In 1984, 45% of the state’s Hispanics voted for Reagan. Then Pete Wilson drove them into Democrats’ arms.
Donald Trump’s new campaign ad covers old material. He wants to “make America great again” and immigrants are standing in the way. The Republican presidential hopeful says that we should ban Muslims, wall off Mexico and deport our way to prosperity. Such talk has brought Mr. Trump large crowds on the campaign trail and kept him leading in the polls, but GOP strategists who know their history are worried that it could backfire big time.
The television spot includes aerial footage of migrants scurrying across a border, and it has drawn comparisons to very similar ads run in the early 1990s by California’s then-Gov. Pete Wilson, another Republican moderate with presidential ambitions who became an immigration hard-liner out of political expediency.
Mr. Wilson, who was first elected in 1990, signed a large tax increase that infuriated conservatives and damaged his poll numbers. Eager to change the subject as he began campaigning for a second term, the governor became a vocal supporter of Proposition 187, a referendum that denied illegal aliens and their children access to schools and health care. The referendum passed (though it was later gutted by the courts) and Mr. Wilson won re-election, but the victory turned out to be shallow, while the subsequent political damage ran much deeper.
Read the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal
