Many say California Republicans’ anti-immigration ballot initiatives in the 1990s lost them the Latino vote and set the party on the road to ruin. Is Trump leading national Republicans down the same failed path? Iris Hui finds that the propositions were not the tipping point, with Republicans starting to lose ground beforehand and feeling the brunt of their shifts only with the next generation. Joshua Zingher finds that California Republicans did lose Latinos without gaining whites, but he says anti-immigration politics in Arizona provides Republicans with a better national model: they gained white voters faster than they lost latinos. Western state politics provides a glimpse of the national future.
The Science of Politics