By KATHLEEN HENNESSEY – AP

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Cindy Florez can’t always remember the name of the man who will get her vote for president, but she knows his party and that’s enough.

“I will vote Democrat,” the 23-year-old hotel housekeeper said, in broken English, moments after registering to vote at a John McCain campaign booth in a Latino neighborhood market.

It’s an insult-to-injury moment for the Republican presidential candidate. And when it comes to McCain’s relationship with Hispanic voters, it’s not the first.

The man who once took a big political risk by joining with Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy to propose a comprehensive immigration reform bill that was embraced by Hispanics is now struggling to win these same voters, and falling perilously below the level of support that helped lift President Bush to the White House.

The candidate who won nearly 70 percent of Hispanic voters in his last bid for Senate in border-state Arizona is watching a first-term Illinois senator run away with those voters.

The pro-military, anti-abortion candidate is seeing Hispanics with similar views turn away en masse.

McCain’s campaign is pushing back on each of these fronts in Spanish-language radio and television ads and on-the-ground contact in the markets, Hispanic neighborhoods, military bases and churches across the southwest.

But polls show the candidate isn’t finding it easy to shake his biggest liability with these voters: the R after his name.

“The Republican Party pretty much alienated that voting bloc with the debate over immigration,” said Clarisa Arellano, a GOP activist in Colorado Springs, Colo., and a co-chair of McCain’s Hispanic coalition in the state. “There’s constant repetition that Sen. McCain is just another Republican, and negative campaigning works.”

McCain’s trouble is most evident in his own backyard — the swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Hispanics in these states are a growing and critical segment of the electorate. They are largely of Mexican descent and trend Democratic, but in recent elections Republicans have successfully carved out just enough of their support to win.

Bush won 44 percent of Hispanic voters in New Mexico in 2004, when he eked out a win in the state by 6,000 votes, according to exit polling.

In a poll conducted last week, McCain was winning just 17 percent of Hispanic voters in the state. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had 62 percent, and 21 percent were undecided, according to the survey conducted by Research & Polling Inc. for the Albuquerque Journal.

McCain is faring somewhat better in national polls. A Gallup poll conducted last week showed 26 percent of Hispanics favoring McCain, while 64 percent preferred Obama.

McCain’s advocates on the ground say there’s no mistaking 2000 for 2008.

“I think Bush identified himself,” said Larry Trujillo, a former Colorado state legislator who is now pouring hours into McCain’s campaign in the state. “I don’t think (McCain’s) story is getting out, I don’t think it has resonated as loudly as I wish it would, as it should.”

Trujillo and other McCain backers said they find Hispanics know little of the senator’s record and lump him in with Republicans they have turned against.

“The problem we have, many people, instead of being with Obama, they’re anti-Bush. They want to vote against anything that represents Bush,” said Xavier Rivas, a Republican activist working on McCain’s Hispanic coalition in Las Vegas.

In conversation with voters, Rivas tries to highlight McCain’s ties to the community. He notes McCain was born on a military base in Panama, has traveled to Latin America and advocates free trade. He doesn’t see the campaign pushing these connections aggressively.

McCain’s campaign has been drawn into an television and radio advertising volley on immigration, an emotionally charged issue that isn’t playing in his favor.

While embraced by the largely pro-immigration population of Hispanics, McCain’s 2006 reform bill was pilloried by many conservatives. The debate left the senator caught between the right wing in his own party and the Hispanic voters he’s trying to court.

McCain tacked to the right during the primary, saying he would not reintroduce his own reform bill until the borders are more secure.

He’s finding it difficult to tack back.

“I do have to say that the primary departure from highlighting his positives on immigration, it lost some people,” Arellano said. “It is muddled. There isn’t enough time to go out there and talk to them about immigration with all these other issues to talk about.”

Even before the economic crisis, polls showed Hispanics prioritizing pocketbook concerns and looking to Democrats as stronger leaders on those issues.

The crisis is crowding out social issues that in 2004 moved some Hispanics, particularly evangelicals and Catholics, toward the Republican ticket. A Pew Hispanic Center survey from July showed only a third of Hispanics who attend church weekly were supporting McCain.

Still, his foot soldiers labor on.

As he makes the rounds of small businesses, Rivas hands out a small card designed to look like a prayer card. It bears an image of the candidate in front of the Mexican icon Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“What is most important is the person who supports our Hispanic community. John McCain has been with us yesterday, today and always,” it reads.

On a recent Saturday, volunteers manned a booth at the market, calling out in Spanish to shoppers like Florez over the din of Mexican pop music.

Their message was well received by Jesus Rosales, a 65-year-old retiree from Las Vegas.

Rosales said he believes “Republicans are stronger, they work harder.” He’s believed this since the 1980s, when he became a citizen under an amnesty program enacted by President Reagan.

Popularity: 18% [?]

By Ben Smith, Politico

Despite championing immigration reform in 2007, John McCain is poised to lose the Hispanic vote by a landslide margin that is well below President George W. Bush’s 2004 performance.

Polls show Obama winning the broadest support from Latino voters of any Democrat in a decade, while McCain is struggling to reach 30 percent, closer to Senator Bob Dole’s dismal 1996 result than to Bush’s historic 40% four years ago.

McCain seems to have wound up with the worst of both worlds: He appears to be getting no credit from Latino voters for his past support for immigration reform, while carrying the baggage of other Republicans’ hostility to illegal immigration.

And he’s been unable or unwilling to attack Obama—who was once thought to have taken a lethally liberal stance by supporting granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants—from the right.

As October puts four states with large Hispanic populations - Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico - at the center of the presidential contest, what appeared at first to be a possible strength for McCain has emerged as a profound weakness.

“I feel bad for McCain,” said Sam Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and a prominent supporter of George W. Bush in 2004, who is neutral this year. “We find ourselves between the proverbial rock and the hard place. We really like John McCain. We really don’t like the Republican Party.”

Democrats relish McCain’s quandary.

“It’s hurt him in every way,” said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the New Democrat Network, which has focused on bringing Hispanics back to the Democratic Party. “I don’t think it’s assured the right he’s really with them. And for those who are immigration reform advocates, he’s become a betrayer, having been a leader.”

Since America’s economic crisis deepened this fall, immigration has almost entirely vanished from the national conversation. Three debates have passed without a single mention of the issue. And the undertow has pushed Hispanic and anti-immigrant voters alike toward the Democratic Party.

But under the radar, McCain and Obama are slugging it out in a bitter exchange of attack ads on Spanish-language radio and television.

Obama’s goal has been simple: To associate McCain with the anti-illegal immigrant Republican right. One ad - which even some of Obama’s allies declined to defend - associated McCain with tough immigration-related rhetoric from Rush Limbaugh. McCain countered with an ad accusing Obama of distortions and, less credibly, of having killed last year’s immigration reform measure himself.

Obama, whose Spanish-language barrage also touches a range of economic issues, responded with a more defensible attack ad, saying McCain “surrendered to the anti-immigrant movement” by saying he wouldn’t vote for his own immigration reform bill.

“We’re seeing the most aggressive Spanish language communication campaign for president that the state of Florida and the country has ever seen,” said Fernand Amandi, the executive vice president of Bendixen and Associates, a polling firm that advises Obama.

Amandi said that some had also falsely assumed that because McCain shared Bush’s moderate position on immigration, he would inherit Bush’s support.

“President Bush making his life and career in Texas grew up with Hispanics, always had Hispanics in his inner circle and in his kitchen cabinet, and had a genuine respect for the culture,” he said. “There was never an emotional connection, there was never a personal connection, between McCain and the Hispanic community.”

McCain advisor Ana Navarro called the attack ads “pathetic ploys,” and conceded that McCain is being dramatically outspent on the Spanish-language airwaves.

“Obama is trying to do with $20 million what John McCain has done with over 20 years of service,” she said, citing a figure released by the Obama campaign. “We don’t have that kind of money to spend.”

Nonetheless, McCain continues to push hard for the Hispanic vote. He spoke about his plan to buy up bad mortgages in an interview with Univision Thursday, and he has offered almost nothing to the anti-immigration wing of his party since sewing up the Republican nomination.

Recent Gallup surveys show McCain with just 26 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Meanwhile, McCain is getting little affection from the other end of the spectrum either: anti-immigration conservatives.

“There’s no substantial difference between the candidates on the underlying issue,” said Steve Camarota, the research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restricting immigration.

To some analysts, McCain is ignoring a major chink in Obama’s armor, though one which may have less salience now that the economic crisis dominates the headlines. When Obama said last fall that he would support states’ decisions to issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, Hillary Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn told her staff that Obama might have just lost himself the election.

“We thought he was going to get killed over it,” recalled a Clinton staffer, who said Penn’s polling portrayed it as so “lethal” that it could cost Obama the reliably Democratic state of California.

Views differ on why McCain hasn’t exploited this issue.

“He just doesn’t have the stomach for pandering,” said Navarro.

Others say immigration never cut as deeply as pundits imagined, and point to the dismal failure of Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo’s single-issue presidential campaign.

“This issue has been a total loser, even inside the Republican Party,” said Rosenberg.

And the shift of the campaign to the West and Florida may have simply made it too risky to antagonize his remaining Hispanic supporters, though some Democrats still think the issue may surface.

“Would McCain say, ‘Screw it, I’m not picking up votes in these states, and would that be a Hail Mary? I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of the Democratic-leaning immigration group, America’s Voice.

But as with other elements of his campaign, McCain may be battling forces beyond his control, as his advisor, Ana Navarro, noted.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with John McCain,” she said of his poll numbers.

Sam Rodriguez, the Hispanic evangelical leader who backed Bush, concurred.

“We really looked at McCain,” he said. “If Bill Clinton was the first black president, John McCain could have been the first Latino president. Things were marching on until immigration reform failed.”

Popularity: 18% [?]

A political scientist in Florida says Barack Obama must increase his appeal among older white women and Latino voters if he hopes to erase his deficit in the Sunshine State.

The St. Petersburg Times reports that the key battleground state of Florida may be falling from the Democratic presidential nominee’s grasp. The last average of Florida polls compiled by the website RealClearPolitics.com shows Senator John McCain, the GOP nominee, with a five-percentage point lead over Senator Obama. At least one polling group (Rasmussen) had the two major party candidates in a dead heat in Florida last week — and, like RealClearPolitics.com, reports the five-point lead for McCain this week (49% to 44%).

University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith says although Obama has never once led in Florida, it will remain a battleground state this year. Dr. Smith notes the gap between Obama and McCain widened after Alaska Governor Sarah Palin entered the campaign, but he expects the race to continue to tighten.

“Election Day is a long way away yet in Florida, and from all appearances the Obama camp is still pouring lots of money into the state,” the educator observes. “They spent over $8 million on TV ads — but more importantly they have an impressive ground campaign with over 75 paid staffers and thousands of volunteers on the ground.” According to Smith, that contingent “dwarfs” the McCain campaign’s current efforts.

The political science professor contends that Obama needs to shore up the older white female vote to win the state, and that that is why he has former Democratic opponent Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York) traveling to south and central Florida to campaign on his behalf. In addition, Smith contends Obama needs to effectively reach out to Latino voters, a group that McCain has been targeting of late. Unlike in 2004, a majority of Latino voters are now registered Democrats in Florida.

In the last ten presidential elections, the Republican presidential ticket has won Florida eight times. The state offers 27 electoral votes to the winner.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Making a play for Hispanic votes in Nevada, Republican presidential candidate John McCain is preparing to roll out a coalition of Southern Nevada Hispanic supporters.

The group is to be formally announced Saturday in a news conference headlined by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, who said in a phone interview Thursday that Hispanics can trust McCain because he knows their community and has championed their issues.

“My Hispanic heritage is important to me personally, and I believe Hispanic heritage is important to the country,” said Gutierrez, who was born in Cuba. “Senator McCain not only has a big Hispanic-American constituency in Arizona, but Hispanic-Americans have been important in his life, some of his best lifelong friends. He has an understanding of the community.”

McCain also will be in town Saturday. He is scheduled to give a speech to the annual convention of the Disabled American Veterans at Bally’s. Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama is scheduled to address the group in a video message.

Today, Obama’s erstwhile rival, Hillary Clinton, is scheduled to campaign for him in Henderson.

McCain’s Hispanic coalition in Nevada is chaired by Otto Merida, president of the Las Vegas Latin Chamber of Commerce. The coalition’s state director is Fernando Romero, a Democrat and president of Hispanics in Politics.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

By Paul Kiernan, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

MEXICO CITY -(Dow Jones)- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said Monday he expects either Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., or Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to pass an immigration reform law quickly, whoever wins the presidential election.

“I believe that whichever one of the American candidates is elected for president, they will succeed in passing soon - sometime early next year - an immigration reform,” Clinton said at a press conference in Mexico City, adding that such legislation would lead to a “substantial improvement in the management of that problem, for both countries.”

Clinton also brushed aside the possibility that Democrat Obama may lose ground to Republican rival McCain in the race for U.S. Hispanic votes by not visiting Mexico, as McCain did earlier this month.

“Just like I don’t think you can say Sen. McCain doesn’t want the votes of German-Americans in Milwaukee because he hasn’t been to Germany yet,” Clinton said. “I assure you (Obama) is interested in a good relationship with Mexico and a positive relationship with the Hispanic community in our own country,” he added.

Clinton, who came to Mexico City to speak at the International AIDS conference and to announce a $50 million investment through his charitable foundation in sustainable development in Latin America, said he sees either of the two major- party candidates increasing development assistance in other parts of the world.

“(The two candidates) seem both very committed to the so-called soft-power issues,” he said. “I think they understand - and Americans understand now - that we do very well when people think we’re on their side.”

Popularity: 31% [?]

Angelette Aviles, a Tampa organizer for John McCain and member of the Republican Party of Florida’s Hispanic Leadership Council, did not mince words when she called GOP headquarters last week:

“Are you guys freaking doing something?” Aviles asked.

McCain is counting on support from Latino voters to help him carry Florida and other swing states in November. But recent data has been alarming to supporters like Aviles.

A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that Latino voters in Florida prefer Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama over McCain 56 percent to 36 percent. A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center showed Obama with a more than 2-to-1 lead over McCain among Latino voters nationwide. And last week, Obama and the Democratic National Committee sought to solidify that support by announcing the most expensive Latino outreach effort in presidential campaign history.

The Obama campaign aims to raise $20 million and target much of that in four swing states where the Latino vote is expected to be large enough to decide the November election: Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida.

Tampa businessman Frank Sanchez, who is charged with raising the money for Obama’s campaign, largely from Latino voters, promised a blitz.

“Everything from television and radio and print and all that, to organizing volunteers to go door to door,” Sanchez said, adding that this year, Latinos are “participating in every aspect of a political campaign, and that includes fundraising.”

Latino voters are viewed as one of the most powerful voting blocs in this year’s election. More than 9 million Latino voters nationwide are expected to go to the polls in November, an estimated 1.7 million more than voted in 2004.

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Popularity: 14% [?]

The pending merger of American beer giant Anheuser-Busch and Belgian company InBev that brews and sells beer in Cuba is thrusting John McCain into the middle of thorny Cuba-U.S. relations. McCain’s wife, Cindy, owns the third-largest Anheuser-Busch distributor in the country — which means she would stand to profit by partnering with a company that is in business with the Cuban government.
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Popularity: 15% [?]

Presidential challengers John McCain and Barack Obama sparred over affirmative action Sunday, with McCain backing an effort to end state and locally run minority preferences and Obama saying policies that consider race need to continue.

McCain, speaking on ABC’s This Week, said he backs a proposed ballot initiative in his home state of Arizona that would prohibit affirmative action policies by state and local governments.

The initiative is part of a nationwide attempt by Ward Connerly to have governmental affirmative action policies eliminated. Connerly, a conservative African-American businessman from Sacramento, Calif., who led a successful drive to ban affirmative action in California, has been trying to do the same thing in other states.

Asked Sunday whether he supported Connerly’s efforts in Arizona, McCain said: “Yes, I do,” adding that he had not seen the details of the proposal.

McCain’s endorsement was an apparent shift on affirmative action. The Republican senator has spoken out against quota systems, but he also has backed affirmative action in certain cases. He opposed a 1998 resolution in the Arizona legislature that asked voters to eliminate most preferences based on race, gender or ethnic origin.

“Rather than engage in divisive ballot initiatives, we must have a dialogue and cooperation and mutual efforts together to provide every child in America to fulfill their expectations,” he said at the time.

Obama, speaking at the Unity minority journalism convention in Chicago, accused McCain of flip-flopping and reminded convention attendees about McCain’s 1998 remarks.

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Popularity: 28% [?]

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.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

WASHINGTON — Question: What is the world’s second-largest Hispanic country? Answer: The United States of America.

Barack Obama and John McCain are devoting a sizable amount of their time and resources to chasing the Latino vote.

“Make no mistake about it: The Latino community holds this election in your hands,” Mr. Obama said Sunday at the annual gathering of the National Council of La Raza, an organization that champions the rights of the Spanish-speaking American community.

Yesterday, it was Mr. McCain’s turn to address the group. “I do ask for your trust that when I say I remain committed to fair, practical and comprehensive immigration reform, I mean it,” he told them. “I think I have earned that trust.” It was the third time in three weeks that the two candidates have addressed Latino gatherings.

Mr. Obama is right: America’s burgeoning Spanish-speaking population could decide the outcome of the presidential election.

There are now an estimated 46 million Hispanics living in the United States, of which about 34 million are there legally. Only Mexico has a larger Hispanic population. One American in eight is of Latino background. Last year, salsa outsold ketchup, as measured by revenues.

Because the Latino population is younger than the national average, and because many Latino immigrants are here illegally, the community is only expected to account for between 6 and 7 per cent of the actual vote in the November election.

“But despite these modest numbers, Hispanics loom as a potential ’swing vote’ in next year’s presidential race,” the Pew Hispanic Center concluded in a Dec. 6, 2007, report. “That’s because they are strategically located on the 2008 Electoral College map.”

(In the United States, the terms Latino and Hispanic are generally used interchangeably, although the former term denotes ethnicity and the latter language spoken.)

In New Mexico, Latinos make up 37 per cent of the state’s eligible electorate. In Florida the figure is 14 per cent; in Nevada and Colorado, it’s 12 per cent. All four states went Republican by narrow margins in 2004. The Democrats hope to take some or all of those states this year.

But predicting the Latino vote will be no easy thing. Both the Democratic and Republican candidates bring unwelcome baggage that could cost votes within the Latino community.

The Latino vote traditionally leans heavily Democratic, but George W. Bush worked hard to swing the vote, and with some success. According to exit polls, 40 per cent of Latinos voted Republican in 2004.

But Mr. Bush’s bid to forge a bipartisan consensus on immigration reform fell to Republican congressional opposition. The GOP is paying a price: In the 2006 midterm elections, the Latino vote split 70 per cent Democrat and 30 per cent Republican. A recent Gallup poll has Mr. Obama 30 percentage points ahead of Mr. McCain among Latinos.

Mr. McCain has been trying to reverse the slide, reminding Latinos that he championed the immigration reform legislation. But that stand angered Republican conservatives, and Mr. McCain now says that securing the border must come before legislative reform.

Mr. McCain, caught between placating his conservative base and appealing to Latinos for their support, risks alienating both camps.

Mr. Obama can hardly take the Latino vote for granted, however. In the Democratic primaries, they heavily favoured Hillary Clinton. There are tensions between the Latino and African-American communities, as both struggle to rise out of the poverty that afflicts too many of their members.

The danger for Mr. Obama is that, rather than vote for him, Latinos will just stay home.

Few, however, expect that the Latino vote actually will decline. The immigration issue remains a powerful concern for Latino voters, who are anxious to find a path to citizenship for their undocumented friends and family members.

And Latino Americans are also concerned about high-school graduation rates far below the national average, and chronic under-representation in management and the public service.

For that reason, “this election has, by far, the most at stake for Hispanic Americans,” maintains Octavio Hinojosa, executive director of the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute, a non-partisan organization that promotes the advancement of Latino Americans.

“As our population grows, we have a greater stake in the overall wellbeing of our country.”

As political observers note, the American Latino community is anything but monolithic. Some are the descendants of settlers who arrived in what is now the United States 400 years ago; others are newly minted citizens. Some identify themselves as white, some as black, some as neither. They can be socially conservative, but economically liberal; older Cuban-Americans see the world differently from their children and grandchildren.

What many share is a pride in their adopted country. “There is a strong strain of patriotism within the Hispanic community,” Mr. Hinojosa believes. Which may be why each election, gradually, the Latino vote increases, and why both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain pay so much attention to it.

*****

El voto Latino

The U.S. Latino vote has been gradually increasing and could be a deciding factor in key areas during the November election for President.

Hispanic share of eligible voters*

1996: 6.2%

200: 7.4%

2004: 8.2%

2007: 8.9%

*U.S. citizens ages 18 and above.

SOURCE: PEW HISPANIC CENTER

Popularity: 33% [?]