Immigration may be hot buttonRepublicans shouldn't push

As post-mortems continue on last week's election debacle for the GOP, one issue that continues to be cited as a reason for the Republican loss in the Virginia governor's race is immigration.

To be sure, GOP candidate Jerry Kilgore didn't limit himself to a single issue. He pushed every hot button he could think of. The Washington Post reported:

Kilgore also figured he could ride the old social-issue train to victory in a Southern state. He declared himself "the pro-gun, anti-tax, limited government, anti-illegal immigration, pro-public safety, pro-death penalty, culture-of-life, trust-the-people conservative."

Kilgore's negative ads on television went after his opponent, Tim Kaine, on immigration and the death penalty -- issues that Wisconsin Republicans seem to be getting ready to run on in 2006. They've already proposed a series of anti-immigrant bills and are talking about bringing up the death penalty in the aftermath of the grisly Teresa Halbach-Steven Avery case.

That strategy didn't work too well for Kilgore, according to the Charlottesville Daily Progress:

Many Republicans believe that Kilgore’s excessively harsh attack ads on symbolic social issues such as immigration and the death penalty turned off so many GOP voters that about 60,000 did not vote for the candidate at the top of the ticket but did vote for his two running mates.

Fred Barnes piles on in The Weekly Standard:

I think there are two better explanations for the Republican retreat in the two exurban counties. First, there's the immigration issue. Late in the campaign, Kilgore played up his opposition to government aid for illegal immigrants. He did so in TV ads and speeches, criticizing Kaine for supporting taxpayer-financed services for illegals and their families. The tagline in his TV spots was: "What part of 'illegal' does Tim Kaine not understand?"

. . . The question is whether his emphasis on illegals might have been seen as unfriendly to immigrants, especially by the large immigrant communities in the two counties. An exit poll might have answered this question, but none was conducted.

Nevertheless, Republican consultant Jeffrey Bell insists the immigrant issue hurt Kilgore. Attacks on immigration work in theory but often not in practice. Bell says criticizing illegal immigrants has backfired in every campaign he's familiar with that emphasized the issue. Indeed, the Kilgore campaign was slipping in the polls late in the campaign when he was highlighting the immigrant issue.

The northern Virginia suburbs which have been the focus of much of the analysis have been reliably Republican in the past, but didn't deliver as expected for the GOP this time. One reason the immigration issue didn't work may be that there are a fair number of immigrants living in Virginia, including Latinos and Asians. Wisconsin has growing populations of Latino and Hmong voters who may be turned off to immigrant-bashing as well.

The right wing already started that campaign last May, you may recall, when the Coalition for America's Families ran two television commercials and a radio ad attacking Gov. Jim Doyle over programs that benefit illegal immigrants. The group has taken the links to the ads off its website, but you can find them on WisPolitics Ad Watch, dated May 22 and June 5.

The Republicans seemed hell-bent on using the issue next year in the governor's race and legislative races. But Virginia's result may give them pause. It should.