Romance is gone between Latinos, GOP

We’re more than a year away from the presidential elections, but if there is one constant floating among the political kingmakers, it’s that the Republicans lost the Latino vote when the immigration bill failed in Congress.

It’s a buildup of the 2006 elections, when Latinos had a big role in denying Repub-licans control of Congress after George W. Bush had charmed the nation’s largest minority group into re-electing him in 2004.

The bet now is that, whoever is the Republican candidate in 2008, he will not get the Latino vote even if he picks la Virgen de Guadalupe as his running mate.

If Hillary Clinton is the Democrats’ candidate, which is a given unless she stumbles badly in the primaries or runs off with Eddie Fisher, she can be assured a large chunk of the Latino vote.

Her formidable campaign organization already has recruited Raul Yzaguirre, the former president of the National Council of La Raza, as her Latino co-chairman. A Latina, Patti Solis Doyle, is her campaign chairman.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has signed on, as has human rights leader Dolores Huerta. Former Latino political boy wonder, Henry Cisneros, a Hillary favorite during his Washington days, must be waiting in the wings.

Hillary, or whoever is the candidate, may not need all that Latino firepower, because the conventional wisdom is that Republicans committed political suicide when the immigrant reform bill failed in Congress.

That is despite the fact that President Bush was one of the biggest promoters of a bill that had as many detractors as supporters from both sides. The senators avoided political heartburn by keeping the bill from coming up for a vote and spared themselves the agony of exposing their biases.

Only 12 of the 49 Senate Republicans voted to end debate and were joined by one-third of their Democratic colleagues. The prospects for resurrecting it before the next elections are poor at best.

Whatever the circumstances, Latinos, with coaxing from Democrats, blame Republicans and their conservative bloc for frustrating the bill’s passage.

The consensus is that the Republican Party will pay dearly at the polls in Novem-ber 2008. Cast as the villains in this legislative drama, it maligned whatever endear-ment and good faith that the Republicans had been stead-ily building with the Latino community during the past two presidential elections.

Ironically, President Bush, who perhaps has shown the most affinity and genuine good will toward Latinos among recent presidents, now is looked upon as the perfidious one, despite his best efforts to enact immigration reform.

The travails lead to the 2008 presidential elections, in which capturing the Latino vote is crucial. Measured against the entire voting spectrum, the dimensions seem somewhat exaggerated.

There’s no question that the Latino vote has moved to a higher level. Political scientist Harry Pachon of the Tomas Rivera Institute describes it as advancing from a “hip pocket vote to a swing vote factor.”

More Latinos are voting now, increasing turnout from 2.4 million in 1980 to 5.9 million in 2000, when Bush received 35 percent of the vote. In 2004, Bush improved his support to 44 percent.

The tide turned for Republicans in the 2006 mid-term congressional elections, when Latinos expressed their disillusion with Republican politics and gave Democrats 70 percent of their vote, helping to end GOP control, albeit with the slimmest of margins.

The importance of the Latino vote, however, comes not from its numbers, but from where the votes are located, which makes nation-al political candidates salivate at the prospects of mining this mother lode of votes.

The Latino vote is concen-trated in nine states that control 207 of the 270 elec-toral votes needed to win the presidency. Win half of them and toss in a few other key states around the nation, and you’re in the White House.

There’s one major problem if you’re counting on Latinos as the catapult. Latinos may be the largest minority group in the nation, with more than 40 million people, but they are notorious for not voting because many of them are indifferent, too lazy, too young or not eligible to vote.

Latinos constituted 8 percent of the electorate in 2004 and more than eight million voted, as compared with six million in the 2000 presidential contest. The Latinos are Lilliputians, vote-wise, compared to non-Hispanic whites, who provided 80 percent of the vote in the 2004 election that re-elected Bush.

Black Americans, now smaller in numbers, cast more votes than Latinos.

What this says is that the role and strength of the Latino constituency in brokering a solution requires more assessment. Latino lobbying organizations warn that they are prepared to rally Latino voters as the sentinels of migration reforms poised to punish political offenders.

Maybe so. However, Latino advocacy organizations leading these efforts have shown in similar issues that they are still shy of the resources and the clout that forces changes.

Both sides of the political aisle perpetuate this calamity in the immigration issue. They seem politically deaf and apparently incapable of measuring the destructive elements of the problem if left unsolved.

Conde, a San Benito native and award-winning journalist, lives in Boca Raton, Fla., and writes on Latino topics. Write to him at CDConde@aol.com.