Partisan activists need to study the work of objective political scientists like Andrew Gelman and of objective partisans like Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress. That's because very few pundits or campaign consultants are terribly numerate. (For a comic example of the innumeracy of our political elite, observe Hillary strategist Mark Penn's recent calculations in the Wall Street Journal on the piles of easy money you can supposedly make off running a blog that gets 3300 visitors per day.)

Partisans need to understand the numbers, or they turn into losers. Consider John McCain's recent campaign.

For nine years I've been saying that the Bush-Rove-McCain consensus of mild enthusiasm for illegal immigration is politically deleterious for the GOP. (And Ruy Teixeira has said some of the same things, as well).

The strategy of the men who have been the last three GOP nominees was to push amnesty in collaboration with Ted Kennedy in order to woo Hispanic voters for the GOP. The media has repeatedly endorsed this Republican approach as electorally sensible. (The question of why Ted Kennedy would help improve GOP electoral prospects does not appear to have come up much in high GOP deliberations.)

In contrast, I've repeatedly argued since 2000 that

- There aren't really as many Hispanic voters as everybody thinks there are. (Hispanics made up only 7.4% of all voters in 2008, if my use of Data Ferret to get the not-yet published Census Bureau survey data is correct. And 2008 was a good year for Hispanics due to fewer whites bothering to vote. In 2006, Hispanics cast only 5.8% of the vote. In 2004, 6.0%, in 2002 5.3%, and in 2000 5.4%.)

- Hispanic voters don't really care that much about amnesty because Hispanic-American voters are American citizens, not illegal aliens. Hispanic voters tend to have profoundly ambivalent views about illegal immigration, combining some level of ethnocentrism with an awareness that they are the most direct victims of the non-stop flow of illegal immigrants competing down their own wages and overwhelming their neighborhoods and their schools.For example, Cesar Chavez hated illegal immigration and sent his brother to lead UFW workers as vigilante border patrolmen, because illegal immigrants threatened to, and eventually did, break the power of the United Farm Workers union to raise wages.

- Bush, Rove, and McCain have an exaggerated view of the importance of amnesty as an issue for Hispanic voters because most of the Hispanics they deal with are Professional Hispanics -- e.g., consultants for advertising to the Hispanic community, Hispanic politicians, Hispanic ethnic activists, and the like. These Professional Latinos all want more Hispanic immigration because they make money based on how many co-ethnics they claim to represent. Due to this financial conflict of interest, they do not accurately represent the mixed views on illegal immigration of the Latino-American citizens they supposedly speak for.

- Hispanics are not a swing vote. They've been solidly, but not overwhelmingly Democratic, since JFK.

- Bush did not carry 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004. The Edison-Mitofsky exit poll firm later admitted they had messed up their Hispanic sampling and the more accurate number was around 40%, up from about 35% for Bush 2000, only slightly more than Bush's increase in the overall vote.

- And that small gain by Bush among Hispanics from 2000 to 2004 was largely purchased by Bush launching the unsustainable Housing Bubble by cutting regulation of home mortgage lending (e.g., Bush repeatedly promoted zero downpayment and zero documentation mortgages in 2002-2004 as part of his call for increasing minority homeownership by 5.5 million households). This poured lots of money into the hands of Hispanic subprime borrowers and Hispanic constructions workers. By 2008, unfortunately but hardly surprisingly, Hispanics were hit disproportionately hard by foreclosures and construction layoffs.

- Hispanics tend to be old-fashioned tax and spend Democrats for straightforward economic reasons that Harry Hopkins would have immediately understood. They just don't earn that much money on average. And their elites benefit from affirmative action. So, they are natural Democrats. (Cubans, born-again Protestants, and the affluent are the main exceptions).

- While Hispanics aren't overwhelmingly Democratic voters, their political leadership is. One study found that 92% of elected Hispanic officials were Democrats. So, increasing the number of Latino residents when gerrymandering is done in 2011 will increase the number of Democratic officeholders.

- Immigration is an issue that can bring out white voters who might not otherwise turn out. It appears that blacks showed up in big numbers in 2008, and Hispanics in fairly big numbers, but whites were rather unmotivated by John McAmnesty's candidacy.

So, it finally dawned on John McCain a few weeks ago that he'd been led down the primrose path. Kirk Victor wrote recently in the National Journal:

"John McCain sounds angry and frustrated that, despite the risks he took in pushing immigration reform, Hispanic voters flocked to Democrat Barack Obama in last year's presidential contest. McCain's raw emotions burst forth recently as he heatedly told Hispanic business leaders that they should now look to Obama, not him, to take the lead on immigration.

"The meeting in the Capitol's Strom Thurmond Room on March 11 was a Republican effort led by Sens. McCain of Arizona, John Thune of South Dakota, and Mel Martinez of Florida to reach out to Hispanics. But two people who attended the session say they were taken aback by McCain's anger.

"What began as a collegial airing of views abruptly changed when McCain spoke about immigration" ... He was angry," one source said. "He was over the top. In some cases, he rolled his eyes a lot. There were portions of the meeting where he was just staring at the ceiling, and he wasn't even listening to us. We came out of the meeting really upset."

"McCain's message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama's pace on the issue. "He threw out [the words] 'You people -- you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,' " the source said. "It was almost as if [he was saying] 'You're cut off!' We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that."

"In 2006 and 2007, McCain was a leader on immigration, but his efforts ran aground largely because his legislation included what many Republicans derisively characterized as "amnesty," a pathway to citizenship for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants if they took a series of steps to earn legal status.

"Having stuck his neck out in the past, McCain apparently is in no mood to do so again for an ethnic group he seems to view as ungrateful. ..."

"Hispanics gave Obama a whopping 67 percent of their votes, more than double the 31 percent they gave to McCain. A former colleague of McCain's, Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who opposed immigration reform, told National Journal, "John risked a lot to go out there and do what he did. They basically turned their back on him, a guy who had done a lot more for them than Barack Obama ever would. So I can understand his anger, but I also know that John doesn't get over things easily."

McCain read all the nice things the media said about him over the years, and believed much of the rest of the media conventional wisdom, especially on topics like immigration.

It betrayed him