The Sleeping Giant Awakes: Latino voter registration numbers
Duke1676
DailyKos.com
Oct 17, 2008
In the spring of 2006 millions took to the streets in cities, large and small, across the nation. Carrying signs proclaiming, "Today We March – Tomorrow We Vote," they voiced their opposition to legislation intended to criminalize 12 million undocumented immigrants, divide families, and foster a climate of fear and intimidation. They demanded instead that meaningful, humane, and responsible, immigration reform be enacted.
Two and a half years later, no such legislation has passed, replaced instead by a toxic and divisive debate that has led to increased raids, illegal detentions, hate crimes, and the very climate of fear and intimidation the marchers took to the streets to oppose. These events have galvanized the Latino community like never before and set the stage for what could be a seismic shift in the American electorate.
Recently released data on voter registration points to the dawn of a new political reality.
Duke1676's diary :: :: Unable to pass new restrictive and punitive legislation, the Right resorted to a mix of increased discriminatory local regulation, increased workplace raids, reinterpretation of federal statutes to allow for civil rights violations, and a media campaign to attempt to legitimize their deportation agenda with the general public. And while they have had some success in riling up their base and redirecting their fears and prejudices towards a fabricated "brown menace" and away from failed economic and foreign policy decisions, the issue has proven to be an electoral non-starter. Campaigns that have relied on restrictionist rhetoric have been utterly unsuccessful..
But now it appears that the dogs of hate unleashed by the anti-immigrant crowd are about to turn around and bite their masters. It’s now becoming evident that they woke a sleeping giant and ignited a flame that has fired up the nation's largest minority like never before. This November, Latinos, and other ethnic groups with large immigrant populations, hold the key to victory in not only the obvious swing states, but a few that some might find surprising.
The protests of 2006 were the largest in US history and elicited different reactions from various groups. Knuckle draggers on right, like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan, saw the marches as the greatest threat to "White European" hegemony in the history of the republic and went ballistic riling up their base to oppose the "brown menace." Progressives and the rest of the liberal chattering classes sat there, jaws agape, wondering how this ragtag group, seemingly without formal organization, or inside-the-beltway guidance, managed to put millions in the streets while they had had such limited success in mobilizing their own forces for similar efforts in opposition to the war.
Latino, immigrant advocacy, and civil/human rights organizers saw something different. They saw the birth of a movement. A movement Washington insiders played little, if any, roll in organizing – a true grassroots effort, born of the streets. Organizers across the spectrum, from well established DC advocacy groups to local community organizations to grassroots groups that sprung up in the wake of the marches, all saw the potential of this new movement and quickly started to mobilize.....particularly in the areas of naturalization of new immigrants and voter registration. And they are now about to reap the rewards of those efforts.
In 2008 alone, over 900,000 new naturalization petitions were approved. Of those, the vast majority plan on voting.
WAAA's numbers are impressive:
Over 83,000 new voters in Florida
70,000 in California
35,000 in Pennsylvania
25,000 in Texas
25,000 Illinois
18,000 in Arizona
17,000 in New York
35,000 in Colorado
52,000 In Nevada (almost 2.5 times the amount that state was decided by in the 2004 presidential election - George W. Bush won Nevada by 21,500 votes).
40,000 in New Mexico (George W. Bush won by 6,000 votes in 20040
And these numbers reflect the efforts of only one group focusing mostly on new immigrants. Others, such as Voto Latino are concentrating on the broader Latino community and Latino youth vote. And then there are the efforts of the various campaigns and political parties to register Latino voters.
Yesterday, Democracia USA, one member of the We Are America Alliance, announced the final tallies of it's registration efforts in 7 States.
According to Jorge Mursuli, President and CEO of Democracia U.S.A., new registrants in Florida have been trending decidedly Democratic. In 2004, 47% of registrants listed themselves as Independents, with the remainder splitting relatively evenly between Democrats and Republicans. In 2008, 58% of new registrants are registering as Democrats, with Republicans garnering numbers in the low 20% range.
We won't know the full effects of all these efforts until after the election, but it's become quite obvious to most following these trends that the Republican Right and their media lapdogs have overplayed their hand, underestimating the blowback their anti-immigrant/anti-Latino rhetoric would cause.
Obama's strong showing among Latino voters follows a general trend where Democrats are viewed as more concerned about issues that effect Latinos ... and particularly the hot button topic of immigration.
For many Latinos, their concern about immigration has just as much to do with the tone of the debate as policy specifics. Polling shows that Latinos favor a comprehensive approach immigration reform at about the same rates as the general population. But as Cecilia Muñoz, Senior Vice President at the National Council of La Raza recently said, immigration "tends to determine who the good guys are and the bad guys are for Latinos."
This is perhaps most evident in one of the most conservative groups within the Latino community; Evangelicals ... a group that according to the Pew Hispanic Center accounted almost entirely for Bush's increased share of the overall Latino vote in 2004, which grew from 35% in 2000 to 40% in 2004.
Today, a coalition of leading Latino Evangelical organizations released a report looking at polling trends among Latino Protestants, 80 percent of whom self-identify as born-again and/or attended an Evangelical denomination.
"The Biblical mandate to welcome the immigrant could not be clearer and we draw our values from our Bibles," said Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, who spoke during the press conference announcing the survey results. "This poll powerfully demonstrates that immigration is a profoundly religious issue for Hispanic evangelicals. We will vote our faith and we will vote our values. It's time that all candidates take notice."
"Latino Protestant voters are demonstrating a faith-based politics that puts moral solutions above ideology and sound bites," added Katie Paris, Director of Communications Strategy at Faith in Public Life, a sponsor of the poll. "Consequently, they are commanding the attention of both parties and defying the outdated stereotype that people of faith are mired in partisanship," she concluded.
Like all other voters, Latinos are most concerned about the economy, healthcare, education and Iraq. But the underlying specter of the xenophobia and racism that marked the immigration debate has led them to more readily question if they have any future in the Republican party.
Back in 2005, when there was still talk of "the permanent Republican majority" and Jim Sensenbrenner and his colleagues in the House Immigration Reform Caucus were pushing through Tom Tancredo's deportation bill, HR4437, one must wonder if they had any idea what waking the sleeping giant would really mean to their party's future.
