Desire For Change — Not Anti-Immigrant Sentiment — Does In Congressman Cannon
Desire For Change — Not Anti-Immigrant Sentiment — Does In Congressman Cannon
Our guest blogger is Henry Fernandez, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund focusing on state and municipal policy.
When Utah Congressman Chris Cannon lost the Republican primary last week to Jason Chaffetz, anti-immigrant groups were quick to define it as an example of a candidate winning because of his restrictionist stance. They were desperate because all of the recent election news has been bad for the anti-immigrant crowd, including recent losses in once über-red House districts in Illinois and Mississippi.
Roy Beck, the head honcho of NumbersUSA — a leading organization opposed to legal immigration — told the Orange County Register:
Cannon’s loss was an outburst of Republican frustration with the minority of Republican office-holders who stand in the Bush-McCain amnesty camp.
And this from Michelle Malkin:
…the simple fact is that voters finally got fed up with Cannon’s constant water-carrying for La Raza and MALDEF…
Unfortunately, the AP parroted the anti-immigrants’ talking points, but gave no facts to back up this assertion. Facts lead to a very different conclusion in a race where voters were so dissatisfied that only ten percent of Republicans even bothered to show up.
It is true that while staunchly conservative on most matters, Cannon was a moderate on immigration. But what is apparently not true is that there was a connection between Cannon’s immigration moderation and his loss. In fact, Cannon’s last election had been against a much more zealous anti-immigrant hardliner and he won. It appears that, Cannon became identified as a DC insider who had lost touch with his district at a time when even conservative voters are swept up in the need for change.
Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy exit-polled voters. While Cannon did lose those who disagreed with him on immigration, he lost those voters in his prior election as well – and no more of them turned out this time around. What changed this time was that he lost voters who agreed with him on immigration. According to the Salt Lake Tribune:
Roughly the same number of voters who were highly concerned about immigration in 2006, when Cannon won his last primary, showed up this time, when Cannon got whipped. Exit poll results show that more of those who said they had a tougher view on undocumented immigrants voted for Cannon’s opponent, Jason Chaffetz, but a majority of those who backed plans like a guest-worker program also favored Chaffetz. … Also, overall, 70 percent of respondents said Chaffetz was the best person to change Washington, while 30 percent picked Cannon.
It is not surprising that folks like Beck and Malkin would jump to erroneous conclusions about immigration and politics. They have made a profession of doing so.
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Shouldn’t Anchor Baby Malkin be hunting terrorist scarf-wearing coffee drinkers?
June 30th, 2008 at 8:46 pmLoad the catapult! Malkin’s flying monkeys will be here any second!
June 30th, 2008 at 8:46 pmAnd don’t forget your raincoats! It’ll be a sh*t-storm!
June 30th, 2008 at 8:48 pmI think she just may have wrested the title of AssKlown Bimbo away from Coultergeist!
Where TF does Faux find these turdballs, anyway?
June 30th, 2008 at 9:14 pmWell good. If they think they can win by running anti-immigrant candidates then so be it.
June 30th, 2008 at 9:18 pmI wonder how this anti-immigrant stance stacks up against their religious conviction, specifically :
Leviticus 19:34 The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
I guess they only support parts of the Bible they agree with. Of course, they could just be hypocrites.
Pax
June 30th, 2008 at 9:34 pmFacts lead to a very different conclusion in a race where voters were so dissatisfied that only ten percent of Republicans even bothered to show up.
Republicans stink so bad they can’t even stand themselves.
http://progressiveworldreview.com
June 30th, 2008 at 9:56 pm1. The linked sltrib article shows a bias and contains misleading terms, and the poll it refers to doesn’t appear to be online. Imagine that.
2. There’s obviously a difference between opposing massive illegal activity and “anti-immigrant sentiment”, so perhaps TP should find someone to explain that to them.
3. Believe it or not, Fernandez has written far worse posts than this: http://lonewacko.com/blog/archives/007538.html
4. The reader should look up those who in 2006 extolled Cannon’s virtues. They too pretended he was “moderate” on immigration, and those extolling him included the WSJ and similar sites. The reader might want to wonder why the positions of CAP/TP and the WSJ are basically the same.
June 30th, 2008 at 11:20 pmI look on this as a sign that America’s Finally waking up and smelling the proverbial coffee. After almost 8 years of Buscho patented insanity, Americans are saying, enough is enough. Hopefully enough real new blood will be elected to congress to truly make a difference. Personally I’d Love to see some Democrats with Spine; it would make a plesant change, if nothing else. Lincoln was right; you can’t fool All the People All the Time.
July 1st, 2008 at 8:45 amImpeach Pelosi, Cheny and Bush and Save the Constitution!
Which part of “illegal” (as in illegal immigrant) do you not understand?
July 1st, 2008 at 2:27 pmWhich part of
(as in legal immigrant) do you not understand?
Roy Beck, the head honcho of NumbersUSA —
[my emphesis]
— told the Orange County Register:
Cannon’s loss was an outburst of Republican frustration with the minority of Republican office-holders who stand in the Bush-McCain amnesty camp.
July 1st, 2008 at 3:42 pmThis pair of articles establishes that immigration was a very important issue in the ouster of Rep. Chris Cannon, despite the claims of
illegal alien advocate Henry Fernandez.
http://thehill.com/ leading-the-news/ environment-helping-gop-challenger-as-cannon-again-faces-political-demise-2008-06-23.html
Environment helping GOP challenger as Cannon again faces political demise
Contributed by Aaron Blake
06/23/08 07:17 PM [ET] The Hill
[The Utah Primary election was on 24 June 2008.]
Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) has weathered difficult primaries throughout his six terms, but never as a member of such
an unpopular Congress.
That anti-incumbent mood of voters will be put to a major test Tuesday, when Cannon faces what appears to be his
toughest primary challenge yet.
Despite Congress’s record-low approval ratings, no incumbent has succumbed to a primary since a pair of Maryland
House members lost in February. Cannon appears more imperiled than any member since then.
Just weeks after narrowly surviving a state convention against former gubernatorial aide Jason Chaffetz, it’s clear
Tuesday’s primary between the two of them is anybody’s guess…..
….Local observers see Chaffetz as a more well-rounded candidate. Throckmorton only raised $80,000, and Jacob focused
his campaign almost exclusively on a hard-line immigration platform - a tactic that proved less effective in 2006 than
many candidates had hoped.
(In 2006, John) Jacob led Cannon, a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, among hard-line immigration voters but lost other categories, said Quin Monson, a professor at Brigham Young University.
Monson, who has conducted extensive polling on Cannon’s primary, said Chaffetz is doing better across the board.
He also noted that Bush likely won’t be a big help for Cannon. His numbers show Bush’s approval has dropped from the
high 80s in the district to around 60 percent, with only a small portion strongly approving. About four in five likely GOP primary voters say the country is on the wrong track.
“I think it’s a bad context for Cannon,” Monson said. “I think he’s had a tough time in the past because he’s not
connected with voters personally. But now, he’s got that on top of a context that’s not so good.”….
And this article shows the 2008 Quin Monson poll forecast a Chaffetz win.
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/271561/17/
Thursday, 26 June 2008
University poll foresees Chaffetz win
DAILY HERALD
Joe Pyrah
No one saw the Tuesday 3rd District primary massacre coming. Not big name pollsters, not the pundits, not the blogs
July 1st, 2008 at 5:24 pmand not the candidates. No one.
Well, OK, there was one — two actually.
Kelly Patterson and fellow BYU political science professor Quin Monson had a poll in their pocket using an
experimental technique that showed a 12-point blowout in favor of Jason Chaffetz over incumbent Chris Cannon.
(The actual vote tally was even higher at 20 points.) But they were afraid to publish the poll last week because the
results didn’t match up with conventional wisdom that showed a tight race, one too close to call……
Great article Henry. I also blogged about this race at http://blog.immigrationforum.org/. Rep. Cannon is an interesting man and survived two attenmpts to unseat him by a fiercly anti-legal immigration candidate. Thanks.
July 1st, 2008 at 6:33 pmRoy Beck, who is the head of NumbersUSA, has repeatedly expressed concerns about illegal immigration during media interviews. In addition, note the following….
http://www.numbersusa.com/ content/ learn/ press/ press.html
About NumbersUSA
NumbersUSA is a non-profit, non-partisan, public policy organization that favors an environmentally sustainable and economically just America. It opposes efforts to use federal immigration policies to force mass U.S. population growth and to depress wages of vulnerable workers.
NumbersUSA is pro-environment, pro-worker, pro-liberty and pro-immigrant. Activists in the NumbersUSA Action Network are Americans of all races and include many immigrants and the spouses, children and parents of immigrants.
Those who need to refer to NumbersUSA with a short, descriptive modifier should call it an “immigration-reduction organization.”
July 1st, 2008 at 7:00 pmWhen will America get a leader who understands the real solution to illegal immigration is sanctions against the 3rd World?
As a Californian who taught in East LA, lives shoulder to shoulder with illegal immigrants and the fallout their faulty transition to the 1st World creates, pays over and over and over again to contain gang activity and destruction of property, I am disgusted the US has not sanctioned Mexico: world’s 5th largest producer of oil, gold mining, silver mining, precious and semi-precious stone mining, tourism, agriculture, textiles. The country is loaded with income. And yet they do not educate, create job opportunity or provide health care for their own people, preferring instead to prepare them to “Go north” the way our parents prepared us to go to college.
Clearly the US is very interested in keeping all that unclaimed tax money from illegal SSNs and retaining all that cheap labor corporations are making billions from employing (think about it: no wage increase, no maternity, paternity or sick leave, no workmans’s comp claims, no EDD claims, no 401k, no retirement paid… BILLIONS) As a tax paying citizen I would like to see immigration be a choice not a life or death decision. For that the 3rd World needs to be forced to step up to the plate and create its own middle class.
And that my friends, take some real balls to stand up and legislate.
July 19th, 2008 at 5:55 pm