To Pander or Not to Pander?

At work yesterday, in response to President Obama winning over minorities in large numbers, I heard a number of arguments voiced that in 2016, we should automatically nominated Sen. Marco Rubio.  The thinking was centered around not so much Rubio's political principles but that he was of Cuban descent and would likely get more of the vote from Hispanic population centers then did Mitt Romney.

But as Yuval Levin argues at NRO, conservatives should not do the mirror image of what Democrats do:

But it seems to me that a lot of people, including perhaps some on the Right, risk drawing the wrong lessons from this election and this electorate. Above all, the notion that Republicans must now adjust their positions to make an essentially race-based appeal to Hispanics and craven interest-group appeals elsewhere strikes me as very wrong-headed—both as a reading of the election and as advice to the losing party.

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As Sean Trende points out today, the lower turnout in this election was driven almost entirely by lower turnout among such voters. “The increased share of the minority vote as a percent of the total vote is not the result of a large increase in minorities in the numerator,” he notes, “it is a function of many fewer whites in the denominator.” And as he further shows, these seem to be lower middle class white voters—precisely the targets of the Obama campaign’s effort to keep Romney’s marginal voters at home. The change in the makeup of the electorate thus seems to be far less a function of demographic shifts than of a failure to turn out potential Romney voters. It would seem that the commonly voiced concerns that Romney would have trouble connecting with working-class voters and that the attacks on him as a vulture capitalist might work were basically right.

And what conservatives should do from here on:

The job of conservatism, and to the extent that it is a conservative party then also the job of the Republican Party, is to lay out its vision before voters in an attractive and serious way, to show them how it builds on America’s strengths to address America’s weaknesses, how it enables human thriving, how it could be applied to the particular problems we face today in ways that would help solve those problems, and why it is good for each and all of us Americans. That means we need to speak to a coherent and appealing understanding of American life today, and that we need to translate our ideas into very concrete policy particulars that would advance them.

Put simply:  Republicans and conservatives should not treat the American People like children.  Though civic education is unfortunately very low across the electorate as a whole, keeping the people dumb by either not talking about the important things or practicing sleight-of-hand will not change things for the better.

As Levin knows, this kind of principled conservative public policy is already out there.  These separate strands just need to be connected.