Latino voters, who turned out in record numbers on Election Day to support Barack Obama, also have very high expectations for his presidency, according to a national bilingual poll by ImpreMedia and the NALEO Educational Fund. The poll, conducted by Latino Decisions between Nov. 6 and Nov. 13, offers an in-depth look at the hopes, expectations and key concerns of Latino voters. Some 800 Latino registered voters were surveyed, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent. These are some of the key findings:

The Latino Vote at the Polls
Immigrant voters and new voters comprised a sizeable share of the Latino vote this November. Nearly half (46 percent) of Latino voters were born outside of the United States or in Puerto Rico. One in every four (26 percent) Latino voters this election was voting in a presidential election for the very first time.

Partisanship and Candidate Choice
Nearly three in four Latino registered voters in 2008 identified themselves as “strong partisans” (70 percent). Among Latino registered voters 61 percent identified as Democrats, 17 percent Republicans, and 14 percent Independents. But only 8 percent of Latinos say they believe the Republican Party has more concern for the Latino community. Twenty-seven percent of Latino voters believe neither party is more concerned about the Latino community. This skepticism was more pronounced among Spanish speakers, where 31 percent believe there is no difference between either party in concern for Latinos.

Latino support for President-elect Barack Obama may have been higher than initially reported in exit poll data: 72 percent of Latino voters said they voted for Barack Obama and 25 percent reported voting for John McCain. Candidate support did vary by demographic group, with second-generation children of immigrants and Spanish speakers showing the strongest support for Obama, nearly 80 percent. John McCain received his strongest support, about one-third of the vote (34 percent), among third generation Latinos.

Post-Election Expectations and Priorities
Nearly two-thirds of Latino voters (67 percent) in this November’s election say fixing the economy is the most important issue they expect the new president and Congress to address. The economy ranked over other prevalent issues like health care (5 percent), immigration (6 percent), and the war in Iraq (6 percent).

However, expectations are still high when it comes to dealing with immigration reform. Overall, 68 percent of voters say that it is extremely important (41 percent) or very important (27 percent) for the immigration issue to be addressed within the first year of the new Democratic government.

Strong support for the president-elect and the new Democratic Congress comes with high expectations on the part of Latinos to see their communities do better over the next four years. Nearly 70 percent of Latino voters expect the situation for Latinos to improve under the Obama administration. Among immigrants these hopes are higher, with three of every four immigrant voters expecting their situation to improve under President Barack Obama.

Popularity: 9% [?]

By Steve Cobble and Joe Velasquez, The Nation.

To update one of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s great phrases, “The hands that picked the cotton, and the hands that picked the lettuce, just picked the new president.”

According to the exit polls, if whites alone had voted, John McCain would be president-elect. That gap was erased by Barack Obama’s incredible support among African-American voters, who gave him 95 percent of their votes while increasing their turnout to 13 percent of the electorate. Despite idiotic and widespread pundit commentary earlier this year that insisted Latino votes wouldn’t vote for an African-American candidate, Latinos in fact gave Obama two-thirds of their votes.

In other words, Latino voters roughly provided Obama with his victory margin — both in the popular vote and in the key swing states that flipped from red to blue.

Almost five years ago in The Nation, our article “Blue States, Latino Voters” made the case that “registering and mobilizing massive numbers of Latino voters in the Southwest and Florida” was key to winning back the White House. Four years ago, just after George W. Bush’s re-election, we updated our case, pointing out that reversing narrow defeats in New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado would have won John Kerry enough electoral votes to win the White House.

Our conclusion then: “The heavily Hispanic states of the Southwest, the ‘Cactus Corner,’ could be part of a winning strategy in 2008.” Well, sí, se puede.

Look at these numbers that were provided to us by the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, which examined the 2008 Latino vote in thirteen key states. USHLI concluded that 67 percent of Latinos voted for Barack Obama, and only 31 percent for John McCain — more than a 2-to-1 difference nationwide.

Seventy-four percent of Latinos voted for Obama in California, 65 percent in Virginia and 72 percent in Illinois. Latinos provided the winning margin in Indiana, with 77 percent, and 63 percent voted Obama in Texas, a very positive trend for the future in that largest of red states.

In the key swing states of the Southwest, all heavily Latino, Obama racked up hefty numbers: 76 percent in Nevada, 73 percent in Colorado, 69 percent in New Mexico and 56 percent even in McCain’s home state of Arizona.

Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico all flipped from red to blue this year, delivering their electoral votes to Barack Obama by big margins.

Down-ballot, Nevada elected a new Democratic Congresswoman, as did Arizona voters — on John McCain’s home turf. Colorado elected a new Democratic Congresswoman, plus new senator Mark Udall, son of the former House environmental leader Mo Udall.

New Mexico went deep blue this year, choosing Obama by double digits; electing Senator Tom Udall, a strong progressive (who is Mark Udall’s cousin and former JFK Interior Secretary Stewart Udall’s son); and electing a new Latino Congressman from the northern part of the state — while flipping the other two Congressional districts from Republican to Democratic — one for the first time ever, the other for the first time in almost thirty years.

Then there’s Florida, where the changing loyalties of younger Cuban-Americans threatened the previously safe seats of three Cuban-American Republicans in the Miami area. Meanwhile, the growing Puerto Rican communities in central Florida voted heavily for the Democratic ticket. The result? For the first time in decades, hatred of Fidel Castro did not guarantee the Latino vote for the GOP in Florida. Instead, 57 percent of Florida Latinos cast their ballots for Obama, helping the Democratic ticket carry the state by a decisive enough margin to prevent a repeat of the stolen election of 2000.

(One other interesting point, especially for progressives — the organizing strategy of the Obama campaign came historically out of the United Farm Workers movement. The building blocks of their brilliant grassroots structure had their roots in Latino labor organizing. As did, of course, Obama’s wonderful “Yes, We Can!” slogan, a direct descendant of Cesar Chavez’s “¡Sí Se Puede!”)

So Latinos came through in a big way in 2008, despite the idiotic pundit predictions. In fact, Latinos cast Democratic votes in just about the same proportion as did young people, more than 2-to-1 for Obama. This is a very hopeful sign, because Latinos are a very young and growing population.

The Democratic Party should treat these voters very seriously, and nurture the relationship with both young people and Latinos. Policy changes in healthcare, educational opportunity and new “green jobs,” changes that improve the lives of Latinos as well as young people, could reap massive vote advantages in key electoral states for years to come.

Especially when voting in combination with the African-American community, Latinos could be a leading edge of a long-term, center-left political realignment. The “black/brown coalition” vote in this election exceeded one-fifth of the electorate, while the black/brown share of Barack Obama’s winning vote exceeded one-third, and served as the foundation of this inspiring victory.

If demography is destiny, consider these census statistics: the fast-growing Latino population in this country is now about 15 percent of the total. By 2050, only four decades from now, Latinos are projected to double their share of the population. The black/brown share of the US population will be about 45 percent.

Sí, se puede, indeed.

Popularity: 8% [?]

By Dan Moffett, Palm Beach Post

The first draft of history on the 2008 election already has concluded that the dismal economy did in John McCain.

But what about the issue that was barely mentioned during the final months of the campaign - immigration? Nothing accounts as precisely for Sen. McCain’s margin of defeat as the math on immigration voting.

Hispanics turned out in record numbers. For most, immigration was a major issue. For many, it was the overriding issue. Hispanics made up more than 9 percent of the electorate, according to exit polling, and more than 67 percent of them voted for Barack Obama, who won by 6.7 points. The math suggests that Hispanic voters provided that margin of victory.

Their votes were a repudiation of the Republican Party’s hard-line stance on immigration reform. For Sen. McCain, this is a cruel paradox. No one in Congress worked harder to pass a comprehensive reform bill. Yet Sen. McCain paid the price for his party’s support for building fences, raiding restaurants and arresting farmworkers, instead of seeking meaningful reform.

The growing Hispanic vote enabled President-elect Obama and Democrats to prevail in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, which George Bush won in 2004. The president won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote that year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Sen. McCain got only 31 percent, with the turnout much higher. Among young Hispanics, Mr. Obama won 76 percent of the vote, a number that will have GOP strategists worrying about many of the battleground states.

But the numbers in Florida are the most intriguing. Mr. Obama won 57 percent of the Hispanic vote, surpassing President Bush’s 55 percent in 2004, and Sen. McCain got 42 percent. The important story behind the numbers is the continued erosion of the Cuban-American voting bloc that Republicans have counted on for decades.

A decade ago, Cuban-Americans accounted for more than 70 percent of the state’s Hispanic voters. In 2008, for the first time, non-Cubans made up a slight majority. Around Orlando, Puerto Rican voters are growing in size and influence. In South Florida, large numbers of immigrants from Latin America have gained citizenship and registered to vote. Across the state, Mexican-Americans have settled and entered the system.

As voters, these non-Cubans have priorities that are much more traditionally Democratic and in line with Hispanics outside Miami-Dade County: jobs, the economy, education, and, yes, immigration reform. They don’t care about Fidel Castro and have a short attention span for politicians who do. There also is a simmering resentment over U.S. policy that gives Cuban immigrants preferential treatment.

Even within the Cuban-American bloc in Miami-Dade, that ambivalence toward Cold War politics is growing. Exit polls showed that 84 percent of Miami-Dade Cuban-Americans over 65 voted for Sen. McCain, and 55 percent of those 29 or younger voted for President-elect Obama. Young Cuban-Americans, most of whom were born here, are leaving the Bay of Pigs to history and questioning the value of a failed trade embargo. To many of them, Castro is a tired anachronism who grows increasingly irrelevant and is hardly worth the political preoccupation.

Florida’s Hispanic voters behave more like those in Nevada and Colorado. This is bad news for Republicans. In 2000, Miami-Dade’s Cuban-Americans rescued the election for George W. Bush. It’s doubtful that another Republican will be so lucky.

Popularity: 7% [?]

By DAVID PAUL KUHN , Poltico

In January 2001, two days before President-elect George W. Bush moved into the White House, his top strategist, Karl Rove, told the Republican National Committee that “our mission and our goal” was make further inroads with Hispanics. Four years later Bush had accomplished just that, improving his share of the Hispanic vote to 44 from 35 percent.

Today, those gains are gone, as Republican John McCain won just 31 percent of the Hispanic vote.

“The percent of the white electorate is dropping every election cycle, and when you look ahead at America, black and Hispanic, by age bracket, there is a demographic trend that is obvious — our country is becoming more diverse,” McCain pollster Bill McInturff said on Thursday. “There are any number of states that McCain just lost that he got the same percent of the white vote that Bush did in 2004.”

When the Republican Party first aggressively courted the Hispanic vote in 1980, Ronald Reagan won 35 percent of the group, then just 2 percent of the electorate. This year it was 9 percent — more than a fourfold increase. In the same period, whites dropped from 89 percent to 74 percent of the electorate.

“It’s not that Joe the Plumber lost his symbolic power,” said one GOP opposition researcher. “It’s that the white working-class voters affected by it lost much of their power at the ballot box.”

In his run against President Carter, Reagan asked California adman Lionel Sosa to lead his Hispanic outreach, insisting it would not be a difficult task.

“Latinos are Republican,” Reagan told Sosa. “They just don’t know it yet.”

Sosa, who has since advised both Bushes and McCain, found that Latinos had too poor an image of the GOP to convince them that they were closeted Republicans. Instead, he pitched each candidate as one they could support without backing the party itself.

“We’ve never sold a Republican as a Republican,” Sosa said. “It’s never been about Hispanic voting Republican. It’s always been about Hispanics voting for one Republican.

“My approach has always been,” he said, “to stay a Democrat but just vote the best man.”

Bush had hoped to change that. Mexican President Vicente Fox was the first state visitor of the Bush presidency. In his second term, Bush taped Alberto Gonzales as the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general. Above all, Bush hoped that comprehensive immigration reform would sustain Latino support for Republicans in the long term.

Bush’s success with Latinos came in part from translating the party’s appeal to white religious and values voters to like-minded Hispanics.

In 2004, Bush won 54 percent of Latino Protestants. This year, Obama won 67 percent.

While the economic crisis eclipsed cultural values among all voters, the shift in the Hispanic vote was especially pronounced.

Luis Cortes, one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential American evangelicals and a strong Bush supporter, says immigration is the reason.

Today Cortes is coy when asked how he voted. He said the immigration issue shaped his vote. “Of course it did. But I’m not going to say anything else,” he said, then added, “I always vote in brown’s interest, meaning Latino people’s interest.”

McCain’s reputation among Hispanics was damaged when he backed away from his failed 2007 immigration reform bill in this year’s Republican primary, as anger among the party faithful about illegal immigration led to a competition among the candidates to offer the most aggressively enforcement-oriented immigration plans. McCain said he would not vote for his own bill if it were to be reintroduced.

Polling, though, suggests that the impact on the Hispanic vote of the immigration issue, which rarely came up during the general election, may be overstated.

Two Pew Research Center polls in the past year found that the economy, education, health care and crime all trumped among Hispanic registered voters. Less than a week before Election Day, 6 in 10 Latinos said the economy was their top issue, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Gallup tracking polls showed Obama’s Hispanic support as low as 53 percent and as high as 66 percent, and McCain’s support ranging from 27 to 38 percent — suggesting that many voters were open to both candidates.

McInturff sees the decline in Hispanic support for the GOP as a result of this election’s playing field.

“When you look at the data,” he said, Hispanics “are overwhelmingly negative about the economy, they weren’t supportive of our effort in Iraq, and [they were against the party's stance on] immigration. Those were three very powerful issues.” He added in reference to this year’s results that “we shouldn’t assume anything is really fixed.”

Sosa, who says he is done with presidential politics, sees the problem as the same one that Reagan faced in 1980.

“We are not in a very good place again. I think the Republican brand has been highly damaged,” Sosa said. “The Republicans are going to realize how much they need to regain what we have lost.”

Popularity: 7% [?]

Remember when the pundits and other political analysts assured us with absolute certainty that Latinos wouldn’t support an African-American for president?

I do. In fact, one of the last times we heard that insulting refrain was just after the March 4 primary in Texas, a state where Latinos make up almost 40 percent of Democratic voters.

The experts claimed there was a historical tension between Latinos and African-Americans born of competition that played out everywhere from public schools to prison yards to university campuses to the job market. And they insisted that this brown-black feud would undoubtedly carry into the voting booth. Some amateur anthropologists went further and implied that Latinos were racist because of their Latin American heritage. Of course, that theory ignored the fact these people come from countries that have already elected indigenous presidents, including Benito Juarez in Mexico, Alejandro Toledo in Peru, and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

The experts even offered what they saw as hard evidence that Latinos wouldn’t support an African-American — the fact that Hillary Clinton had so dominated the Latino vote in the Democratic primaries against Barack Obama. Clinton carried Texas, California, Florida, New York, Arizona and New Mexico — all states with significant Latino populations. Clinton won the Latino vote overall by a margin of nearly 2-to-1. It never occurred to the experts that Latinos were demonstrating loyalty to the Clinton brand

Read Complete Story

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Latinos in the U.S. took into consideration harsh rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, and that played a part in their strong support of Barack Obama in last week’s election.

That was the message issued by a group of officials in Washington today.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a relatively new organization advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, said that has been a lack of political will by Washington-based elected officials. He blamed it on faulty conventional wisdom.

Sharry said his organization hired two pollsters to look at how immigration played with voters nationally, and in key battleground states and congressional districts.

Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, repeated the main questions that were asked of Latino voters this year: would they turn out to vote? Would they vote for a black candidate? And would that vote make a difference?

Murguia said the answer to all those questions was a resounding yes. Though issues like the economy took precedence with Latinos as they did with overwhelming majority of voters, to say that immigration was not a priority, would be a misreading of the Latino community, she said.

David Mermin is a pollster with Lake Research Partners. He surveyed 1,000 voters from Wednesday through Sunday - and said every part of conventional wisdom about immigration was wrong.

A different poll looking at the immigration issue taken by pollster Pete Brodnitz found that 14 pro-reform candidates beat hardliners in 16 battleground House races. And he said five Senate Reform candidates beat hardliners in battleground races, in Colorado, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Oregon.

Simon Rosenberg is a Democratic Party political consultant with the New Democratic Network. In his view, the only issue that George W. Bush proposed that had bipartisan support in the House was for comprehensive immigration, which went down soundly went voted on in 2007.

But Rosenberg said the 2008 election, exemplified by Barack Obama’s electoral success, has put a cap on the so-called Southern Strategy employed by Richard Nixon and the Republican Party in the 1960s of exploiting racial fear to win national elections.

And Rosenberg said that if Democrats appeal to Latinos and win those states, like Obama did this year, it could permanently tip the Electoral College for the Democrats for a generation to come.

Popularity: 7% [?]

by Randy Shaw, BeyondCron

Among the most overlooked stories this political season was the major impact of Latino voters in Barack Obama’s red state victories. While Latinos’ 67% support for Obama has gotten some attention, the media has largely overlooked the fact that Latino immigrants backed Obama by a 78% margin, and their support was critical in the Democrat’s narrow victories in Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. The Immigrant Policy Center has released a new analysis of Latino immigrant voting, which deserves the widest possible attention for revealing the importance of the immigration issue in key swing states. The Center’s analysis confirms that comprehensive immigration reform must be a priority for President Obama’s first year in office, and that Latino immigrants are ready to push the issue.

The Immigrant Policy Center released the following analysis this week:

Latinos weren’t the only group that flexed its muscles this past Election Day. New Americans — naturalized citizens and the U.S.-born children of immigrants who were born during the current era of immigration that began in 1965—make up another important demographic group that demonstrated its ability to swing an election. While complete data on New Americans is not yet available, exit polling among Latinos and Latino immigrants tell two important stories.

First, Latino immigrants voted for Obama at a higher margin than native-born Latinos. While Obama made an impressive gain among native-born Latino voters, capturing 67% of the Latino vote compared to Kerry’s 56% in 2004, the records were smashed with Latino immigrant support coming in at a whopping 78%. What charged the immigrant vote? Immigration.

Meanwhile, these New American Latino voters made a difference in districts we’ve never detected their presence in before. In unprecedented fashion, they provided the critical, extra push for Obama in North Carolina and Indiana, without which victory would have been impossible in those states; and played a significant role in winning Virginia. These findings suggest that immigrants are having a tsunami impact beyond the Sunshine and Rocky Mountain states and throughout the country.

A preliminary analysis conducted for the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) by Rob Paral and Associates explores the electoral power that was exhibited on Election Day by Latino New Americans and shows:

Indiana and North Carolina Latino New American Voters Helped Push Obama to Victory.

* In North Carolina, Obama won by approximately 14,000 votes and received the votes of nearly 26,000 more Latino New Americans than McCain—nearly double the margin of victory.

* In Indiana, Obama won by roughly 26,000 votes, and received the votes of nearly 24,000 more Latino New Americans than John McCain. The additional votes that Obama received from Latino New Americans who chose him over McCain equals more than 90% of his margin of victory.

Virginia’s Latino New American Voters Amounted to a Fifth of Obama’s Margin of Victory.

* In Virginia, Obama won by roughly 156,000 votes, and received the votes of approximately 35,000 more Latino New Americans than McCain. The number of additional votes that Obama received from Latino New Americans who chose him over McCain was equal to one-fifth (more than 20%) of his margin of victory.

Immigrants Voted for Obama Largely Due to Their Concerns About Immigration.

Interviews conducted by Bendixen & Associates among Latino immigrant voters just before the election found that “a rise in discrimination against Hispanics because of the tone of the immigration debate contributed to the rejection of the Republican nominee for President.”

Based on this voter analysis, the Immigrant Policy Center concludes “President-elect Barack Obama and the 111th Congress cannot afford to disregard the needs and future of the fastest growing part of the American electorate without facing a backlash in 2012. These stunning election results represent a clear mandate to work towards enacting reform that restores the rule of law, renews confidence in America’s immigration system and realistically tackles illegal immigration.”

In assessing the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform, two points are increasingly clear.
First, it will be far easier for Congress to enact a reform measure in 2009 than in 2010. Legalization advocates recognize that the economic crisis, health care reform, and the drive for a new energy policy will take precedence, but there is a place for immigration reform by next fall.

Second, success requires the entire immigrant rights movement to mobilize its base. Not all House and Senate Democrats support legalization. I think Nancy Pelosi will make sure that the measure passes the House, but winning majority support in the Senate (and avoiding a filibuster) will require pressure campaigns targeting swing politicians.

Popularity: 13% [?]

It isn’t as if Republicans weren’t warned.

For years — especially as conservatives’ rants against immigration seemed to lose any distinction between illegal and legal residents — Republican Hispanic media consultant Frank Guerra sounded the alarm for Republicans to back off.

As one who had worked for the 2000 and 2004 campaigns of George W. Bush, and the 2002 reelection of Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Guerra fearedRepublicans’ harsh rhetoric on immigration would cost them the Hispanic support that was critical to the Bush victories. Bush adviser Karl Rove and 2008 Republican nominee John McCain were at the forefront of that argument but were a minority inside the GOP.

Of course, Guerra — McCain’s Hispanic media adviser this year — was proved right on Election Day.

While the economy was the top concern of Latino voters, the immigration hardliners’ rhetoric motivated them to get involved in the election.

Read Complete Story

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By Ed Hornick, CNN

Si se puede.

Translation: Yes we can.

It was a common phrase used by Barack Obama and John McCain on the campaign trail this year as they tried to increase their outreach to Latino voters — an influential voting bloc.

But clearly, based on exit polling, those voters overwhelmingly said ’si se puede’ for the Illinois senator. Latinos supported Obama 67 percent to 30 percent for McCain.

Obama did well with Latinos because they appear to disapprove of President Bush’s job performance more than the rest of the country, said Bill Schneider, CNN senior political analyst.

About 80 percent of Latinos gave Bush negative marks, while 72 percent of all Americans do, exit polling showed.

The question remains: Did Latinos flock to Obama’s message of change or did they simply leave the beleaguered Republican Party?

Fernando Espuelas, a prominent Latino radio host and activist, said it was a little of both. Video

“Obama inspired a lot of excitement among Latinos — his immigrant background, the rags-to-riches-to-power narrative, his promise of change — that resulted in massive support from the Latino community,” he said. “At the same time, the GOP’s torpedoing of comprehensive immigration reform, which was accompanied by inflammatory anti-Latino rhetoric and harsh, selective enforcement of immigration laws meant to satisfy the right wing of the party, was also a powerful force in Latinos’ mass repudiation of the GOP.”

Leslie Sanchez, a Republican strategist and CNN contributor, said Latinos rallied behind Obama’s message of hope rather than “a misguided anti-immigrant siren touted by some Republicans.”

“Immigration reform was not the bellwether issue for Latinos in 2008, yet the Democrats made the election a referendum on the issue. By accusing McCain of flip-flopping on comprehensive immigration reform, Obama managed to put the most pro-immigrant GOP primary candidate on the defensive,” she said. Read more on comprehensive immigration reform

Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said the center’s polling this year showed a steady stream of Latinos toward Obama and Democrats.

“Hispanics see Democrats more concerned about issues to the Latino community…. They saw Obama as the better candidate all around,” he said. “Latinos are more likely to say Democrats are more in tune with their concerns.”

Sanchez, author of “Los Republicanos, Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other,” said moving forward, the GOP must make a big effort to connect with the growing minority.

“[Republicans] have to develop a core of young bloods who connect with these voters in innovative ways and who are attuned to their brand of conservatism. … We have to offer different alternatives … connect in a way to reach this community more effectively.”

But Espuelas said any short-term strategies for Republicans are bleak.

“Winning back Latinos’ confidence could take a long time. People will not quickly forget the failed immigration reform, which was in any case seen by many as punitive and anti-family, nor will the wounds of the accompanying anti-Latino rhetoric and violence heal easily,” he said.

Latinos are an important group to the political parties, representing 9 percent of the eligible electorate and 15 percent of the U.S. population.

In the 1988 presidential elections, Hispanics accounted for 3.7 million votes. In 2004, it was more than twice that — 7.5 million votes.

President Bush took 44 percent of the Hispanic votes four years ago, helping him win re-election. But only 30 percent of that demographic cast ballots for Republicans in the 2006 congressional elections.

Democrats hoped this year that the Latino vote could prove pivotal in swing states such as Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, which ranks 11th nationally in its percentage of Latino residents.

The Obama campaign made an unprecedented effort to attract new voters in the Latino community. The campaign’s strong get out the vote efforts in many of these battleground states had been widely eyed as a major reason for Obama’s strong showing in formerly GOP-leaning states.

“In the end, McCain could not secure these swing voters to trust he would make the best choices to protect the quality of life,” Sanchez said.

The Arizona senator had hoped that education appeals and social values could help chip away at an expected landslide from Latinos.

But a Pew Hispanic Center Poll taken over the summer showed issues like education, jobs and health care weighed heavily on Latino voters.

Ninety-three percent of those surveyed said education was the top issue, followed by jobs with 91 percent, and health care with 90 percent.

“By a margin of 3-1, Hispanic registered voters believe that Obama will do a better job than McCain of dealing with education, jobs … health care,” Lopez said. Read more on the poll

The fact that the economy was issue No. 1 for Latinos is a large reason for their support of Obama, Espuelas said.

“The economy is the single most important issue impacting Latinos. We suffer disproportionately in a down economy — higher unemployment, lower wages and fewer resources to tap in bad times.”

CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said voting history among Hispanics has typically favored Democrats.

“Since 1972, Democratic candidates for president have, on average, won 64 percent of the Hispanic vote. So a 66 percent mark for Obama is pretty much what you would expect a Democratic candidate to get from Latinos,” he said.

McCain and Obama both addressed gatherings of three of the nation’s most influential Hispanic groups this summer.

Even as McCain tried to reassure conservatives that he would stress security in his immigration policy, he hit the airwaves this year with a string of Spanish-language radio ads and a television spot highlighting the service of Latino veterans.

So what should Obama and the Democrats do to keep Latinos in their corner?

Espuelas said Latinos want reasonable immigration reform that benefits the country and immigrants.

“If the Democrats can deliver, they will have the Latino vote as a dependable block election after election,” he said.

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As a bloc, Latinos heavily favored Obama and may realign the political map of the future, a poll shows.

Tim Rutten, The L.A. Times

America has long scouted Los Angeles for cultural signposts to the new. The results of last week’s election may have put the city on the country’s political cutting edge as well.

Analysts parsing the components of President-elect Barack Obama’s decisive victory have begun to believe that the campaign ended in a “realigning election,” reshaping the nation’s political map like the ones that brought Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to power. If that is the case, then several of the trends that pushed Obama to victory showed themselves first in L.A.

One is the continuing movement of affluent, better-educated voters and suburban residents into the Democratic column — a trend that has been visible in L.A. for years. Suburban voters went strongly for Obama nationally and overwhelmingly in Los Angeles.

Another clearly marked signpost to the future was Latino participation, which has been growing in Los Angeles for decades but which surged to historic levels across the country in this election cycle, according to an unusually comprehensive exit poll conducted by Loyola Marymount University’s Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles under the direction of Fernando Guerra. No one predicted at the campaign’s outset that more than six out of 10 Latino voters would cast their ballots for the first African American president, but they did.

The significance of that landslide was amplified by the fact that Latinos are clustered in the Western states that Obama pried from the red column. Seventy-three percent of Colorado’s Latinos went for the Democratic candidate, as did 76% of Nevada’s and 69% of New Mexico’s. More striking, Latinos helped deliver to Obama two of the three Sunbelt states crucial to Reagan’s first realigning victory. In California, 77% of Latinos went for the Democrat, as did 57% of Florida’s. Even the third, Texas, seems to be teetering on the blue precipice.

It’s hard to believe that little more than a decade ago, many analysts were predicting that Latinos, mainly Catholic and socially conservative, would be irresistibly drawn into the Republican orbit, much as Italian Americans of similar background had been after World War II in Eastern states.

So what happened? Two things: immigration and organized labor. Beginning in 1994, when then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, made support for Proposition 187 — which denied health, education and other benefits to undocumented immigrants — a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, Latinos across the country have been moving as far from Republican candidates as their legs will carry them.

To see just how far, The Times asked Loyola’s Guerra and his associate, Jennifer Magnabosco, to break out the votes of Protestant — mainly evangelical — and immigrant Latinos who voted in Los Angeles on Nov. 4. The notion was that these two groups would make up the most socially conservative members of their ethnic community.

The Loyola exit poll found that only 18% of L.A. Latinos voted for John McCain; just half of them were Protestants. That was true even though 47% of Latino Protestants favored a ballot measure that required that parents of teenagers seeking abortion be notified, and an overwhelming 61% favored the ban on same-sex marriage.

So much for the link between religiously based Latino social conservatism and Republican sympathy, but what about newly naturalized citizens? According to the Loyola survey, 21% of all foreign-born L.A. voters backed McCain, but only 18% of foreign-born Latinos did. In fact, Latinos who were born outside the U.S. went for Obama by a slightly greater margin than native-born Latino Americans — 78% to 76%. Loyola’s poll also turned up something else that ought to concern GOP strategists: In a campaign marked by widespread indecision into the eleventh hour, 86% of U.S.-born Latino Angelenos and 77% of naturalized Latino citizens reported they decided to vote for Obama more than two weeks before election day.

Loyola’s findings also tend to support research done by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center that shows Latino social conservatism is at its apogee in the immigrant generation — about four of 10 Latinos in the U.S. are foreign born — and declines until it becomes indistinguishable from the attitudes of white Americans in the third generation. Although 56% of L.A.’s Latino voters favored parental notification, only 40% of the native born did. Similarly, 60% of naturalized voters endorsed the ban on same-sex marriage, and 51% of the native born opposed it.

If you’re a Republican strategist, you need to weigh all this against two facts: By 2050, according to the Census Bureau, one in four Americans will be a Latino. One of the other significant trends in this election was the surge in young voters; one third of the voters under 29 were members of minority groups, mainly Latinos.

Political history is a funny thing. Who would have guessed that Pete Wilson would be one of the architects of Barack Obama’s victory?

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