Skip navigation

For Clinton, Latino vote could swing the deal


< Prev | 1 | 2
Video: Decision '08  
  
Turning Point: 2008
Nov. 5: NBC's Tom Brokaw recaps the historic election of America's first black president. Produced by msnbc.com's Kevin Flynn.

  The candidates in pictures
U.S. Republican presidential nominee Senator McCain points into the crowd at an airport campaign rally in Roswell
Reuters
Final push
Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain make their final appeals to voters.
Image: President Richard Nixon greets John McCain after he returned from Vietnam.
AP file
John McCain
The Republican presidential candidates' life has revolved around the public need.
Barak "Barry" Obama
Punahoe Schools via AP
The life of Barack Obama
The path of the president-elect, from childhood to party leader
Image: Sarah Palin
The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman via AP
Sarah Palin
The fast-track governor's rise from Alaska beauty queen to governor to John McCain’s running mate.
AP file
Joseph Biden
The senator's legacy of public service and life filled with second chances.

Votes for Clinton, not against Obama
In exit polls, Latino Democrats gave Obama high marks for his leadership qualities and the freshness of his ideas, but even though they said they would back him in the general election should he win the Democratic nomination, they gave their votes in the primaries and caucuses to Clinton.

Roberto Suro, a professor at the University of Southern California and former director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said Clinton had a 15-year head start on Obama in cultivating support in Latino communities thanks to the popularity of her husband, who was able to maintain a 70 percent approval rating among Latino voters even at the height of his impeachment battle in 1998.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Latinos remembered the Clinton administration as “great years for working families.”

Story continues below ↓
advertisement | your ad here

“They were years when the minimum wage was raised, the years when we invested in housing,” Villaraigosa said. “So a long history is what it comes down to.”

Clinton also got a faster start in targeting Latino voters in her campaign, the first to be run by a Latina, Patti Solis Doyle.

Early on, Clinton lined up endorsements from a wide array of influential Latino figures, including Villaraigosa; Henry Cisneros, the first Latino mayor of a major U.S. city, San Antonio, before becoming housing secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration; Raul Yzaguirre, founder of the National Council for La Raza; Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey; and Dolores Huerta, the legendary activist who helped organize the farm workers with César Chavez —whose brother, Richard Chavez, also endorsed Clinton.

Kennedy’s impact questioned
Obama began a targeted Latino outreach much later, countering with a highly publicized endorsement from Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, a popular figure in the Latino community.

Video
Obama gets big endorsement
Jan. 28: Barack Obama's campaign gets a boost as Caroline and Ted Kennedy endorse him for president. NBC's Brian Mooar reports.

NBC News Channel

“He got a lot of play for Kennedy,” acknowledged Ace Smith, Clinton’s California campaign manager. “But we had an intensive surrogate effort that went on for a month.”

Other analysts questioned the significance of Kennedy’s endorsement, noting that much of his appeal lay in reminding voters about his brothers, President John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. Many voters, Latino and otherwise, were born after 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and have little or no firsthand memory of the brothers, but they have vivid memories of Bill Clinton.

Clinton “worked hard for a long time to capture the Hispanic vote,” Suro said. “Obama’s own advisers admit they left a little bit to be desired in their pursuit of the Hispanic vote.”

‘Too late’ for Obama?
All that could add up to trouble for Obama in Texas, whose primary is March 4.

John Garcia, a specialist in Latino politics at the University of Arizona, said the closeness of the Democratic race amplified the significance of Clinton’s advantage among Latinos. Latinos comprise a third of the state’s voters, compared with African-Americans, who have turned out in equally large proportions for Obama but make up only 11 percent of the Texas electorate.

Roberto de la Garza, a specialist in Latino politics at Columbia University, told EFE that “it’s too late” for the Obama campaign to make up the lost ground.

“The reality is that [Obama] has not been much in touch with Hispanics,” he said.

  Picking the president: The candidates
Click to visit that candidate's MSNBC page or click the XML symbol for an RSS feed.


John McCain               

Barack Obama

By Alex Johnson of msnbc.com. Tom Brokaw of NBC News, Telemundo and NBC affiliates KNBC of Los Angeles; KNTV of San Francisco; KOB of Albuquerque, N.M.; KVBC of Las Vegas; WHEC of Rochester, N.Y.; WMAQ of Chicago; and WTHR of Indianapolis contributed to this report.


< Prev | 1 | 2

Sponsored links

Resource guide