Mesa Ruben
 | |
| Era | The 2000s |
|---|---|
| Age | 20-28 |
| Home | Mesa, AZ |
| Demographic | second-generation Mexican-American, construction, Sun Belt |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | hispanic |
| Predecessor | Rio Grande Ofelia |
| Successor | Phoenix Pablo |
Ruben is a Phoenix-born house framer in his twenties, representing second-generation Mexican-Americans of the Sun Belt building boom. He has no fixed ideology or party, and his vote depends on whether immigration officers can tell him apart from the people they target.
Who they stand for
President George W. Bush, who speaks Spanish, proposed a guest-worker immigration programme in January 2004 and won about four in ten Latino votes that November, a record for a Republican. In December 2005 the House passed the Sensenbrenner bill, making unlawful presence a felony. In spring 2006, half a million people marched in Los Angeles and more than a hundred thousand marched in Phoenix, many of them citizens carrying both American and Mexican flags. Arizona was the centre of this fight: Proposition 200 passed in 2004, the Minuteman Project of armed civilian border patrols began in 2005, Sheriff Joe Arpaio began sweeps in Maricopa County in 2008, and SB 1070 passed in 2010, letting police demand proof of legal status. The Republican share of the Latino vote fell to about three in ten in 2008 and lower in 2012. Ruben's parents gained legal status through the 1986 amnesty, and his trade rose and fell with the Phoenix housing boom.
In the lineage of personas, this line of voters drifts steadily to the right across three decades. Ruben's decade is the only exception, because immigration enforcement in his decade was aimed at people who looked like him.
Playing to them
Ruben responds to respect before he responds to policy. He wants a president who calls him an American, supports a guest-worker programme, offers legal status for relatives such as his uncle, opposes a border wall, opposes taxing overtime pay, and honours relatives who served, such as a cousin in Iraq. His conservative views on guns and the death penalty mean the left's culture-war issues have no effect on him. He will not forgive immigration sweeps, workplace raids, being asked for papers at a traffic stop, a felony bill, or a speech that lumps him with recent arrivals he himself often resents. A Republican who separates enforcement from how he is treated, as Bush did in 2004, can win him. A Democrat who takes his vote for granted loses him not to the Republicans but to not voting.
Winning Ruben's support costs the cast's restrictionists, such as Fox News Phyllis, Jasper Faye, Flathead Wade, Janesville Gary, Chattanooga Travis and Drywall Josh. A guest-worker programme keeps Abilene Ray; full legalisation loses him. Bakersfield Jesús and Las Vegas Marisol want the same policy and are already committed Democrats, whereas Ruben is still undecided, which is what makes him worth campaigning for.
Where they live
The five states where Mesa Ruben makes up the largest share of the electorate in the 2000s:
- New Mexico
- Texas
- California
- Arizona
- Nevada
Lineage
Rio Grande Ofelia → Mesa Ruben → Phoenix Pablo
The Mexican-American swing voter whose family has been in the Southwest for generations. None of the three has a fixed ideology. Their vote depends on whether Republicans are attacking immigrants in a way that includes them. Ofelia inherited a Democratic vote and is drifting Republican over abortion and because the Democrats take her for granted. Ruben is pushed back toward the Democrats by Sheriff Arpaio's sweeps and the Minutemen, because that enforcement targets people who look like him. Pablo owns a business and nobody questions his status, so he votes on taxes and abortion again. Across thirty years the drift is rightward, interrupted by the one decade in which Republican immigration enforcement was aimed at him.