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Monday, July 15, 2013

Getting to Sí | The Weekly Standard

Getting to Sí | The Weekly Standard

How do you succeed in wooing Hispanics without really trying? Rick Perry may have the answer. In 2010, running for his third full term, the Republican governor won the support of more than 400,000 Hispanic voters in Texas, his best performance to date. Perry didn’t need to win that many—Texas is still deep red, and he had won his last two elections pretty easily. But even had he needed the votes, it isn’t Perry’s style to make an explicitly ethnic pitch to a minority group. In fact, Rob Johnson, Perry’s campaign manager, says the team didn’t develop a separate Hispanic outreach strategy at all.
Rick Perry at a Hispanic pro-life event
RICK PERRY AT A HISPANIC PRO-LIFE EVENT
NEWSCOM
“Did we have Spanish-language ads? Sure,” Johnson says. “But they mirrored the same message as the English ones.”
That message was part economic, part populist: The Perry regime of lower taxes and smaller, less intrusive government had kept the economy booming through the Great Recession and kept more money in the average Texan’s pocket. That convinced the majority of Texas voters, who reelected Perry over his Democratic challenger by double digits. More remarkable, though, was how the Anglo Republican also managed to convince about 40 percent of Hispanic voters, who are traditionally and overwhelmingly Democratic. That was a major improvement for Perry, who in 2006 received closer to 31 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Texas’s economy is still going strong after more than a dozen years with Perry at the helm. His announcement last week that he won’t seek a fourth term may mean we won’t get to see if he can persuade even more Hispanics. But whether or not he decides to run for president again, the soon-to-be-former governor is one of several Republicans offering the rest of the party a model for winning more Hispanic voters.

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