The Lone Star State is the last big GOP bastion where Hispanics are a sizable voting bloc.

By Michael B. Farrell | Staff writer Christian Science Monitor

Houston

When President Bush says so long to Washington on Jan. 20, he’ll return to a much different Lone Star State from the one he left eight years ago.

Pickup trucks, Big Oil, and barbecue brisket still reign supreme, but this red state that helped deliver the presidency to Mr. Bush twice and his father once, and that catapulted GOP strategist Karl Rove to the national stage, is suddenly spotted with big pockets of blue.

Dallas is controlled by Democrats; Houston is in their hands, too. It’s all largely because of the state’s growing Hispanic population, which overwhelmingly sided with Democrats this year.

“The tide of demography in Texas is moving against the Republicans,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “All the major cities are Democratic and are likely to become more so over time.”

The Pew Hispanic Center reports that Latino voters sided with President-elect Obama over Sen. John McCain by a margin of more than 2 to 1, helping Democrats win crucial states such as Florida, Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado. While the overall Hispanic turnout did not rise much – it accounted for 9 percent of the vote this year and 8 percent in 2004 – Latino support for the GOP dropped nine percentage points, according to Pew.

That has left Republicans panicking and Democrats drooling. Duncan Currie writes in last week’s conservative Weekly Standard that Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R) of Florida says the GOP has a “very, very serious problem” because of diminishing Hispanic support.

Political scientists, sociologists, and activists say that concern reflects a keen awareness of what a growing and increasingly political Latino community could mean in big, traditionally red states like Texas: Those voters could tip Democratic in future national contests.

“We are in the process of watching this remarkable shift,” says Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University here, referring to the overall demographic transformation of America. “You can be absolutely certain that every election [to come] in Texas will have a larger percentage of Latino voters.”

In 2005, Texas joined California, New Mexico, and Hawaii as states where minority populations collectively outnumber whites, according to the US Census Bureau. In Texas and California, the second-largest group behind whites, and the fastest-growing population, is Hispanics. Nationwide, Hispanics number about 45.5 million, or 15 percent of the population. In Texas, Latinos make up about 36 percent of the population and about 20 percent of participating voters this year.

“It’s the biggest pool of Hispanic voters left in a state that didn’t vote Democratic in 2008,” not counting Arizona, because it’s Senator McCain’s home state, says Richard Murray, a political scientist at the University of Houston.

For the Democratic Party nationally, the overwhelming Hispanic support presents an inviting opportunity, especially to develop party loyalty among younger Latinos, who backed Mr. Obama 76 percent to 19 percent for McCain, according the Pew analysis.

In Harris Country, which includes Houston, 70 percent of people older than 60 are Anglo, while more than 75 percent of people younger than 30 are non-Anglo, notes Professor Klineberg.

While Bush didn’t carry the Hispanic vote here in 2004, he came close. He captured 49 percent of that bloc, with 50 percent going to Democratic rival Sen. John Kerry. Republicans also lost ground among Hispanics this year in Florida.

Since the advent of his political career, though, Bush found ways to appeal to the Latino community, which saw him favorably for his close relationships with Latin American leaders, his faith-based initiatives, and his ability to speak Spanish.

While Hispanics are not a monolithic bloc, many began turning away from the Republicans in Texas, and elsewhere in the US, amid the harsh rhetoric about immigration reform in 2007, says Professor Murray.

“Even in Texas you can’t just be a party of white folks,” he says. “Nationally and locally, the party is going to have to do some retooling.”

Though the Lone Star State’s spots of blue darkened on Election Day, the state remains solidly Republican (55 percent McCain, 44 percent Obama). McCain scored huge victories in rural Texas, taking as much as 93 percent of the vote in some counties in the Panhandle, helping deliver the state’s 34 electoral votes to the Republicans. The statehouse in Austin also remains in Republican hands.

Associated Press exit polls showed that whites, seniors, Christians, and the affluent largely stayed with the GOP ticket and that McCain took two-thirds of the state’s white vote and about three-fifths of families making more than $50,000 annually.

While rural, suburban, and small-town Texans stick with traditional Republican values, Klineberg says, a new cosmopolitan and high-tech Texas is emerging in cities such as Houston, which is the country’s fourth-largest city, with a population of about 2 million.

Houstonian Judy Craft, a longtime Democratic activist and an environmentalist, is used to swimming against the red tide in Texas. “I was hoping we’d do better, but that’s because I’m really good at suspending my disbelief during the middle of a campaign,” says Ms. Craft, who signed off her e-mails during the campaign with the hopeful wish that Texas would turn blue. “Oh well, at least I got a bluer shade of purple.”

Popularity: 7% [?]

It’s all in the numbers.
If current trends continue and Republicans do not fare better with
Latinos, Texas will become a swing state within a few election cycles,
political experts say.

Latinos are the fastest growing sector of the electorate and are increasingly trending Democratic. In the latest election, President-elect Barack Obama won 67 percent of the Hispanic
vote nationwide, a significant increase for Democrats from 2004, when Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts received about 55 percent of Latino votes.

In Texas, 63 percent of Latinos voted for Obama, according to exit polls. Among young Hispanics, 18 to 29 years old, 67 percent voted Democratic. Kerry won about half of the Latino vote in Texas in 2004.
more
Alan Abromowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who studies party re-alignment, said that Texas could become a swing state “within a decade or so” if the GOP does
not improve its standing among Latinos and young people.

Thomas Mann, a Congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Texas could become a swing state if Latinos maintain their current level of support for Democrats and if young Latinos’ embrace of the Democratic party becomes long-lasting.

However, he said it is too early to call the strong Hispanic vote for Obama a permanent shift.

“This will depend on whether Obama succeeds in governing, how he deals with the immigration issue, and whether the Republicans continue to be dominated by restrictionists,” Mann
said.

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, a veteran of the Clinton administration, said that Republicans have alienated Latinos largely because of the immigration issue. Rosenberg is the
founder and president of NDN, a Democratic think tank that studies immigration and other issues.

He said that Republican rhetoric surrounding recent immigration bills in Congress offended all
Hispanics. A major measure that would have given illegal immigrants a path to citizenship failed last year after a revolt from conservatives, who denounced it as an amnesty for lawbreakers.

“If they do that again, it’s going to be catastrophic for the Republican
Party,” he said.

Rosenberg said that Texas could become a swing state as early as 2012 depending on the level of Latino participation and whether the Democratic Party will continue to make investments in
the community.

Some Republican strategists and politicians are alarmed by the strong Latino vote for Obama, fearing it could translate into a permanent bloc.

GOP vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, said in recent interviews that losing the
Hispanic vote was a major reason Republicans lost the election.

Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, an immigrant from Cuba and former chair of the Republican National Committee, said this week that the GOP “had better figure out how to talk” to Latinos if they want to return to power.

Abromowitz said that Republicans are “trapped by their base” on the immigration issue.

“Any moves to appeal to Hispanic voters by taking a more moderate stance on immigration will meet with strong resistance from the current Republican base, which is overwhelmingly opposed to what they view as ’amnesty,”’ he said. “They are caught between a changing electorate and a shrinking conservative base.”

This is a major dilemma, experts say, because the Latino population is growing rapidly. It is expected to triple in size by 2050 and become 29 percent of the population, according to an analysis of Census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a non-partisan research group in Washington.

Latinos were instrumental in delivering key states to Obama this year, including three that president George W. Bush won in 2004 — Florida, Colorado and Nevada.

In Florida, a key swing state that Bush won twice, Obama received 57 percent of the Hispanic vote and McCain received 42 percent. In 2004, Bush took 56 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida.

However, it is unclear whether Latinos voted strongly Democratic this year as a rebuke to Bush and out of economic concerns or whether it is a permanent change in party identification,
experts say.

Nathan Gonzales, political director at the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political
Report, said that the Latino vote is still up for grabs.

“We need another election or two to see if this is a long-term problem (for
Republicans),” he said. “I don’t think Democrats have Latino voters
locked up.”

Gonzales added that Texas and other GOP states could become competitive if Democrats are able to solidify their current Latino support.

Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California, said that the GOP could recover with Latino voters.

“The Latino vote fluctuates depending on the candidate,”’ he said. “There is a certain segment of the Latino population that is very volatile — that flips back and forth.”

Popularity: 9% [?]

LESS than two months ago, New Mexico was very much in play in this election.

John McCain, reaping the rewards of the Sarah Palin shock factor, had grabbed his first lead in the opinion polls in months, in a state that recent history shows often goes down to the wire.

Al Gore carried the state by 366 votes in 2000, and four years ago it went to George W. Bush by fewer than 6000 votes.

But today, the story of New Mexico is the same one repeated throughout what had been shaping up to be the battleground states of this election.

The Rasmussen poll, which had McCain slightly ahead after the Republican national convention, now predicts Barack Obama will take the state with a double-digit margin of victory. Every other major poll mirrors those findings, only varying in the predictions of the magnitude of the victory.

McCain, the four-term senator from neighbouring Arizona and a man of the west, should have held a distinct advantage in the mesas of the Land of Enchantment.

But he didn’t need to look to his pollsters to take the pulse of the people.

Last weekend, when he and Obama were both in New Mexico campaigning, more than 35,000 gathered at Johnson Field, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, to hear the Democrat speak. An estimated 10,000 more supporters were outside the football arena.

Meanwhile, at a rally for McCain in the same city, less than 1000 came to hear the Republican say his rival “has never been south of the border”, an obvious play on the heavy Hispanic influence in the state.

New Mexico has the highest concentration of Hispanics of any US state, at more than 37 per cent.This is where the Spanish conquistadors came in 1540, a continuous settlement of almost 470 years.

But the early Hispanic reluctance to support Obama - their numbers were for a long time lined up behind Hillary Clinton - has been replaced with a growing acceptance. Polls now show that Obama is the favoured candidate by a margin of three to one.

It did not hurt that the nation’s foremost Hispanic politician, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, abandoned Clinton during the Democratic primaries to establish himself as one of Obama’s most influential supporters.

But more to the point, Hispanics tend to be most concerned about bread-and-butter issues such as jobs and the economy, and the economic downturn of the past month has played directly into Obama’s hands.

Another factor explaining Obama’s success in New Mexico is the resources his campaign has thrown at the state. John Kerry, who barely lost there in 2004, had 10 campaign offices in the state, mostly in the populous areas. Obama has 39 offices - four times as many as McCain - and has sent people into more remote regions of the state, cultivating often-neglected rural voters.

Analysts say Obama’s daunting ground presence has translated into one of the more remarkable poll numbers of this election: of those who have already voted, 64 per cent gave their vote to Obama and just 36 per cent to McCain.

Despite its uniqueness, New Mexico has been a good barometer: in the 1980s, it was firmly behind the Reagan Revolution; in the 1990s, it supported Bill Clinton. Obama will be hoping New Mexico’s status as a national barometer continues.

And, for the record, an Obama campaign spokesman said the Illinois senator had, in fact, visited Mexico, while at university.

Popularity: 11% [?]

In the final stretch of the campaign, John McCain is trying to hold on to Florida’s Hispanic voters, while Barack Obama is focused on getting Democrats to the polls.

BY MARY ELLEN KLAS, MiamiHerald.com

The ghosts of elections past emerged in Florida on Friday as Al Gore stumped for Barack Obama and John McCain’s campaign vowed to match George W. Bush’s record ad-spending and absentee-ballot success.

In the final weekend before Election Day, Florida remains in play as one of the most pivotal states in the nation for the presidential race. Both campaigns have focused their battleground strategy on trying to avoid the pitfalls of 2000 — when Gore lost to Bush in Florida by 537 votes — and in 2004, when Bush trounced John Kerry despite unparalleled voter-registration efforts by Democrats.

McCain — scheduled to come to Miami on Sunday — will be trying to hold on to Miami-Dade’s Hispanic voters and win over swing voters along the Interstate 4 corridor. Obama is focused on turnout — making sure the 657,000 new Democratic voters and the 1.6 million Florida Democrats who sat out the 2004 election get to the polls this time.

”It’s going to be obviously a ferocious four days here,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager on Friday. “We’ve got a lot of voters to turn out . . . And there’s still a decent number of undecided voters out there.”

In 2004, Plouffe noted, Republicans won the early vote and the absentee vote. This year, he said, Obama has the edge. He said Democrats outnumber Republicans with a 200,000-vote edge in both early voting and absentee ballot returns as of Thursday night.

McCain’s campaign counters that absentee vote requests from Republicans exceed those from Democrats, which could give the GOP a boost when votes are counted. Record television ad buys this week, ”electrifying” crowds for running mate Sarah Palin and a solid ground game add up to ”one of the greatest comebacks since John McCain won the primary,” Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said Friday.

A poll also released Friday provided one sign that McCain may be trailing behind President Bush’s 2004 benchmark among Hispanic voters in Florida. The exit poll of more than 8,683 voters was paid for by the Democratic firm Bendixen & Associates and showed that McCain is winning 69 percent of voters in Miami-Dade who were born in Cuba, compared to Bush’s 78 percent in 2004.

The poll does not include results from the GOP-heavy absentee ballots but shows that while McCain is leading overall among Hispanic voters 53 to 47 percent, in Miami-Dade, Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans favor McCain. Respondents born in Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, the Honduras, the Dominican Republican and Puerto Rico lean toward Obama. To shore up support among this once-reliable Republican voting bloc, the McCain campaign has enlisted former Gov. Jeb Bush to tape an ad to run on Spanish radio this weekend and is hosting a rally Sunday at the University of Miami with Cuban-American singers.

McCain is mounting another line of defense along the battleground region of Central Florida’s I-4 corridor, where Palin will headline three rallies on Saturday. McCain will return for one last push through Miami on Sunday and then start his seven-state road trip on Monday with a rally in Tampa.

Meanwhile, Obama’s focus remains on trying to get the surge of new Democratic voters his campaign helped register as well as what his campaign calls ‘’sporadic” voters to show up on Election Day.

Hillary Clinton will campaign for him in rallies in Orlando and Miami on Saturday. Obama running mate, Joe Biden, will host rallies to get out the youth vote in Tallahassee, Gainesville and Daytona Beach, and Obama returns to Florida for a final push in Jacksonville on Monday.

At rallies in West Palm Beach and Coconut Creek on Friday, Gore and his wife Tipper reminded voters of the importance of every vote. Gore lost his presidential bid in 2000 by 537 votes after dimpled ballots, hanging chads and ultimately a U.S. Supreme Court decision to stop a 36-day recount handed the election to George W. Bush.

”The economy started going down on Jan. 20, 2000, and I know,” Gore joked to an audience of about 200 in West Palm Beach, home of the infamous butterfly ballot. “I was the first one laid off.”

Then, he grew somber: ”Don’t let anyone take your vote away from you or talk you into taking it away,” he said. “Go and vote early in Florida. Vote early. Take people with you to the polls. Make sure every vote is voted.”

Miami Herald staff writer Beth Reinhard and Marc Caputo contributed to this report.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Russell Haythorn, 7NEWS Reporter

Political pundits coast to coast believe it’s the Latino vote that could tip this election one way or the other.

No where is that more true than here in Colorado. Both parties are aware of the enormous impact Latinos could have on this election, and both parties feel their agenda appeals more to Colorado’s Hispanic population.

“I would hope there’s enough penetration out there by the media and interested people and our representatives to get everyone to vote,” said Latino voter Armando Quiroz.

“It’s such a large number of Latino’s who historically don’t vote. I hope to see that change this election, because it’s so important for everyone to vote,” said Latina voter Olivia Gallegos.

Former Denver mayor Federico Pena said Latinos will make the difference for his candidate, Sen. Barack Obama.

“The Latino vote is going to be key. Not just in Colorado, but in New Mexico, Nevada and Florida,” said Pena.

The Latina Initiative is one of several non-partisan groups working to get out the Hispanic vote in Colorado.

The Latino vote could make up 10 percent of the Colorado electorate this year.

“Elections are won and lost by just a handful of votes. So 10 percent of the electorate, that’s thousands of voters,” said Latina Initiative executive director Dusti Gurule.

Both campaigns have picked up some big endorsements from the local Hispanic community.

On Tuesday, three high-profile Hispanic evangelical pastors in Colorado endorsed Sen. John McCain. Those Christian leaders are Mark Gonzales, Marcos Witt and Dr. Gilbert Velez.

Gonzales is the vice president of governmental affairs for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference or the NHCLC.

Witt is a four-time Latin Grammy Award winner who has sold over 10 million copies of his records.

Velez is the National Chairman of the NHCLC. The three men believe McCain’s core values resonate more with Latinos, especially Catholics.

Gurule said she is just encouraged to see more Latino’s becoming civically involved. “We’re educating all members of the Latino community. But for me, it’s more fulfilling to see women and men in their 30’s who have lived here for many years, now becoming involved. To me, that’s a little more fulfilling.”

The Latina Initiative is also targeting Hispanics who aren’t even old enough to vote. “Kids at 14,” said Gurule. “To really get them engaged early and bought into the process.”

Popularity: 14% [?]

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Bloomberg

In Little Havana, once the heart of Miami’s Cuban exile community and a reliable bloc of Republican voters, it’s easy to see the changing face of Florida’s Hispanic population.

At storefronts that wire money, newer immigrants line up to send cash to Guatemala and Honduras. At Miami food kiosks, Colombian and Venezuelan arepa corn patties are as popular as Cuban pork sandwiches.

The Hispanic vote in Florida — the fourth-largest U.S. state with 27 electoral votes — is one of the biggest prizes in the presidential contest. In past elections, these voters, dominated by Cuban-Americans, have usually backed Republicans; this year, they may not. For the first time, Cubans no longer are the majority of Hispanics in the state, and some younger and less well-off members of the community are more likely to consider voting Democratic than their elders.

That spells trouble for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who is lagging in overall state polls and who needs to capture Florida to win the White House.

`Economic Issues’

“What we’re seeing is the domination of economic issues leading” Hispanics to vote more Democratic this year, said Dario Moreno, director of the Metropolitan Center at Florida International University in Miami. “The question is: Is the economy bad enough, is Obama different enough and compelling enough of a candidate to get these newly registered people to vote for him.”

Hispanic voters are 12 percent of Florida’s electorate, and for the first time since the state started reporting registration by race or ethnicity, Democrats now outnumber Republicans among them by almost 68,000 registered voters, according to figures released Oct. 19 by Florida’s secretary of state. Almost one in three Florida Hispanics aren’t registered with either major party.

Four years ago, President George W. Bush won Florida’s Hispanic vote 56 percent to 44 percent, helping him to carry the state.

This year, several recent polls show the Hispanic vote in Florida in a statistical tie, with a slight advantage for McCain, according Steven Ochoa, vice president of research at the William C. Velasquez Institute, a Los Angeles-based Hispanic public policy organization. An Oct. 5 Mason-Dixon Poll, for example, had McCain leading Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama 49 to 44 percent among Florida Hispanics, within the margin of error.

Obama Advantage

Mexican-Americans in California, Texas and New Mexico and Puerto Ricans in New York largely vote Democratic, and surveys, including a Zogby Poll released yesterday, show Hispanics nationwide favor Obama by a 2-to-1 margin. Florida has always been an anomaly.

Yet the state is changing. At a Dominican barber shop in Miami’s working-class Allapattah neighborhood, posters of Obama emblazoned with “Cambio” — “Change” — adorn the window. The manager, Michael Avila, 33, said he identifies with the Illinois senator because “he comes from a single-parent family, he had to work hard, he’s multiracial like many Dominicans.”

Avila said he hasn’t voted in the past, though he will this year because “the economy is a mess.”

Many of Florida’s Hispanics remain conservatives, however. They include longtime Cuban exiles, evangelical Christians, entrepreneurs who fled leftist governments in Venezuela and Nicaragua or Marxist guerrilla movements in Colombia and Peru. Many are turned off by Obama’s stated willingness to talk to Cuban leaders Fidel and Raul Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. They also don’t like the Democrat’s opposition to Latin American free-trade deals.

McCain’s Appeal

Arizona Senator McCain, who bucked his party by pushing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, has impressed many Florida Hispanics. In June, he visited Colombia and Mexico to show his support for free trade and cooperation against drug trafficking. Obama, 47, hasn’t visited Latin America since becoming a politician.

“John McCain at great political risk tried to achieve comprehensive immigration reform,” said Hessy Fernandez, McCain’s national Hispanic media spokeswoman. “Where was Barack Obama?”

Among elderly Cuban exiles, the group that most strongly supports McCain, 72, there is palpable vitriol against Obama.

`Communist’

“I have to fight the communist who is Obama,” said Odelia Montesinos, 79, a retired office worker who fled Castro’s Cuba when she was 32, and now volunteers at McCain headquarters in Miami.

Republicans are confident that Cuban-Americans, still at least 40 percent of registered Hispanics in the state, will vote in far higher numbers than the new Democrats.

“The real issue is turnout, and the Republicans turn out more than Democrats in Florida,” said Katie Gordon, press secretary for the Florida Republican Party.

She said she wasn’t worried about Obama’s gains in Florida because registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the last few elections in the state, yet “we’ve elected President Bush twice, Governor Jeb Bush twice and Governor Charlie Crist,” she said. Republicans hold the majority in the state House and Senate.

Still, even in the Cuban community that provided the winning edge for Republicans in the past, that support is slipping.

Ruben Granda, a former Republican from Little Havana, was born in Miami after his parents fled Cuba. He voted twice for Ronald Reagan and twice for George H.W. Bush. Yet on every issue that is important to him now — from foreign policy to the economy — Granda, 48, said Obama is aligned with his principles. He has seen a similar openness among other voters when he canvasses for the Democrat.

Switching Parties

“I got a lot of people switching parties from Republican to Democrat, and a lot were Cubans,” he said.

Obama’s campaign has allocated $20 million to Hispanic outreach nationally, including advertisements and Spanish- speaking field organizers, said Temo Figueroa, national Latino vote director for Obama. That’s aside from $39 million invested in Florida for the general election — close to half the amount McCain has available to spend nationwide. Figueroa said Obama is spending twice as much as McCain on Spanish-language television ads and triple the amount on Spanish radio ads in Florida.

Obama’s message is getting through, said William Fuentes, 37, an electrician from Cuba who lives in Little Havana.

“No one’s selling houses, there’s no jobs,” he said. “I’m going to vote for Obama.”

Popularity: 15% [?]

It used to be said in Las Vegas that there were only two groups that the could get 500 Latinos in a room: The Catholic Church and the Culinary Union, says Hugh Jackson, the blogger behind the Las Vegas Gleaner. Long before the Democratic Party realised that Latinos would be a force in politics, the Culinary Union was aggressively organising the community.

Latinos make up 25% of the population of Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, but they usually only vote by about half of the numbers in which they are eligible, Hugh said. Will the efforts of the Culinary Union and the Obama campaign actually get Latinos out to vote?

Some say that if Latinos, who traditionally lean strongly Democratic, would have turned out in 2000 that Nevada would have gone to Al Gore, sending him to the White House, Hugh said.

“Everyone wonders if this will be the year that Latinos show up,” he said.

The Culinary Union isn’t leaving that to chance. The union had to work hard to unite its 100,000 members after the state’s causcus. Ignoring the union’s endorsement, many of its members rebelled and supported Hillary Clinton. She narrowly won the state.

In the lead up to the general election, the union has workers six days a week canvassing to get voters out. They’ve knocked on nearly 90,000 doors in the last few months.

This film gives a taste of the on the ground organising here in Las Vegas, with an appearance by Hugh himself:

UPDATE: The Democrats are not the only ones trying to reach out to Latino voters. John McCain has been an advocate for immigration reform, an unpopular position within his own party, but something that is important to a senator from a border state. He hasn’t said much about immigration reform, which might be a mistake as we found in speaking with Latino students in California. He revisited this issue in September as Obama increased his lead amongst Latino voters, but has said little since.

McCain can’t win for losing. His reform efforts are largely forgotten in among Latinos, and he’s being punished for the “other Republicans’ hostility to illegal immigration”.

Immigration isn’t on most people’s radar this election. The economy is the issue by overwhelming margins. Hugh said that he has yet to see a single political ad on immigration this year.

Popularity: 12% [?]

By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

BERNALILLO, N.M. — Rick Sepulveda can’t make up his mind between Barack Obama and John McCain. The 49-year-old beer salesman thinks the Democrat would do a better job with the economy, but he can’t stomach Obama’s support for abortion, an affront to his faith.

“I’m pro-life. That’s a big issue for me,” Sepulveda said recently, after taking an order at the T&T Supermart here, 18 miles north of Albuquerque. But, he added, “McCain is another Bush.”

Undecided Latino voters, particularly socially conservative ones like Sepulveda, could play the pivotal role in deciding who wins the five electoral votes in the Land of Enchantment, a state known for razor-thin margins in presidential races. Former Vice President Al Gore won by 365 votes in 2000; President Bush by 5,988 in 2004.

In New Mexico, Obama led McCain in recent polls and has a substantial lead among Latinos. But nearly 1 in 5 Latino voters, who make up almost a third of the state’s electorate, remain undecided, double the rate for white voters.

Many of these voters are torn: drawn to Republicans by their Roman Catholic faith, but to Democrats by their concerns about the economy.

“A lot of Hispanics in New Mexico are Catholic and . . . wrestle with the values and platform and campaign positions of candidates on both sides,” said J.D. Bullington, a longtime Republican lobbyist who registered as a Democrat this year. “That’s the reason why there’s a large number of undecideds in the Hispanic community. I think they take their time and listen carefully and balance it all out, all the way up to the election.”

This year, with the economy overshadowing nearly every other issue, it’s unclear how much weight voters will give values issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. But the state, while tilting toward Obama, is still in play, and both campaigns are targeting it.

In the week that ended Oct. 4, McCain spent $144,000 on advertising in New Mexico, and Obama spent $185,000. That’s a tiny fraction of what they are spending in other battleground states, but airtime is cheaper in Albuquerque, and both have a steady presence on television. Both are airing Spanish-language ads that blame the other for the failure to reform immigration laws.

The Democratic nominee has 40 field offices around the state, from six in Albuquerque to a single storefront in the tiny southern village of Hatch.

“We thought it was important for us to get beyond the I-25 backbone — Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Cruces — into areas where we didn’t do as well as we should have in 2004,” said Obama state director Adrian Saenz, who added that the campaign has mobilized thousands of volunteers. “We’re not taking anything for granted.”

In New Mexico, as in other swing states, the Illinois senator hopes to expand the electorate. In the last month, the campaign has registered more than 35,000 new voters. Now, with voters already casting ballots, staff and volunteers are turning their attention to get-out-the-vote efforts for those newly registered voters and others, with neighborhood canvassing, phone banking and early-voting rallies.

McCain, who has visited New Mexico four times, has a slimmer ground operation, with 10 field offices, plus a presence in the state’s 33 county GOP offices.

“Obama wants to waste his time opening offices here and there,” said Ivette Barajas, spokeswoman for McCain’s New Mexico effort. “Our ground operations are very effective and very strong. We saw that in 2004 with the Bush campaign, and we’re going to see that here.”

The senator from neighboring Arizona is also replicating a 2004 tactic of connecting like-minded volunteers with voters, such as veterans, mothers and social conservatives.

“You see people just like you who live in the same city, have similarities with you,” Barajas said. “You’re more likely to connect with those people.”

She scoffed at Obama’s chances among socially conservative Latino voters. “Hispanics feel that connection with McCain, they know who he is, he has the knowledge and the record,” she said. “The community is asking, ‘Who’s Obama?’ They really, really have to dig deep to get in touch with who this Obama person is.”

Scott Jennings, who ran the state for the Bush campaign in 2004, said McCain needs to energize the southern conservatives to offset the Democratic advantage in large cities. Recalling that the Bush campaign had a high-level representative in the state every week in the month before the election, often in small towns off the traditional campaign trail, Jennings said the McCain campaign needs to do the same.

“The president and his wife and the daughters and the vice president — everyone at that level of the campaign lavished New Mexico with attention and visits,” he said, recalling one day when Bush held three rallies that attracted 45,000 voters. “I still to this day believe that attention was crucial.”

Bush won over socially conservative Latinos in rural communities and ended up with 38% of the Latino vote statewide.

Churches have played a smaller role in the presidential campaign this year, though there have been reports of some leafleting in parking lots.

“It probably would start heating up about now,” said Joe Monahan, who runs a well-read nonpartisan New Mexico political blog. “Four years ago it seemed to be pretty overt.”

Esperanza Arellano, 28, an administrator for Rock Christian Outreach’s school in Española, said her pastor had stressed the importance of voting for candidates who oppose abortion, though he has not named a candidate.

It’s a message that has resonated with Lorenzo Lavato of Albuquerque. The 27-year-old, who works as a mechanic while studying civil engineering at the University of New Mexico, is a registered Democrat and was initially for Obama.

“He kind of sucked me in for a little while with his charisma,” he said.

But in November, Lavato said, he will vote for a GOP candidate for the first time because of McCain’s opposition to abortion and patriotism. He questions Obama’s character because of his associations with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and William Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground.

Another issue is race. Since Obama launched his campaign, pundits and politicians have questioned whether Latinos will vote in large numbers for a black man.

The issue came to the surface here when Bernalillo County GOP Chairman Fernando C’ de Baca said: “The truth is that Hispanics came here as conquerors. African Americans came here as slaves. . . . Hispanics consider themselves above blacks. They won’t vote for a black president.”

His comments were loudly denounced on both sides, and he stepped down. However, for a small fraction of voters, De Baca’s words may resonate.

Antoinette Trujillo, 43, owns the Corner Store, a small grocery in Bernalillo stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables and strands of dried red chiles. Outside the front door, she placed a sign that read, “Obamanos! ‘08″

An older Latino customer told her she ought to throw it on the road so cars would run over it.

“He didn’t want to vote for a black guy,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Several political observers said that for most voters, it is not overt racism but rather an unfamiliarity with black politicians.

Monahan said Obama’s surrogates, most notably New Mexico’s Latino governor, Bill Richardson, may have helped ease concerns about race. But he said the faltering economy may do more to bring skeptical voters to Obama.

“The money argument is trumping the race argument,” he said. “The economy has gotten to be such a huge issue that it may be washing away” everything else.

Popularity: 13% [?]

By Jeremy Pelzer,  PolitickerCO.com

A new survey from a Democratic polling firm released Saturday night shows Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Mark Udall both have a 10-point lead in Colorado.

The survey, taken by Public Policy Polling, has Obama leading Republican opponent John McCain 52 percent to 42 percent. Udall leads Republican U.S. Senate nominee Bob Schaffer 49 percent to 39 percent in the poll.

PPP said Obama’s lead was due in large part to increasing Hispanic support in Colorado for the U.S. Senator from Illinois. The poll found 71 percent of Colorado Hispanics surveyed favored Obama; just 21 percent of Hispanics polled favored McCain.

PPP’s last survey in Colorado, released Sept. 23, showed Obama with a 57-36 lead among Hispanic voters.

Just 6 percent of those polled were undecided about the presidential race.

The survey was taken Oct. 8-10 among 1,331 likely voters. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 2.7 percent.

Popularity: 11% [?]

By MARGARET TALEV
McClatchy Newspapers

AURORA, Colo. — A cartoon taped to the door of Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado’s fifth largest city, depicts a young man with a clothespin over his nose. The caption says, “I registered because the economy stinks.”

Since President Bush’s call for a $700 billion Wall Street bailout and the first presidential debate, polls have found that Obama has edged ahead of Republican John McCain in this Western battleground state with nine electoral votes. Obama was up by 5 points according to an average of five late-September surveys by the Web site RealClearPolitics.

An Obama win in once-red Colorado, which voted twice for President Bush but has since elected a Democratic governor and senator, could tip the election. The race is still close, however, and Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state by about 74,000. About one-third of Colorado’s 3 million voters don’t belong to either party.

“If Obama wins this state, it’s indicative of other things happening around the country,” said Bob Duffy, a Colorado State University political scientist. “This is a state that McCain should win.”

Several undecided Coloradans who were interviewed last week said the economy had pushed other concerns to the background, such as alternative energy and immigration, but that they still weren’t sure how the financial crisis might affect their votes.

At a Wal-Mart in Greeley, a traditionally Republican city an hour northeast of Denver - where Latinos drawn by meatpacking and agricultural jobs now make up 30 percent of the population - retirees Paula Seader, 74, and her husband, Paul, 83, worried about Wall Street’s woes reducing their retirement savings.

Paula Seader said she’d previously leaned toward McCain, but “with this money problem, that brought me down a notch on McCain. He’s been in there for so long it seems like he had something to do with it. I’ve never been so mixed up.”

Paul Seader plans to stick with McCain. He accepts the Arizona senator’s recent conversion to favoring more regulation of Wall Street: “I think he’s finally seen the mistakes the Republican Party’s made and is willing to change them.”

At the Dollar Tree store down the street, Nicole Benavidez, 30, a Mexican-American single mother of three and a home health-care provider, said she would back Obama: “We need a change.”

Obama’s campaign is hoping that Colorado’s growing population of Latinos, an estimated 9.5 percent of the state’s registered voters, and college-educated white voters moving in from other states will help put him over the top.

McCain is pushing back. He’s put up aggressive ads portraying the Illinois senator as fiscally irresponsible and himself as the change candidate.

Both candidates campaigned in Colorado last week, looking for undecided voters in suburban counties around Denver. Both campaigns are working to turn out voters in party strongholds, such as Boulder for Democrats and Colorado Springs for Republicans.

Obama’s campaign is mounting a serious Latino outreach effort in Colorado. McCain also is courting Latino Democrats, especially those who wanted Hillary Clinton.

Tom Kise, a Colorado spokesman for McCain, said the race “is neck and neck, and it’s going to be a battle for finding the independent voters on both sides. We’re reaching out aggressively not only to Hispanic voters, but unaffiliated voters.”

McCain’s announcement that Friday he would visit the heavily Latino and Democratic city of Pueblo, two hours south of Denver, was the lead Page One story on Wednesday in The Pueblo Chieftain. The article said that McCain might be the first Republican presidential candidate to visit since William Howard Taft in 1912.

Lisa Martinez, 39, a mother of four who was shopping in the Denver suburb of Westminster, where Obama spoke at a high school earlier in the week, is the sort of Latino Democrat the McCain campaign is targeting.

She moved to Colorado five years ago from New Mexico. She considered herself “a die-hard Democrat” until Obama got the nomination. “I was a Hillary fan, so it’s hard for me to want to vote for Obama,” she said. “I just have untrust for him.”

When Martinez talks about what issues are important to her - she favors abortion rights and wants the government to make health care more affordable - Obama sounds more like her candidate than McCain.

But McCain’s addition of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to the ticket - regardless of Palin’s anti-abortion and small-government stands - has gotten Martinez thinking seriously about voting for McCain.

“I know it sounds really odd,” she said. “But it’s about damn time that a woman got into that house. She’s a strong woman.”

Many other Latino men and women who were interviewed last week preferred Obama to McCain, however, and didn’t consider Palin a selling point.

Kristin Draper, an Obama campaign volunteer in Fort Collins, said she never initiated questions about Palin in calls to voters, but that right after McCain picked his running mate, some undecided female voters told her they were tempted to vote Republican because there was a woman on the ticket. That’s faded; in the past couple of weeks, Draper said, she isn’t hearing that anymore. “She’s just not being mentioned.”

Susan Yaple, 42, an office manager, said that Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver helped convince her to support him. She likes what he has to say about cutting taxes for the middle class and wanting to penalize companies that send jobs overseas.

Yaple worries that homes in her neighborhood have lost one-third of their value in the past year. Still, her husband works for Budweiser, and she figures that as the economy goes south, beer sales will go up. “The worse the economy gets, the more people want to forget it.”

Some McCain-Palin supporters said the Iraq war or social issues were still paramount.

“If the economy is bad and it’s the Republicans’ fault - if everything is the Republicans’ fault - on the simple matter of not killing an unborn child, I’d vote for them,” said Daniel Thompson, 40, an insurance adjuster from Louisiana who was transferred to Colorado.

Retiree Joyce Lumming moved to Colorado a year ago from Minnesota. She’s a Democrat, but in recent weeks, both campaigns have tracked her down at home in Pueblo to ask for her support. She was surprised to get one campaign solicitation on her cell phone, a number she thought was unlisted. “They’re out there trying,” she said.

Popularity: 9% [?]