AUSTIN, Texas — President Barack Obama has erased George W. Bush’s inroads among Latinos, with these influential voters consistently giving the president exceptionally strong marks and the White House employing an aggressive strategy to keep it that way.
Obama’s challenge is to ensure that Latinos pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party for the 2010 elections and keep supporting him through his own likely 2012 re-election race while he tackles the divisive issue of repairing the nation’s immigration system.
Latinos are the nation’s fastest-growing minority group. The government projects they will account for 30 percent of the population by 2050, doubling in size from today and boosting their political power.
If Democrats build on Obama’s gains, Texas and other traditionally Republican states with huge numbers of Latinos could be within reach in the future. That would mean deep trouble for a GOP that is already older, whiter, dwindling in numbers and lacking a standard bearer to make Latinos a priority the way Bush did.
Although the latest Associated Press-GfK poll showed that a strong 68 percent of Latinos approve of the job Obama’s doing, maintaining such support is far from certain.
“Democrats speak to me, and this one in particular seems to be listening to what we need and what we want,” said Tina Calhoun, 52, of Sacramento, Calif., who grew up in a family of Republicans but tends to vote Democratic.
Still, she, like many others, isn’t necessarily going to stick with Obama no matter what.
“I want to give him a little more time,” she said.
Indeed, it is unclear whether Latinos will back Democrats to such strong degrees next fall when Obama is not on the ballot. Minorities and young voters who turned out in droves for Obama in 2008 didn’t show up this year for Democrats in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races.
There is also a lifetime before Obama’s expected re-election campaign, and he has promised to push immigration legislation before then, including an eventual path to citizenship for about 12 million people in the country illegally.
Immigration is a galvanizing issue on both the left and the right, with pitfalls for both parties. Republicans could alienate Latinos if the vocal right again takes control of the debate with angry rhetoric. Democrats risk seriously disillusioning Latinos by inaction, delay or a piecemeal approach. A fight in Congress is assured.
“They flirted with Republicans because they liked Bush. But the whole immigration fight really reversed all the gains Republicans had made,” said Andrew Kohut, a nonpartisan pollster at the Pew Research Center. “There’s no question that they are part of the Democratic base now.”
