Can Francis Wilkinson really say the following with such confidence?
The 2016 Republican nominee for president will almost certainly not make a fuss about deportation policy, regardless of past positions. In all likelihood, facing a difficult road with Hispanic and Asian voters, he will support legalization of long-settled undocumented immigrants. Citizenship remains an unsettled question. But the era of deportation is coming to an end.
Admittedly, once a Republican has secured the nomination of their party, they won’t see much upside to going around the country infuriating Asians and Latinos, but they’ll have done plenty of that before they secure the nomination. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush may avoid embracing the id of the Republican base on brown people and still somehow miraculously win the nomination, but we’ll have to see if they can do so with relatively clean hands.
For the others, it’s one thing to avoid making a fuss about something and it’s quite another to do an about-face and adopt a position 180 degrees away from the position that won you the support of your most ardent and committed supporters. They may not want to talk about deporting immigrants in the general election, but that doesn’t mean that they will suddenly support legalization of millions of undocumented people.
Remember when Barack Obama was all for renegotiating NAFTA during the primary and then had little to say about it afterwards? That’s the familiar kind of dishonest pandering that most successful politicians feel compelled to engage in from time to time. But he didn’t accept the nomination in Denver and go out on the campaign trail the next day talking about how great NAFTA was. He was at least rhetorically locked into his position for the remainder of the campaign because to flip-flop would have caused more pain than to be consistent.
As Mitt Romney discovered, what you say in the primary sticks with you and the eventual Republican nominee can make a fuss or not make a fuss but they’ll have no easy pivot.
