Changing Face of Hispanic Voters Gives Hope to Obama Catherine Philip - The Times of London
go to original November 2, 2012

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ORLANDO - Solsiris Nunez doesn’t have much time for electoral apathy. “In my house, if you don’t vote, you’re out,” she says.

And those sentiments don’t stop at her own front door. Every day, between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., she knocks on other people’s doors — in trailer parks, in the lush suburbs and in the crowded inner city. Anywhere where Orlando’s burgeoning Hispanic population can be found.

Efforts to get these voters out on Nov. 6 could be the deciding factor in the presidential election, not only in Florida but nationwide.

As the largest swing state and with an electorate that is one third Hispanic and rising, Florida offers a vivid glimpse into America’s electoral future — the growing power of the Hispanic vote and the perils awaiting any party that fails to connect with it.

Their tilt toward the Democratic Party, the consequence in part of harsh Republican rhetoric over immigration, helped President Obama to win 57 per cent of the Hispanic vote in Florida in 2008, despite the overwhelming support of the Cuban population for John McCain, his opponent.

This time, said Daria Moreno, a political scientist at the University of Florida, the Hispanic vote is more important. “Whoever gets 50.1 per cent of the Latino vote is going to win in Florida,” he said. And as the electoral map lies now, as it did in 2000, whoever wins Florida wins the White House.

Mi Familia Vota, the organization for which Nunez works, is politically neutral.

“Our job is just to get them out to vote, to get Hispanic voices heard,” she said. But the consequence is anything but neutral. For decades Florida’s Hispanic community, centred around Miami, was mostly Cuban and reliably Republican, given their feelings toward the Communist state they had fled.

But gradually that profile has changed, first with the influx into Central Florida by Puerto Ricans and, more recently, by immigrants from countries such as Mexico, Colombia and Panama, attracted by a large Spanish-speaking community.

Polls show that Central Florida’s growing population of non-Cuban Americans overwhelmingly back Obama, a trend that his opponent, Mitt Romney, has privately admitted “spells doom for us” if it can’t be reversed.

Some are not for turning.

Read more at The Ottawa Citizen

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