Growing Hispanic Political Power

WASHINGTON (Hispanic Business) November 18, 2004 - Hispanics grew up politically in the presidential election of 2004. Their numbers, as high as 7 million, proved powerful for the Republican Party and the re-election of President Bush. Hispanic turnout for Republicans surpassed the goals of even the architects of the Bush campaign.

And it left stalwarts in the Democratic Party wondering why they took flight.

The growing shift in political preferences is a loss of traditional support for Democrats. More important, movement to the right shows that political differences among Hispanics are growing to mirror the political schism in American politics.

It's no secret how Republicans beat Democrats in races for the White House and Congress. Republicans simply did a better job of identifying and molding the conservative message to appeal to disparate voting blocs.

Democrats will rightly be accused of taking Hispanics for granted this year. But there was ample evidence to suggest that, for several years, Hispanics were already buying into the Republican message. In his run for the White House in 2000, Bush took sizable chunks of support from Hispanic Democrats. This year, Bush took even more votes from such heavily Hispanic areas as the South, the Southwest and Florida.

The Arizona vote mirrors the nationwide decline in Democratic support. In 2000, 65 percent of the state's Hispanics voted for Al Gore. This year, only 56 percent voted for John Kerry. The actual percentages each candidate received from Hispanics are in question. Support for Bush was somewhere between 31 percent and 41 percent of Hispanics. This, of course, means John Kerry was by far the favorite among Hispanics.

There were signs that Bush also was running strong. Columnist Myriam Marquez of the Orlando Sentinel warned weeks before the election that Kerry's focus on education, the economy and health care was faring badly against Bush's anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-stem-cell-research stance.

She was right. On Election Day, we saw how a growing number of Hispanics were moved by these more emotional issues of abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research.

No doubt Democrats believed their core issues would win out with a minority group that is among the country's poorest, youngest and least-educated.

The votes are still being counted. But the more important figures are those of the last three elections, with the trend of Hispanics moving rapidly to the right of center.

Most polls show that in 1996, Bill Clinton took 72 percent of the vote; in 2000 Al Gore took 62 percent; and this year John Kerry took 54 percent of the Hispanic vote. Conservatives say this is a natural movement among Hispanics, for whom family and religion are paramount.

Even think tanks that study American Hispanics, including their political preferences, overlooked what are now being called the morality issues. In a national survey of politics and civic participation by Hispanics, conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center earlier this year, morality never came up as a political issue.

But two of the more interesting findings from the Pew report centered on party affiliation and issues of importance among those registered to vote.

Nearly half of those surveyed, 45 percent, considered themselves Democrats. Only about 20 percent considered themselves Republican. More important, about 21 percent said they were independents.

If those figures held true until the election last week, then the Democratic Party did a truly terrible job of spreading its message. And with 21 percent of Hispanics calling themselves independents before the election, Democrats did a better job of repelling rather than attracting voters.