Whit Ayres’s comments on Latino voters:
The first rule for winning the Latino vote is to realize it’s a voter bloc in name only. There is a common ancestral language that binds nationalities, family histories and geographic allegiances. But that’s about it. A recently naturalized Mexican in Los Angeles is more likely to vote Democratic than a fourth-generation immigrant in New Mexico, who is more likely to be liberal than a 65-year-old Miami Cuban, whose 23-year-old daughter is more likely than her father to have voted for Obama in 2008. Last year, when Democrats ran Spanish-language TV ads pushing the President’s jobs plan, they hired two actors: a South American to read the script for Florida and a Mexican for Nevada and Colorado.
Local differences matter, but so do those things that distinguish Latinos from other ethnic groups. Latinos tend to be younger–their median age is just 27–and more socially conservative on issues like marriage and abortion, and they are less politically active than non-Latino whites and blacks. They have also been hit harder by the recession, with median household net worth dropping 66% from 2005 to 2009, according to the Pew Research Center. When it comes to voting, one issue obscures all the others: respect. “Once any group senses that you really don’t like them and you really don’t want their support,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres says of Latinos, “it really doesn’t matter what you say after that.”
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