After John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in 2004, I attended at a day-long seminar at the home of Arianna Huffington called “Rebranding the Democratic Party.” At one point, the former director of Kerry’s outreach to Latino voters addressed the room on the future of his party. If we can’t keep the Latino Republican vote below 40 percent, he said, we won’t win a presidential election in the future.
He was right. Republicans are trying (rather episodically) to make inroads with Latino voters. The U.S. Latino population has soared to 50.4 million and Latinos now make up a quarter of all Democratic voters. In the 2008 election, the U.S. Latino vote (9.5 percent) was almost twice the size of the Jewish, Muslim, and Asian American votes combined. And because Latinos are heavily concentrated in key swing states like Florida and Colorado and electoral rich states like California and Texas, appealing to them is vital to both parties. “We need to do better among Hispanic voters,” said former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour in June. He added, “The Latino vote makes a difference and can make the difference in a number of critical states.”
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