USA (By Dick Morris, NewsMax.com) November 5, 2004 - The biggest reason for Bush's victory was that he finally cracked the Democratic stranglehold on the Hispanic vote. While Gore won 65 percent of the Latino community, holding Bush to a mere 35%, Kerry only carried the Hispanic vote by 55-45, paving the way for the Bush victory.

Since Hispanics cast 12 percent of the vote in 2004, their ten point movement to the GOP gave the president an additional 1.2 percent of the national vote. Take a similar amount away from Kerry and the Latinos gave Bush a 2.4 percent edge in the general election balloting. Since Bush beat Kerry by only 3.1 percent, how important was the Hispanic vote? Vital and crucial. There are two reasons for Bush’s success among Hispanics. The most important seems to be his emphasis on social values issues, particularly his opposition to gay marriage. Hispanics are, of course, Catholic and deeply committed to traditional values. I handled the campaign for Vicente Fox in Mexico where his deeply religious Catholicism won him many votes in a political system traditionally committed to a secular anti-clericalism.

These three groups accounted for 54 percent of John Kerry’s vote on Tuesday even though they cast only about one-third of the total vote in the election. Bush still lost blacks by 89-11. He lost single women by 64-36 (while carrying married women by nine points), but his gains among Hispanics permitted him to win the election anyway.