With the GOP presidential race tightening up, Texas Senator Ted Cruz is looking to strike early and overtake Donald Trump in the first in the nation Iowa Caucuses and even attempt to sneak past the billionaire in the South Carolina primary and dominate the Deep South contests later this spring to capture the front runner title in the ever shifting Republican field. Equally pressed and determined to make his mark on the race, to shore up establishment support and firmly and definitively come out as the party’s most electable general election candidate is Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
With polls showing the Deep South increasingly fertile territory for a Cruz victory, and for now, New Hampshire comfortably in Trump’s column, Rubio will need to prove he is indeed the candidate to usher in Hispanics and millennials into the Republican Party’s fold. The most obvious place to do that is Nevada with its February 23rd primary.
What will be telling, is how the two Hispanic candidates attempt to differentiate themselves as they traverse the state with a population that is 28% Hispanic. The most successful model of how to win over Hispanics in the state is current Hispanic Republican Governor Brian Sandoval. Often mentioned as a potential GOP vice presidential pick, Sandoval, a former judge, won a convincing 33% of the Hispanic vote in 2010 and has since gained popularity ion the community for bucking hardline conservative positions on immigration, for instance.
Judging by the electoral map, Nevada appears to be the most likely place that these two Cuban American senators will collide on their potential paths to the nomination. Rubio would seem to be the most likely to fit the Sandoval mold and would find Nevada friendly territory for talk of his work on the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration legislation which is popular with the Hispanic population that skews predominantly Mexican American and Central American.
Whether its Cruz, Rubio, Trump or anyone else who wins the GOP contest in Nevada, the one thing that is almost guaranteed is that issues important to Hispanics that Republican candidates have long been resistant to dive into at length will be front and center in this contest that is increasingly becoming a crucial must win across the field.
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