The immigration debate is tearing the Republican party apart. The GOP is unable to please its base, and yet its base has succeeded in alienating increasing numbers of Hispanic voters. Money quote:
Ken Strasma, a Democratic strategist who specializes in using demographic data to target potential voters, and the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study concluding that, if past voting patterns hold, the growing Hispanic population means that Democrats will increase their 2004 vote totals by nearly half a million votes in 2008.
"The impact is even stronger farther out in the future, as Hispanic vote growth would move two Southwestern battleground states — Nevada and New Mexico — into the Democratic column by 2016, and add Iowa and Ohio by 2020," the study said … A third study of all voters found that conservative white Republicans are the most adamantly opposed of all political and demographic groups to what Bush calls his "rational middle ground" policy toward allowing more undocumented workers to become legal and eventually to become citizens.
And so the Republicans fall into the chasm between the two groups. The Rove strategy of a new Republican coalition is slowly being exposed as a fantasy.
The Dish 