GOP strategist Bill McInturff has long emphasized that earning 40 percent of the Hispanic vote is critical for Republicans to win. Today, McInturff is John McCain’s pollster, and by his metric McCain has a serious Latino problem.
While he earned the support of about seven in ten Hispanics in his last Arizona Senate race, a Pew Hispanic Center poll released Thursday shows that just 23 percent of Latinos intend to vote for McCain in the presidential contest, barely half of the four in ten Latino voters who exit polls showed voted for President Bush in 2004.
“You have to understand in a way that the Republican party is damaged among Hispanics,” conceded Hessy Fernandez, McCain’s spokesperson for Hispanic media. “But at the end of day, it’s the contrast between Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama.”
McCain’s problem looks to be most pronounced among Protestant Latinos, who had seemed to be the GOP’s doorway into the Hispanic population. From 2000 to 2004, Protestant Latinos increased their share of the total Hispanic electorate from 25 percent to 32 percent, in large part because of Bush’s evangelical outreach and strategic microtargeting of the community. Even as turnout increased, support for Bush among the group rose from 44 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2004.
The Pew poll, however, shows that only a third of Protestant or Evangelical Hispanics intend to vote for McCain, while 59 percent support Obama — who also enjoys a 50-percentage-point lead among Catholic Latinos, long a solid bloc of the Democratic coalition.
Popularity: 52% [?]
