The McCain-Latino disconnect
David Paul KuhnSun Jul 27,2008
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.
While McCain and Bush have similar views on most social issues, including abortion, McCain's candidacy may mark a return to an era of blue-blooded Republicans less vocal about their religious beliefs. Barack Obama, by contrast, speaks comfortably and frequently about his faith.
The biggest reason for the shift, though, has been the heated debate over immigration reform that has alienated many Hispanic voters previously receptive to the GOP — and that nearly cost McCain, a co-sponsor of the bipartisan 2006 immigration reform bill that inflamed conservatives, his party’s nomination.
In the 2006 midterm election, exit polls showed Latino support for Democrats had increased by 16 percentage points from 2004, compared to a six-percentage-point increase among whites.
While McCain’s support of the immigration bill — which was eventually voted down — appealed to many Hispanics, it infuriated some conservatives. McCain, his campaign then floundering, promised primary voters that he had “got the message,” vowed to prioritize enforcement and even claimed he wouldn’t have voted for his own bill it if was to have come up again.
The shift in tone placated conservatives while infuriating many Hispanics.
Luis Cortes, one of Time Magazine’s 25 most influential evangelicals in America and twice an early Bush backer — in 2000, Bush visited Cortes at his North Philadelphia office to court his support — hasn’t yet decided who to back this year.
“I’m going to vote brown,” Cortes said.
“McCain’s problem is the problem of his party demonizing Hispanic people,” Cortes said. “His party demonized us. You can’t switch off the immigration rhetoric and think it will work. In the context of the immigration issue, Hispanics define the enemy as the Republican Party and you don’t erase that overnight.
“Bush didn’t have to overcome his party’s position on immigration and I think that’s the difference,” said Cortes, who heads the Christian social service group Nueva Esperanza (New Hope).
The Republican party stance on immigration may not be clear until the platform is completed, and Cortes said he may wait to read the platform before deciding whether or not to leave the GOP.
“Do the border fence overnight, do it first, fine,” he said. “Then get to work on immigration reform in the first year.”
Tony Fabrizio, who worked as Bob Dole’s presidential campaign pollster in 1996, emphasized that no single measure of support is decisive. “McCain can make up the difference” he said, by increasing his support among whites,.
Such compensation is made easier by continued low turnout among Hispanics, despite many organizations devoted to organizing the Latino electorate. In 2004 there were 41.3 million Hispanics in the United States but only 16 million were eligible voters, and only 39 percent of those eligible actually cast a ballot, as compared to 76 percent of whites and 65 percent of blacks.
Hispanics, who made up eight percent of the electorate in 2004, have remained a white whale of American politics because of the group’s many eligible but unregistered voters, and the many native-born children of illegal immigrants who will become eligible voters at 18. They are also clustered in several swing states — in 2004, 15 percent of Florida voters and as many as one-third of the voters in New Mexico were Hispanic.
On Wednesday, the Obama campaign announced its first media buy of the general election on Hispanic radio in Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Obama has not yet purchased advertising on Hispanic television, while the McCain campaign has been up for months on both TV and radio.
Those ads, though, have yet to move his numbers much. Both Gallup and Pew show his support to be fairly steady at and 10 percentage points less than Bush’s in the summer of 2004.
“You begin with the anti-immigrant legislation that came out of the House and jump started a level of activism in the Latino community that we had not seen ever,” said Adam Segal, director of the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University “and you add to that the favorable political environment for Democrats in general,” and it’s hard, he said, to see McCain’s numbers among Hispanics improving.
“This cycle is extremely favorable to Obama and the Democrats,” Segal, who then paused before emphasizing “extremely.”
