Election 2012

Winning More Latinos Wouldn’t Have Helped Romney

One of Romney's former top staffers said the campaign shouldn't have been as tough on immigration so as to pick up more Latino voters.

It wouldn't have helped.

So far, Obama leads the popular vote by 3.6 points, 50.9 percent to 47.3 percent. And overall, according to exit polls, Latinos represented 10 percent of the electorate, or just over 12 and a half million voters. For Romney to make his popular vote gap through Hispanics alone, he’d have to win an additional 4.5 million votes on top of his current share, for a total of 7.9 million votes, or 63 percent of the Latino vote.

Put another way, Romney would have had to improve his vote share among Hispanics by 36 points to find the votes necessary to beat Barack Obama in the popular vote.