar voters consistently made up roughly a 30% minority of GOP voters, which meant that Paul was always fishing in a relatively small pool.  His “natural constituencies” were very unnaturally backing candidates who espoused the opposite of everything Paul was offering, meaning that Paul was usually getting perhaps a fifth or less of this third of Republicans that he theoretically should have dominated.  Arguably, restrictionism was one area after Tancredo’s withdrawal where Paul could have conceivably gained some purchase, since he had some real credibility in opposing mass immigration in a field crowded with latecomers and opportunists.  It was an attempt that did not pay dividends, but it was a reasonably smart move considering that it was the perception of Huckabee and Romney as hard-liners on immigration that continued to keep them viable with conservative voters who should have regarded both with suspicion on this and other issues.  Huckabee won Iowa in part because he presented himself simply as an anti-amnesty candidate.  The figure of 8% in New Hampshire is no better, but also no worse than his statewide performance, and the percentage is consistent with the fraction of GOP voters who have been called ”Fortress America” Republicans.  These are the voters most receptive to a combined anti-Bush, antiwar and anti-immigration message.  Outside this group, however, anti-immigration sentiment tends to be strongest among nationalists, who tend to be “Jacksonian” in their foreign policy views and so are least inclined to endorse foreign policy arguments that stress “blowback,” criticise American deployments as outposts of empire and demand immediate withdrawal from a war zone.  It’s true that Paul could only draw a small sliver of restrictionist voters, because only a small sliver of these voters also share Paul’s foreign policy perspective.  In an ideal world, pro-sovereignty and anti-imperial messages ought to complement each other electorally, but in reality they seem to cut against each other. 

Yet it is very questionable whether a “more foreign policy–based libertarian message” would have been the better course.  I assume Weigel and others have seen the high unfav ratings Rep. Paul had in every early state; these high unfav ratings were the result in large part of Paul’s principled and correct foreign policy position, so it seems likely that an even more intensely foreign policy-based campaign would have been the cause of higher unfavs and would have been even less successful electorally.  As frustrating as it is to admit, thoroughgoing non-interventionism or a general “mind our own business” attitude in foreign affairs is not terribly popular among Republicans, and perhaps has not been for at least ten years.  Focusing even more intently on this part of the campaign was not going to boost Paul’s share of the vote.  Deploying populist appeals on immigration was an attempt to broaden Paul’s message that did not really yield the desired results, but it seems certain that a more strictly anti-imperialist campaign would have had even more limited appeal.  Some voters choose candidates purely or primarily on foreign policy, but most do not.  A campaign that was already heavily defined by its foreign policy dissent could scarcely have increased its numbers among antiwar voters who were already willing to vote for McCain and Romney, since their opposition to the war could hardly have been very deep.  One of the biggest problems with Paul’s restrictionist appeals is that they came relatively late in the process, which probably gave the average voter the impression that Paul was engaged in imitating Huckabee and Romney in their race to capture the restrictionist vote.  A deeper problem, and one Paul’s campaign could have done little to change, was that the GOP is filled with voters who rallied behind such “conservatives” as Huckabee and Romney and has very few that prize radical devotion to the Constitution or economic liberty.  Under the circumstances, and bearing in mind the mistakes in organisation the campaign did make, Paul may have done about as well as he could have.

Filed under: immigration, politics