Borderline catastrophe: how the fight over immigration blew up Rove's big tent.

• Author: Morris, Rachel
• Position: Karl Rove

Karl Rove's storied partnership with George W. Bush, now in its second decade, has long been concerned with more momentous matters than simply winning elections. Famously, Rove has sought to engineer a seismic realignment in American politics. To that end, he's perfected two signature strategies. He's mastered a "base-in" approach, designing policy positions first for the party's core conservatives, then marketing them to moderates (in contrast to the "center-out" model preferred by Bill Clinton). At the same time, Rove has made ingenious appeals to new constituencies that he believed were already Republicans, but just didn't know it. Because these tactics defy all kinds of conventional wisdom and have delivered Bush a string of victories, they've won Rove a reputation for political genius. Stories about him invariably make dazzled references to his latest scheme to bring some unlikely group into the GOP fold: black conservatives, Arabs in Michigan, outlier Jews.

But for Republicans eyeing a long-term majority, the Hispanic vote is considered the real prize, particularly immigrant Hispanics. While two thirds of registered U.S.-born Hispanics reliably vote Democratic, foreign-born Hispanics remain up for grabs. This group now comprises nearly half the Latino electorate, which has tripled between 1980 and 2004 to 10 million voters; that figure is expected to double by 2020. For Republicans, this growth is especially important, because their core constituency--white voters--is in demographic decline. But what makes Hispanic voters so coveted by both parties is also their location on a stratified electoral map. As the last two presidential contests have demonstrated, the Democrats have a lock on the Northeast and California, while Republicans hold the South; the two parties split the Midwest. The real battleground is the West and Southwest, traditionally GOP regions that have been drifting leftward, partly because of their growing concentrations of Hispanic residents. If one party wins their loyalty, the theory goes, it holds the key to a generation of political dominance.

Rove and Bush understood the importance of Hispanic voters and have courted them earnestly. That's not an easy task. Puerto Ricans don't vote like Cubans; Mexican Americans in Texas are very different from Mexican Americans in California. But one issue has the potential to attract significant Latino support or provoke their opposition: immigration. After Bush won the White House in 2000, he repeatedly promised to enact a guest-worker program and some form of legalization for the undocumented. In a rare occurrence for this administration, the imperatives of Republican politics actually aligned with something resembling sound public policy. It's not so far-fetched to say that the GOP's future rested with Bush and Rove's ability to make that policy happen.

Nor is it too overwrought to say that Rove's grand designs have disintegrated. For most of this year, the Republican Party has been publicly waging an ugly internal fight over immigration. Like the president--and, polls show, most Americans--a bipartisan coalition in the Senate supports comprehensive reform. But House Republicans, fearful of their inflamed base, won't budge from an enforcement-only measure that in March and April propelled thousands of Hispanics into the streets. This April, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie penned a dire warning to his party in The Wall Street Journal: "Anti-immigration rhetoric is a political siren song, and Republicans must resist its lure," he wrote, "or our majority will crash on the shoals." But instead of working with the Senate to actually pass legislation, this summer, Republican representatives have been traveling to competitive districts to hold hearings with rifles like, "Should We Embrace the Senate's Grant of Amnesty to Millions of Illegal Aliens and Repeat the Mistakes of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986?" Even if Congress scrapes together a face-saving compromise before November, the damage to the GOP's standing with Latinos can't be so quickly repaired--already, a recent poll by NDN showed that Bush's support among Spanish-speaking Hispanics has dropped almost by half.

It's become a journalistic truism that the House's theatrics will hurt the Republicans in the long-term, but will at least provide the boost they need to hold Congress in November. A closer look suggests that even that latter...