Dream Away: Could the Dream Act be the GOP's Ticket Back to Statewide Relevance?

Over the next few weeks, state lawmakers and immigrant rights advocates will try to cobble together enough support to pass the Dream Act. The legislation, a priority for downstate Democrats ever since Congress failed to pass a more sweeping measure providing a pathway to citizenship, opens up access to college financial aid for young immigrants living illegally in New York. Yet upstate and suburban Republicans remain staunchly opposed to the bill, and if the legislative battle plays out as it has in recent years, the GOP-led state Senate will block it and supporters will once again come away empty-handed.

The bill can be viewed as a litmus test dividing the state’s Democrats and Republicans, but it may be more than that. Some political observers suggest that the Republicans’ stance on the legislation is also a gauge of the party’s ability—or inability—to adapt to New York’s growing minority population and, in turn, to find a viable strategy for winning statewide elections. Along with the party’s positions on issues like abortion and perhaps climate change, the GOP’s opposition to the Dream Act is standing in the way of support among key demographic groups that may be slipping out of its grasp.

In the 2014 elections, for example, Rob Astorino, the Republican standard-bearer, lined up with much of his party in openly opposing the Dream Act. Although he speaks fluent Spanish, the gubernatorial candidate drew the ire of Latino lawmakers when he said that he supported a scaled-back measure that would offer young immigrants access to private scholarship funds—but not to public funds from the state’s Tuition Assistance Program. Meanwhile, John Cahill, a former top aide to Gov. George Pataki who won the Republican nomination for state attorney general, bucked his party and backed the Dream Act. Both men lost, but Cahill won more total votes than Astorino and came closer to knocking out his Democratic rival.

“Cahill came out for it and he led the ticket,” said Bruce Gyory, a Democratic consultant and political science professor at the University at Albany. “Would the Conservative Party have liked it? No. But would it have killed you, especially if you explain to people that it’s not the immigrant kid gets a full scholarship and you have to go get a loan, but it’s basically the immigrant kid will be entitled to the same ability to get TAP dollars as you get because they’ve been raised here? They could have framed it differently.”

Of course, such a dramatic policy shift would be difficult for any Republican candidate in New York to make, let alone the state party as a whole. The GOP has been outspoken in its hostility to the Dream Act, arguing that it would take away funds from other needy students. Nationally, the party has taken a hard line against illegal immigration, and the absence of any Republican elected statewide officials would make it hard to take a different tack.

Nor is it clear that the benefits of passing the Dream Act would outweigh the costs, at least in the short term. A Siena College poll last spring found that 56 percent of New York voters oppose the legislation. Eight in 10 Republicans were against the bill, while 52 percent of New York City voters, 39 percent of suburban voters and just a quarter of upstate voters supported it. In the state Senate, the one remaining bastion of Republican statewide power, the party’s stance didn’t keep them from winning an outright majority at the polls last fall.

“I was told by a lobbyist from the real estate industry that in their polling in the state Senate for Republicans before the election, supporting the Dream Act was a killer for the Democrats in these marginal seats and very helpful to Republicans,” said another political consultant, Jerry Skurnik. “So I said they’ve got be careful in how they do that. For a long-range feature, it probably makes sense. But for the short range, they have to be careful in how they handle that.”

In the long run, Republicans could be at risk. In a 22-page memo analyzing the 2014 elections in New York, Gyory notes that Astorino garnered well under a quarter of the total minority vote, did only slightly better with Hispanics and won just a third of female voters, who typically make up slightly more than half of the electorate. The total minority vote in New York dropped a percentage point from 2010 to 28 percent, due to stunningly low turnout in New York City, but that is likely to be a blip on a generally steady upward climb. The GOP could find itself sidelined if it comes down on the wrong side of such an issue, whether it’s the Dream Act or another issue that resonates strongly with minorities.

Currently 1 in 5 New York City voters is Hispanic, as are about 5 to 7 percent of voters in the suburbs. Those figures will rise over the next decade to a quarter of the New York City vote and then a full third in 15 years, while reaching double digits in the suburbs, Gyory predicted. As the minority population grows, Republicans will face pressure to pick up a substantial share of their vote. Past GOP candidates have done so—Rudy Giuliani won about a third of the Latino vote in 1997, Michael Bloomberg got 47 percent of in 2001, George Pataki garnered 45 percent in 2002. The question is whether the party can do it again.

“The fact that Republicans haven’t been able to win more than a third of the female vote in five consecutive elections—wow!” Gyory said. “And as the aggregate minority vote—black plus Hispanic plus Asian plus biracial—grows towards a full third of the electorate, and if they continue to lose that by margins of 4-to-1, there’s very little room for them to grow. The subset of that is, given where the black community has been since the Voting Rights struggle, that means they’re going to have to do much better with Hispanic and Asian voters.”

Astorino did win 27 percent of the Hispanic vote, up from Carl Paladino’s 12 percent share in 2010, in part by making inroads among socially conservative Latinos that the GOP has long identified as potential allies given their common ground on issues like abortion and gay marriage. Astorino also successfully avoided antagonizing Latinos, noted Larry Levy, the dean of Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies.

“The turnout was really, really low, so you could suggest that Astorino managed to leach some poison out of his and his party’s image so there was not a groundswell of Latino turnout looking to punish the standard-bearer,” Levy said. “He didn’t come across as evil and in need of being snuffed out with a groundswell of support. For Republicans, reflected in Astorino’s showing, the initial challenge is to take the anger out of the community for their candidates in the short term, race by race, contest by contest, while they come up with some longer-term strategy to gain at least a respectable share, if perhaps never a majority of minority voters.”

In the longer term, a winning strategy for Republicans may be to run a statewide candidate who takes a bold stand and breaks with the party on a key issue like the Dream Act to help the party survive in New York in the years ahead.

Gyory drew an analogy to a move Bill Clinton made during his 1992 presidential bid. Sister Souljah, a hip-hop artist, had made provocative comments about riots in Los Angeles, suggesting that since black people were killing each other every day, “why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton publicly condemned the remarks, drawing criticism from African-American leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton but setting himself apart.

“Astorino did almost nothing,” Gyory said. “He didn’t break through. What if he had taken the same pitch Cahill did on the Dream Act and had a Sister Souljah moment? The Republicans desperately need a Sister Souljah moment, where they’re willing to take some grief on their right flank to kind of bring it together.”

 View Gyory's full memo on the 2014 state elections below:

Anatomy of NYS’s 2014 Statewide Elections – an Uncertain Future