The Growth Message is a Winner

An "Anglo" Republican defeated an Hispanic Democrat in an overwhelmingly Hispanic and Democratic California state senate district.   How did that happen, just as the experts all seemingly agreed that The Golden State was really the Blue State?

The big issue was jobs for the 16th district, located in the Central Valley of California.  The GOPer, one Andy Vidak, had a better pro-jobs message; that message obviously transcended ethnicity, partisanship, and the Democrat's huge money advantage.

As Los Angeles-based public intellectual Gregory Rodriguez has argued for years, Hispanics of today are best compared to the American "ethnics"--mostly Central and European--of a century ago.  That is, work- and family-oriented, socially conservative, but also economically liberal--liberal in the old sense, the New Deal sense.

So the winning message for them would be jobs and wages.    And that's the message that Republican Vidak, not the Democrat Perez, was most effective at delivering.

As I have argued in the past, the GOP--or, for that matter, Democrats of an older stripe--could do much more with that pro-growth/anti-Malthusian message if they wanted to.