Dem Latino Vote Is No One's Big Enchilada

[one...two...tree 2,762]

by Roberto Lovato, New American Media

Asked on Super Duper Tuesday to choose between a black candidate and a white candidate, Latinos chose both -- and neither.

"The candidates need to understand where Latinos stand," says Smithe Celestrin, 31, standing outside Public School 24 in Brooklyn's diverse working class neighborhood of Sunset Park. Celestrin, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican-French-Chinese digital advertising manager, says her main issues are the war, the economy and immigration. "This is our country and we will have our say in it."

In a Democratic contest in which the issue of race has played a definitive role, racially fluid and ambiguous Latinos like Celestrin delivered a loud and historic message to the candidates and pundits and to the country as a whole: the black-white electorate of yesteryear is dead.

Preliminary results of the most intense primary in recent memory indicate that predictions of a monolithic Latino "firewall" for Clinton have fallen short. The candidates split key Latino-heavy states in different parts of the country. Clinton won states like New York, California and New Jersey while Obama won states like Colorado and Illinois.

Exit poll results also demolished widely-held notions that Latinos are unwilling to support a black candidate. Obama succeeded in cutting Clinton's 4-to-1 Latino advantage (68 percent to 17 percent according to a CNN poll conducted last week) to 3-2 last night. And in almost every Latino-heavy state that voted on Super Tuesday, Obama received more than the 26 percent of the Latino vote he got in Nevada just two weeks ago.

Analysis of Latino voting patterns indicates that Latinos did not, as predicted, march monolithically into the voting booths to vote according to the candidate's skin color. Instead, the Latino vote segmented along other vectors, the most interesting of which is the regional vector.

In what appears to be the development of a Latino voter regionalism, the vote varied depending on what part of the country (and in some cases what part of a state) the vote was cast. For example, while Clinton secured 74 percent of the Latino vote in her home state of New York, available data also indicates that Obama won 59 percent of the 30- to 44-year-olds, the largest age bloc, in his home state of Illinois' Latino electorate.

Obama won important Latino votes -- and delegates -- in Colorado, Arizona and other states where Clinton was expected to overwhelm him. With the support of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and other members of the Latino political machine nurtured by her husband, the former president, Clinton won more than 60 percent of the Latino electorate in states like New Jersey and New York. And regardless of the final tallies in California, the Latino electorate has already proven to be a powerful, new and greatly misunderstood segment of a multi-hued electorate of the United States.

"Candidates are spending tens of millions of dollars trying to capture the attention of Latino voters, mostly in the Spanish-language media," said Maria Teresa Petersen, the executive director of Voto Latino, a nonpartisan voter registration organization that also uses technology and pop culture to promote the political participation of new Latino voters. "But what the campaigns haven't figured out is that 79 percent of the 18 million eligible Latino voters consume media in English," said Petersen.

Analysts like Petersen, whose organization registered more than 7,500 young voters this past January, agree that the youthfulness of the Latino vote guarantees that this vote will continue to see great flux. "Exactly 50 percent of the 18 million voters eligible to vote are under 50 years old. And this is a generation growing up in the era of anti-immigrant politics. This is why they marched and this is why they are voting. Immigration is more than an issue. It's a great catalyst. The candidate who understands this will win the Latino vote in the future, including the near future."

As the highly contested Democratic primary rages beyond Super Duper Tuesday states, Latinos will continue to play critical roles, especially in tight races, according to Antonio Gonzalez, the president of the California-based William C. Velasquez Institute.

"The big enchilada will be Texas, followed by mid-sized states where Latinos are about 5 percent of the vote, states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and Washington," said Gonzalez. "It's going to continue to be very interesting," said a smiling Gonzalez. "On the one hand," he added, "Latinos are clearly trending towards Obama who overcame a 27 point difference nationally. But, on the other hand, Clinton still won several states with (Latino) margins of more than 50 percent."

If Clinton's Latino advantage holds and if the trend, especially among young Latinos, favoring Obama continues, understanding the fluidity of the very racially and ethnically diverse Latino electorate will be mission critical to success well into November's general election.

Roberto Lovato is a New York-based writer with New America Media.

[no name 1]

February 7, 2008, 7:14 pm

Patterns of Distinction

By ANDREW KOHUT

In terms of the numbers, Super Tuesday was as much a national election as it was the sum of individual contests in 24 states. While significant variations emerged in voting patterns from state to state, similarities outweighed differences. In both political parties, distinct patterns shaped the outcomes from coast to coast, and they provide some indication of the course ahead — particularly in the closely contested Democratic race.

In the Democratic primaries, race, class, gender, age and party identification continued to be the most important factor in determining a voter’s support. Hillary Clinton won the support of white voters in most primary states. But Barack Obama carried the white vote in Illinois, New Mexico and Utah.

Credit: Pew Research Center.

Nonetheless, Senator Clinton’s support among white voters showed a noticeable gender divide. She won the white female vote in most states, but she continued to have trouble gaining support from white men. She took the white male vote in eight states and lost it to Senator Obama in seven states. As in earlier primaries, the senator from Illinois enjoyed overwhelming support from African-American voters, who were vital to his victories in the large delegate states of Georgia and Missouri.

In most states, the exit polls found almost as many as one in five voters saying that race and gender were important considerations in their vote. Women who said that gender was a consideration voted for Hillary Clinton at higher rates than those who did not. And many of the men who said they were considering gender in casting a ballot, gave the New York senator more, not less, support than did other men.

This would suggest that Senator Clinton’s problems in winning the male vote may not be a negative reaction to her gender, but a dislike of other things about her.

White voters who said that race mattered also backed Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama by a larger margin than those who said that race was not a consideration in the way they cast their ballots. For the most part an even larger number of blacks than whites said the candidate’s race was an important voting consideration, and they nearly universally voted for Senator Obama.

Given the racial pattern in the vote, Senator Obama will enjoy an advantage in next week’s primaries as relatively large percentages of these electorates are likely to be African-American. In particular, blacks are a sizable segment of the Democratic base in Louisiana (46 percent) and in delegate-rich Virginia (27 percent) and Maryland (39 percent), according to Pew Research Center.

But the Feb. 5 primaries revealed another crucial ethnic factor that may not bode so well for Senator Obama in one big state still ahead: Texas. On Tuesday, Hispanic voters overwhelmingly supported Senator Clinton in most contests. In California, she won this large bloc (30 percent of the vote) by more than two to one, a margin that played a key role in her victory there. Sizable majorities of Hispanic voters in Arizona, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New Mexico also supported her. The exit polls showed Senator Obama winning the support of a majority of Latinos in Connecticut and managing to just tie Senator Clinton among Latinos in his home state of Illinois.

This trend could be troublesome for Senator Obama in the very important Texas primary where, according to Pew surveys, nearly three in ten voters may be Hispanic. However, blacks are a potentially offsetting factor in this state’s primary, accounting for nearly one in four among the Democratic electorate. This was certainly not the case in California on Tuesday where Latinos far out numbered blacks — 30 percent to 7 percent.

Besides ethnicity and gender, ideology and party identification also continued to be important factors on Tuesday. On average, Senator Obama’s backers were more often liberals and voters who identified themselves as independents, while Senator Clinton garnered more votes from moderates and people who think of themselves as Democrats.

These factors may break in Senator Obama’s favor in key states later this month and in early March. The Pew Research Center data base suggests that the Illinois senator may benefit from the large number of liberals in Washington state (44 percent) — one of the highest concentrations of liberal Democrats in the country, matched only by Colorado (which Senator Obama won this week in caucuses) and Oregon. Another important potential advantage for Senator Obama is that the Wisconsin primary on Feb. 19 and the Ohio primary on March 4 are open and semi-open, respectively. If independent voters flock to the Democratic primaries, that could be a big plus for Barack Obama.

His strength among younger voters and Hillary Clinton’s among older voters is likely to play out over and over again, but there is little indication that the generation gap in any of the big states on the horizon presents particular challenges or opportunities for either candidate.

The socio-economic divide was as apparent in the Feb. 5 primaries as in the previous Democratic contests. Senator Obama’s support was more affluent and better educated, while Senator Clinton’s was more working class. Rising concern about the economy may help Hillary Clinton in hard-pressed states like Ohio. This week’s primaries, unlike previous contests showed some difference in support based on the issues that mattered most to voters. Those most concerned about the economy were more disposed to Senator Clinton and they represented nearly half of the Super Tuesday electorate (48 percent). A smaller number considered Iraq the top issue (29 percent) and they favored Senator Obama.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/200...on/?ref=opinion