Hispanics gain ground in politics

By JONATHAN GURWITZ

New York Times News Service

As Texas goes, so goes the nation.

That’s true demographically. Texas became a majority-minority state in 2005, a multicultural trend that won’t be reflected by the nation as a whole for three more decades, according to the experts.

And that’s true politically. How Republicans and Democrats navigate these changing demographics in Texas — or how they run aground on the shoals of identity politics — will portend a lot about the fortunes of the national parties.

Demography does, to a large extent, determine destiny. But so do individuals. And last week, two of Texas’ brightest sons assumed important roles in shaping their parties’ futures.

In the GOP primary race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, former state Solicitor General Ted Cruz — educated at Princeton and Harvard — scored a stunning victory over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Most of the attention in Tuesday’s primary runoff had focused on the ostensible split between tea party conservatives and traditional Republicans, or the supposed extremist challenge to the Republican establishment.

In the short run, those are interesting topics for discussion, especially among the snotty set for whom “tea party” has replaced “neocon” as the political epithet of choice. In the long run, the larger issue is that Texas Republicans have chosen to put a candidate with a Spanish surname at the top of the ballot in November. To put it mildly, that hasn’t always been the case.

In 2002, state Supreme Court Justice Xavier Rodriguez lost a GOP primary battle to the heavily outspent and thoroughly underqualified Steven Wayne Smith. In 2010, Texas Railroad Commission Chairman Victor Carrillo lost a primary challenge from the unremarkable David Porter, though heavily outspending his opponent. Even as Cruz triumphed last week, Supreme Court Justice David Medina lost his re-election bid to the gloriously named John Devine in the Republican primary.

Supreme Court and Railroad Commission seats, though elected statewide, are typically low-profile races but the Cruz-Dewhurst matchup was a marquee event. Despite being outspent 3-to-1, Cruz prevailed. His victory demonstrated, among other things, that Texas Republicans are more interested in conservative ideals than in ethnicity.

Cruz’s victory is effectively guaranteed in November. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, and 2012 is not likely to be the year this string of GOP wins comes to an end.

But then there’s the hard fact of demography. Can Cruz — and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — help Republicans craft a platform and a message that appeals to Hispanics? As recently as 2004, President George W. Bush won 44 percent of the Latino vote. By 2008, only 31 percent of Hispanics voted for John McCain, versus 67 percent for Barack Obama.

It’s no coincidence that on the same day Ted Cruz strode onto the national stage as the likely first Hispanic senator from Texas, Democrats announced that a Hispanic would for the first time deliver the keynote address at their national convention next month. Stanford-and-Harvard-educated Julian Castro — mayor of San Antonio, the nation’s seventh-largest city — will speak in the same slot that brought Obama — then an obscure Illinois state senator — to national prominence in 2004.

Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the United States. Along with Asians, they represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. Their success is the latest chapter in the great American saga.

Americans should be prepared to hear a lot more about people with names like Cruz and Castro, including the mayor’s Congress-bound twin brother, state Rep. Joaquin Castro.

Republicans and Democrats, in Texas and across the nation, could do far worse than hitching their political fortunes to these rising stars.