There is a candidate with a Latino problem (but it’s not Obama)

June 18, 2008

Just a few weeks ago, Barack Obama’s critics insisted that he “has a problem with the Latino community,” a charge bolstered by exit polls showing him trailing Hillary Clinton among Hispanic-American voters. Indeed, one of Clinton’s top aides said John McCain has a “very favorable standing with Hispanics because of his position on the immigration bill…. So if Obama is against McCain in states where Hispanics are important, I’ll just tell you: he’s not going to be able to cut the mustard on that.”

The good news is, Obama’s standing in the Latino community is quite strong. The better news is, Obama is even stronger than expected. The remarkable news is, Obama is even ahead in Florida, where Cuban-American voters have consistently voted Republican for the last four decades.

Last week, an NBC/WSJ poll showed Obama leading McCain among Hispanics, 62% to 28%. It prompted MSNBC to note yesterday, “It’s no longer fair to say that Obama has a problem with Latino voters; McCain does. This was a case of conventional wisdom that was never based on fact, just semi-informed speculation based on primary exit polling and bad stereotypes of Latinos.”

But in case there were doubts about that poll, consider this one. (thanks to dnA for the tip)

A new national survey of Latino voters shows Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama with a nearly 3-to-1 advantage over his rival, Republican John McCain.

The survey found that 60 percent of Latinos planned to vote for Obama, compared to 23 percent for McCain, while 16 percent were undecided. Latino Decisions, a joint effort between Pacific Market Research and University of Washington political scientists Matt Barreto and Gary Segura, conducted the poll by telephone June 1-12.

The poll found that Latino Dems preferred Hillary Clinton to Obama by 22 points, but in a general-election race, these same voters strongly prefer Obama to McCain.

This is of particular significance in Florida.

The pollster added:

Likewise, Obama does well among Latinos across many states. In California, he leads 66 percent to 20 percent; in New York, 65 percent to 20 percent; in Texas, 61 percent to 22 percent. Combining data in the four southwestern states expected to be key battlegrounds — New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada — Obama leads McCain 57 percent to 31 percent among Latino voters. In Florida, where about half of Latino voters are Cuban-American, Obama has 43 percent to McCain’s 42 percent.

The results from the Sunshine State are especially encouraging given that Obama has taken a provocative message to South Florida: the U.S. policy towards Cuba hasn’t worked over the last half-century, and it’s time for a change. There was some talk that the position would undermine Obama’s chances — the opposite appears to be true.

McCain has a “very favorable standing with Hispanics because of his position on the immigration bill”? Not so much. Indeed, McCain abandoned his own position on immigration policy in order to win the Republican nomination, a fact that I’m sure did not go unnoticed in the Latino community.

I’m not sure what McCain can do about this, short of trying to convince voters that he both supports and opposes his previous immigration policy at the same time — a trick McCain isn’t nimble enough to pull off.

The media has been talking for months about the presidential candidate with a “Hispanic problem.” It turns out there is a candidate with this dilemma, just not the one the media identified.

Are you saying John McSame is also Juan Mcdiferente?

  • The poll found that Latino Dems preferred Hillary Clinton to Obama by 22 points, but in a general-election race, these same voters strongly prefer Obama to McCain.

    Retroactive confirmation, not that any was needed, that which candidate wins in a given state in the primary has nothing to do with how he or she will do in the general. Which is apparently an abstruse, astonishing and completely unintuitive mind-blowing gobsmacker of an insight to the great majority of our Keepers of Konventional Wisdom, judging by how many times “But Obama can’t win in X cuz he lost to Clinton!”) has reared its head in the Pundosphere and elsewhere lo these last 5-6 months.

  • I’m not sure what McCain can do about this, short of trying to convince voters that he both supports and opposes his previous immigration policy at the same time — a trick McCain isn’t nimble enough to pull off.

    Not that that’s kept him from trying on any number of issues he’s flip flopped on. And given that “pulling it off” only requires “not having anyone in the Corporate Pundosphere mention it,” his lack of nimbleness doesn’t appear to be that much of a detriment so far.

  • Now if we can just eliminate Republican-controlled voting machine corporations from “counting the votes” in secret, we may actually be able to win the November elections. Back in 2004, GOP thugs, criminals and traitors flipped seven million Kerry votes into Bush votes on Election night. About half of the fifty states had their Presidential election vote counts rigged, altered and fixed for Bush.

  • First, this shows the brilliance of Obama’s strategy of challenging the ‘conventional wisdom’ in the home of that ‘wisdom.’ When he does that, he rarely loses votes he could have gotten, but gets a certain number of people who had been spouting that ‘wisdom’ to think about what they were saying, and to change their minds. (It also wins him points for the ‘guts’ to do it.)

    On the other hand, the Democrats who believe in ‘triangulation’ — which includes not just Hillary but every candidate since at least Dukakis — only comfirm the ‘cw’ in the minds of those who share it (“See, even the liberal Democrat agrees with us”) and strengthens them and at the same time makes them appear untrustworthy to those of us who know the ‘cw’ is wrong.

    DADT may be the prime example of this. Had Clinton been Trumanesque and said to the Generals and the Sam Nunns “I am the Commander in Chief and the Armed Forces are going to accept gays NOW!” I doubt if the wave of homophobia over gay marriage would have existed or been — briefly — successful. We would have gotten used to gays a lot sooner, and — as with the white soldiers who were forced to accept desegregation — the soldiers who had served with gays would have been strong advocates for acceptance of them in other areas.

  • 1) Holy crap, we’ve got some voters paying attention to something other than the Republican noise machine. Whatever next?

    2) What do you know, as some people were telling Clintonites who kept harping about how Clinton won the primaries in the big states so Obama couldn’t win them in the general election, the general election is not the primary election.

    3) I hope this lasts.

    4) Obama is least successful with Hispanics in Florida, many of whom are Cuban-Americans, so that may suggest that Hispanic-Americans are happy enough to vote for a member of a different minority (or simply for Obama as an exceptional individual), but Obama’s Cuba position is holding him back a bit in Florida. Still, I’m very pleased that he took the right position.

  • Gridlock (3): Pero con respeto al asunto de imigracion, me parece que hemos encontrado una diferencia significante. O puedes decir que como siempre, tiene dos posiciones opuestos, per desde el punto de vista democratico, preferemos la diferencia. Ay caramba. Me vuelvo loco.

  • “but Obama’s Cuba position is holding him back a bit in Florida”

    His Cuba position may have helped him with other Hispanics voters, though. While McCain continues to twist and turn on just about every issue, Obama is being clear and direct. He spoke to the cubans in Florida honestly. I think that sort of thing reverberates past the initial audience.

  • Dr. BB (@2): Exactly. I never understood that argument. If I like pork chops better than steak, and my local diner is out of pork chops, that doesn’t mean I’ll order liver. I’ll simply enjoy my steak.

    jbsayre: do you have the slightest evidence to back you up, or are you still in PUMA-like denial? (I’ll conced that Blackwell’s voter suppression probably switched
    Ohio’s Electoral Votes — and the election — to Bush.)

    But I see no evidence that Bush did not win the majority of popular votes, nor does this surprise me given that:
    Kerry was a lousy candidate,
    Swiftboating worked — that time,
    The War was not yet visibly the disaster it has become,
    Bush had the advantage of incumbency and,
    The homophobia that ‘triangulation’ had allowed to grow (see my comments at @6) won Bush a lot of votes.

    If you use your argument, you have to explain how these evil geniuses of manipulation singularly failed to keep the Congress safely Republican in 2006 (you DID notice we won both Houses, didn’t you). I mean it wasn’t as if the anti-Diebold movement actually got anywhere in 2006, that the manipulators were being too closely watched to ‘do their magic.’ I was worried about this too, in 2006, but the fact was that the only person in the MSM who was actually raising the issue was — of all people — Lou Dobbs. If they could switch 7,000,000 votes in 2004, why couldn’t they switch the much smaller number that would have been needed to defeat Webb and Tester and kept two dozen House seats in the Republican column?

    I know that Kerry’s loss traumatized a lot of us, and many of us ARE still in denial, but we aren’t living in an episode of the X-FILES. (I liked the show too, but I never confused it with reality.) The fact is that conspiracies don’t happen, or they get exposed pretty damn fast — yes, even by the MSM.

    Hey, one thing we’ve noticed about republicans. They are Pretty Damn Dumb — and these idiots didn’t have a brief period when they were ‘fiendishly clever’ or the majority of people would still be supporting the War and the Bush Presidency.

  • N. Wells:
    Obama may be doing poorly among Florida Cubans, compared to how he is doing with other Hispanics, but he’s doing marvelously with them compared to past Democratic candidates — because of his boldness in challenging the ‘cw’ in the heart of it.

    And anyone who argues that ‘minorities automatically support other minorities’ apparently has never spent much time around them. Sadly, many minorities resent prejudice directed against themselves but share the same prejudices against other groups that the ‘majority’ has — sometimes some prejudices are even stronger in minority communities than in the country as a whole. It’s sad, it ‘shouldn’t be that way’ but it is true.

  • Which is apparently an abstruse, astonishing and completely unintuitive mind-blowing gobsmacker of an insight to the great majority of our Keepers of Konventional Wisdom, judging by how many times “But Obama can’t win in X cuz he lost to Clinton!”) has reared its head in the Pundosphere and elsewhere lo these last 5-6 months.

    I spent a certain amount of time these last 5-6 months trying to figure out what percentage of proponents of this argument were craven fucking liars, and what percentage were too fucking stupid to feed and dress themselves without assistance.

    But a girl could go crazy thinking too much about that stuff. Onward.

  • Sadly, many minorities resent prejudice directed against themselves but share the same prejudices against other groups that the ‘majority’ has — sometimes some prejudices are even stronger in minority communities than in the country as a whole.

    Correct. Our very own Insane Professor, Mary, has been a shameful example of that these past months.

  • If the polling among Cuban Floridians is large enough and has crosstabs for age, I strongly suspect that you will see a divide among generations with younger and/or second generations in terms of their voting preferences as well as their position on the Cuban embargo. Having talked to with those Cuban-Americans, I know that the prevailing political stereotype of their positions on this issue (i.e., that they are hardcore embargo supporters) tends to be very wrong.

    Obama has proven to me that he understands how to interpret good foreign intelligence and how to use it (his opposition to the Iraqui war). Now he shows me (and everyone else) that he knows how to read the American public and move beyond traditional political stereotypes. Definitely “change we can believe in.”

  • Prup wrote: “The homophobia that ‘triangulation’ had allowed to grow (see my comments at @6) won Bush a lot of votes.”

    It’s a bit more that Gay Marriage referendas got Bushy inclined voters out to the polls who were never going to vote for Kerry.

    That may happen again, though I’m not sure Americans really ‘Know’ McCan’ts position on Gay Marriage any more then they ‘Know’ McCan’ts position on abortion rights.

    The narrow lead in Florida is a concern. Obama has huge leads in traditionally Democratic states. That distorts the national averages. He can’t rest on the overall numbers of Hispanic support, he has to hit the battleground states and win people over there.

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