Winning the Latino Vote
Winning the Latino Vote
In this year’s tight race for the White House, wooing the Hispanic voter bloc takes on unprecedented importance. Both camps face challenges in attracting Latino voters. In an AS/COA interview, Consul General of Mexico in New York discusses prospects for immigration reform during the next administration.
As a tough contest for the White House heats up between the presumptive presidential nominees, the importance of capturing the Latino vote attracts increasing attention. Over the course of the presidential race, the voting heft of the country’s largest and fastest growing minority group has drawn widespread media attention. With Senators Barack Obama (D-IL) and John McCain (R-AZ) neck-and-neck in national polls, the campaigns find themselves chasing after supporters in a non-homogeneous bloc. Both camps face challenges in winning the Latino vote.
A Pew Hispanic Center survey from late last year pondered whether Hispanics could serve as a “swing vote” in the 2008 election. The report uncovered a growing gap between Hispanic voters who lean towards Democrats rather than Republicans—with some 57 percent self-identifying with the former party and 23 percent with the latter. But while these figures should spell a strong support base for presumptive Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama, his former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was able to command a much larger portion of the Hispanic electorate. Furthermore, Republican candidate John McCain serves as a senator of a southwestern state and was behind the ill-fated 2006 comprehensive immigration reform bill.
Recent polls list Obama drawing as much as 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in a matchup with McCain. But even if polls show more Latinos supporting Obama, that majority “may not mean much if a large portion of those supporters live in states that Obama is already expected to win,” writes the Washington Post’s Marcela Sanchez. Columnist Andrés Oppenheimer suggests that to win the election, Obama must win the Hispanic vote by a large margin.
However, capturing the Latino vote also serves as a major challenge for McCain. Dallas Morning News columnist William McKenzie notes that xenophobic language from some members of the GOP threatens McCain’s ability to win over Hispanic voters, including conservative evangelical Latinos who typically vote Republican. Furthermore, the Arizona senator could lose votes through his decision to distance himself from the comprehensive immigration reform plan he previously supported.
Faced with the challenge of a voting bloc that appears slippery to grasp for both nominees, the campaigns are making moves to gain a foothold. In late May, the candidates made major policy speeches regarding Latin America—with Cuba as a focal point—in which they condemned each other’s policies. Both candidates plan to address the 25th Annual Conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on June 28.
Last week, Obama held his first in a series of meetings with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with the hope that they will work as “goodwill ambassadors” to win over Clinton supporters. The Illinois senator also chose Patti Solis Doyle—a high-profile Hispanic political figure who worked on the Clinton campaign—to serve as chief of staff for his vice-presidential nominee. An independently produced music video “Podemos con Obama,” which features Latino celebrities such as Alejandro Sanz, Paulina Rubio, and Jessica Alba, could help secure younger Latino voters.
Meanwhile, McCain’s campaign launched a Spanish-language website on Cinco de Mayo. He recently announced plans to visit Colombia in early July, most likely as a show of support for a U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement currently pending in U.S. Congress. The senator also backs Brazil’s membership in the UN Security Council and G8.
Despite McCain’s recent attention to Latin American affairs, Obama has shown signs of greater popularity in that region. In all but three of 24 countries polled as part of a recent Pew Global Attitudes Project, those surveyed voiced confidence in Obama over McCain. In the two Latin American countries surveyed—Brazil and Mexico—respondents expressed greater confidence in Obama over McCain by a double-digit margin. During a recent interview with Gazeta Mercantil, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called Obama a “revolution” and praised him for his position on Brazilian ethanol.
In a new AS/COA Online interview, Consul General of Mexico in New York Rubén Beltrán expressed optimism that, regardless of which candidate wins the presidency, the next administration “will seize the opportunity to put forward comprehensive immigration reform.”
