The mile-high city of Denver in the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado and its large Hispanic population are bracing for next week’s historic presidential nomination of Barack Obama by the Democrats.
The drama is expected to flood convention site Denver with 50,000 out-of-towners as the centre-left party tries to unify the Democratic Party after bitter primary elections and to reinforce a strong public image for Senator Obama, 47.
Obama is the first black American to be nominated by a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national political scene.
The following week, Republicans will meet in St Paul, Minnesota, to nominate Senator John McCain, 71.
There’s little mystery about the convention outcomes after six months of state-by-state voting by party loyalists in the hottest US primary contest in decades. Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton hung on to the very last against Obama, falling short by about 200 votes of the 2,118 delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination.
But if the outcome is already decided, the convention that starts Monday will serve other purposes, beginning with its location in a region that has voted for Republican presidents for much of the past 40 years.
Democrats this year are specifically targeting the Hispanic vote in Colorado and nearby New Mexico and Nevada, where Latinos were credited with helping Republican President George W Bush - a former border state governor with Hispanic family ties - return to the White House in 2004.
In addition, the Mountain West region has seen 15 per cent population growth since 2000 and “the emergence of unaffiliated voters as the largest voting bloc,” holding out hope for the centre- left party, Colorado’s Democratic Senator Ken Salazar wrote in the Los Angeles Times this week.
Denver is known as the “mile-high” city for its exact altitude of 5,280 feet (1,609 metres). Anchoring the western edge of the Great Plains against the Rocky Mountains, the city of more than half a million is the region’s cultural capital.
Denver’s ethnic mix includes 50 per cent white, 11 per cent black and a variety of other identities. Most striking is the strong presence of Hispanics and Latinos of all races, who make up 35 per cent of the city’s population and 21 per cent of those who claim Spanish as their first language, census figures show.
Hispanics make up 15 per cent of the US population, but only 9 per cent of the eligible American electorate - a number kept low by the illegal status of many and the large number of children under voting age, according to the Pew Hispanic Centre.
But their presence exceeds the national 9 per cent average in Colorado, with 12 per cent of eligible voters; and in the region where New Mexico has 37 per cent; Nevada, with 12 per cent; and Florida, with 14 per cent.
Those numbers and those four states are especially interesting for Democrats and their 20-million-dollar campaign to target Hispanic voters because of the narrow outcomes in 2004.
That year, they were four of the six states that Bush carried by the narrow margin of 5 percentage points or less, according to the Pew Hispanic Centre, and Democrats are determined to wrestle them into their territory this November.
Polling results have given Democrats reason to hope. Hispanic voters prefer Obama over presumptive Republican nominee McCain by a nearly 3-to-1 margin, according to the Pew centre - a sharp reversal from the primary vote, when Hispanics threw their weight to Clinton.
On the last day of the convention, August 28, Obama plans to bask in his growing star power with an open-air acceptance speech before 75,000 people at Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium.
The date marks the 45th anniversary of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream” speech, and also draws comparisons to the late John F Kennedy, the last presidential nominee to take his acceptance speech out of the limited confines of the convention hall to a larger venue in 1960.
The decision has created nightmares for security officials in Denver and intensified the scramble for already scarce hotel rooms as thousands learned at the last minute they had won a lottery for tickets.
Two-bedroom condominiums were renting for 5,000 dollars during convention week, and hotel rooms, if at all obtainable, started at 400 dollars a night.
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