THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Two years after that verminous RNC Chairman Rinse Prewash declared that the Republicans needed to rebrand to be attractive to Hispanics, the GOP has reverted to its exclusionary ways. And this may lead to their losing a most important Hispanic news anchor, Jorge Ramos.

For years, Mr. Ramos largely aimed his ire at President Obama for breaking his 2008 campaign promise — made directly to Mr. Ramos — that he would propose an overhaul of the nation’s immigration system in his first year in office, and for deporting two million people since. Even after Mr. Obama announced late last year that nearly half of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants could apply to work without fear of deportation, Mr. Ramos confronted him during a Nashville forum for having “destroyed many families” by not acting sooner.

But Mr. Ramos’s focus has changed, he said in an interview here: “Now is the turn of Republicans.”

This weekend, the Spanish-language Univision, and Fusion, its English-language venture with ABC News, will cover the first gathering of 2016 Republican presidential aspirants, at a conservative forum in Des Moines on Saturday organized by Representative Steve King of Iowa. Mr. King, an immigration hard-liner, is well known to Latinos for remarks like one claiming that most young border-crossers have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana.”

That coverage follows Mr. Ramos’s in-depth reporting last week of House Republicans’ vote to block Mr. Obama’s immigration orders and deport up to four million people, mainly so-called Dreamers brought to the United States as children and the parents of American citizens. Given Republicans’ immigration stance, Mr. Ramos expects to cover more such stories through 2016.

And that has some Republicans worried.

“Remember what L.B.J. said, ‘When you lose Walter Cronkite, you’ve lost the war’?” said Matthew Dowd, a campaign adviser to George W. Bush, recalling the oft-cited if disputed story that President Lyndon B. Johnson said he lost “middle America” when Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War. Among Latino voters, Mr. Ramos has the sort of influence and audience that Cronkite had more broadly among Americans in his day.

Mr. Ramos is “not only a journalist, he’s become the voice of the Latino constituency,” Mr. Dowd said. “And that’s where Republicans have to worry — you don’t want to lose Jorge Ramos.”

How Republicans are perceived among Latinos mattered little in the midterm elections last year, when the party won control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in Mr. Obama’s presidency. Turnout of Latinos and other minority voters was, as usual, much lower than for presidential elections, and most close contests were in places with few Latinos.
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But in 2016, the Republican record will matter. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, who said during the campaign that undocumented residents should “self-deport” — a position he defended in an interview last November on Univision — got only 27 percent of Latinos’ votes. Republican strategists say their 2016 nominee must get more than 40 percent to win. The last Republican candidate to do so was Mr. Bush, who had supported a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Early signs in both the Republican-run Congress and the presidential nomination race suggest how far Republicans have veered from the immigration course recommended two years ago when the party, at Mr. Priebus’s direction, produced an autopsy of Republicans’ 2012 losses that concluded that they must do more to engage Latino voters and propose “positive solutions on immigration.”

The Teabagger wing of the Republican Party can't help themselves. For all that they may rationally understand the need for Hispanic voters, they are driven by their hates and will pull down the rest of the party rather than let go of their reason for being.