The Associated Press-Univision poll recently released suggests that the Democrats’ historic grip on Latino voters isn’t as strong as it used to be, but don’t count on the GOP to pick up those votes just yet.
Hispanics rated President Obama’s job performance 13 points higher in the poll than the rest of the nation. The poll also revealed that the Democratic Party is favored by Hispanics by as much as three times more than the GOP. However, 43 percent of those polled said Obama is not adequately addressing their needs and 21 percent said he was not.
The President’s strong opposition to Arizona’s S.B. 1070 has favored him with support from Hispanics who speak mostly English at home. They tended to give Obama higher marks on his handling of their top issues than did Hispanics who primarily speak Spanish and who tend to be more recent immigrants or non-citizens. The President’s support from English-dominant Hispanics rose up to 52 percent from 40 percent in the weeks after Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the anti-immigration legislation into law, which was followed by a lawsuit from the Department of Justice.
Another poll (PDF) by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund shows a galvanized Latino community willing to take their opposition to the polls in November in the wake of Arizona’s controversial law. Up to fifty-four percent said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate or party that took a position on immigration that they disagreed with, even if they agreed with most of that candidate or party’s positions on other issues.
This does not bode well for the Republican candidates in California who are seeing little success in garnering votes from the Hispanic community.
Carly Fiorina, a Republican with a bid for the Senate, shows a paltry Latino following of 16 percent to Sen. Barbara Boxer’s 61 percent according to the NALEO poll. The gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who actually opposes the law, still lags behind her rival Jerry Brown 49 percent to 15 percent. Her opposition to the Arizona law hasn’t helped her recruit Latino votes either, and now she faces having to explain her opposition to the more than half of Californians who support it.
I think the government should take the latino community more seriously.