The Hispanic Vote
Blog post by John Feehery
May 28, 2009 @ 12:52 pm

Much has been said about the importance of the Hispanic vote.

Some Republican strategists say that for the GOP to be competitive in future presidential elections, they’ll have to capture about 40 percent of this fastest-growing minority group.
President George W. Bush, who spoke a bit of Spanish, had a strategy to reach out to Hispanic voters and actually hit that 40 percent number in the 2004 election.

But it has been a bad couple of years for the Republicans when it comes to the Hispanic vote.
As a Pew survey points out, “Some 57 percent of Hispanic registered voters now call themselves Democrats or say they lean to the Democratic Party, while just 23 percent align with the Republican Party — meaning there is now a 34-percentage-point gap in partisan affiliation among Latinos. In July 2006, the same gap measured just 21 percentage points — whereas back in 1999, it had been 33 percentage points.”

The debate over President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, may make that trend even more pronounced.

What has caused this collapse of Republican support in the Hispanic community?

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