Margin of Error

Orlando Segura has been a Republican his entire life. The 48-year-old Mexican-American of San Antonio, Texas says that %uFB01scal conservatism drew him to the Republican Party, and encouraged him to cast each of his presidential votes for Republican candidates—until this year.
Sensing that the country was in “a world of hurt,” as he puts it, Segura cast his 2008 general election vote for Barack Obama. But although Segura voted Democratic in this election, he has no intention of changing his party af%uFB01liation any time soon. Instead, he’s taking a “wait and see” approach to the Obama administration.
For decades, politicos and academics alike have forecasted the potential impact of the Hispanic vote, and this year, as turnout among many groups surged nationwide, increased Latino turnout played a decisive role in Obama’s victory. The number of Latinos who went to the polls increased by nearly 25 percent over 2004, and 67 percent of them went for Obama. According to a study by the nonpartisan National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Of%uFB01cials (NALEO), sharp rises among naturalized immigrants and %uFB01rst-time voters accounted for much of the increase.
Latino Democratic turnout turned back the tide on Republican gains, shattered the long-standing myth of an insurmountable black–Latino divide, and provided unexpectedly large margins of victory for Obama in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, New Mexico, Nevada and Virginia.
Obama’s success among Latinos was both the byproduct of a unique election year and a well-organized, aggressive Latino outreach program. But while 61 percent of Latino registered voters identi%uFB01ed as Democrat, Democrats don’t have a lock on this important voting bloc. The NALEO study shows that 27 percent of Latino voters believe neither party is more concerned about the Latino community.
This skepticism over the parties’ concern about the community was even more pronounced among Spanish-speakers; 31 percent believe there is no difference in concern between the parties. When it comes to Latino turnout, what can Democrats and Republicans learn from this election? And where do both parties go from here?The Perfect Storm
Latinos’ top issues in the 2008 election closely mirrored those of the larger change-oriented electorate. Dr. Juan Hernandez, the McCain campaign’s national director of Hispanic outreach, says that “Hispanics, like the rest of the nation, wanted change, were disappointed with the Republican brand, were disappointed, like many Americans, with the performance of George W. Bush, and that meant voting for Democrats.”
According to the NALEO study, more than two-thirds of Latino voters (67 percent) identi%uFB01ed %uFB01xing the economy as the most important issue for the new president to address—they ranked it higher than immigration (6 percent), Iraq (6 percent) or health care (5 percent). Although immigration was a lagging issue, it contributed to voter turnout.
Hernandez says that although the economy might poll higher, Hispanics are “passionate about immigration reform.” As he explains, the matter of immigration is personal, and targeted: “You’re talking about our friends and our family members who are being taken away as though they’re criminals.”
In 2006 and 2007, voter registration drives organized around immigration reform increased the number of Latinos on voter rolls, and a growing community-wide reaction to anti-immigrant sentiments inspired movement to the polls.
“The policy debate was inside-baseball,” explains Jorge Mursuli, executive director of Democracia USA, a non-partisan Hispanic civic engagement organization. “But when the right-wing part of the [Republican] party became vitriolic, that’s when Hispanics woke up.”
Both former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani—moderates who were eager to capture support from the right wing of the party—spent much of the presidential primary in a heated game of “Who’s More Anti-Immigrant, Anyway?” Their right-step on immigration, compounded by a conspicuous Republican absence at several 2007 Hispanic umbrella groups’ events—including a Univision Republican presidential debate that was postponed when only Sen. John McCain agreed to attend—revealed Republicans’ dismissal of Hispanic voters.
Long-shot candidates Rep. Tom Tancredo’s and Rep. Duncan Hunter’s hyperbolic statements on illegal immigration lassoed the party even further to the right. Mursuli suggests that had the Republican primary not focused as much on anti-immigration arguments, McCain would have entered the general election more likely to pick up Latino voters.
In addition, University of Washington Professor Matt Barreto argues that the extended Democratic primary season was one of the greatest and least-often acknowledged factors in increased general election Latino turnout. According to Barreto, Obama “owes the people who frontloaded the primary calendar for bringing Latinos into the process earlier.”
Barreto explains that in the past, a candidate wouldn’t “campaign for Latino votes until September or October,” but Super Tuesday—or Super Martes—as it became known within the community, comprised of various Latino rich states, forced the Democratic contenders to focus on the Latino vote early on. For example, in both the Nevada caucus and New Mexico primary, 62 percent of the Hispanic vote went to Clinton.
And while Sen. Hillary Clinton’s success among Latinos in the primary initially presented challenges to Obama’s general election campaign, some of Obama’s success among Latinos must be credited to the base of voters built and engaged by the Clinton campaign’s Hispanic outreach team. Obama was further aided by division among members of the McCain campaign over their outreach strategy. Hernandez claims that “McCain was probably the best possible candidate to win over Hispanics, but the campaign never really put the effort nor the money into winning them.”
According to Hernandez, the McCain campaign “felt that Hispanics already knew McCain because of his position on immigration reform. But people forget very quickly. He was never introduced to the Hispanic community as he was introduced and re-introduced to the non-Hispanic community.”
As early as August 2007, the campaign asked Hernandez to secure Hispanic surrogates, and to %uFB01nd local Latinos to stand behind McCain at press conferences. But the people Hernandez offered never ended up on stage. Hernandez believes that it was not McCain, nor senior members of the campaign, but rather a pervasive fear among mid-level campaign staff that “if the candidate spoke too much about Hispanics, it would be translated as immigration reform, amnesty.” The Obama Team’s Hispanic Outreach Program
Beyond the con%uFB02uence of factors that tipped the electoral scales towards Obama, the campaign waged an impressive Hispanic media and GOTV program. According to Andres Ramirez, vice president of Hispanic Programs at The New Democratic Network, in past elections, campaigns would “come up with a general Spanish language message and use it for all communities.” Some of these messages were more effective than others.
According to Freddy Balsera, a Hispanic media consultant for the Obama campaign, “the Bush political world understood Hispanics, understood how to communicate with them, and invested in them.” In 2004, Bush ran Spanish language media on the slogan “Nos conocemos,” or “We know one another.” Rather than focus its Latino outreach on issues, the campaign devoted its resources to building a familiarity between the candidate and the Latino community. It proved to be a winning strategy; Bush won more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.
As Mursuli explains, relationship messaging works because, as a generalization, Hispanics are “very relationship oriented people; we hire roofers and plumbers based on relationships more than an ef%uFB01cacy test. And the same holds true with politicians.”
But this year, relationship messaging was not enough. Democrats abandoned a one-size-%uFB01ts-all pan-Hispanic message, and targeted Latino voters by nationality and geography. According to Ramirez, the Obama campaign was “very speci%uFB01 c about outlets they chose and corresponding messages.” For example, messaging in the Southwest focused more on immigration than messaging in Florida and the Northeast.
 
Balsera calls Obama’s straight-to-camera Spanish-language ad (the %uFB01rst of its kind), “icing on the cake.” The ad ran heavily in battleground states and served as both relationship building and policy focused messaging. In addition, Balsera says, “the Obama Hispanic message was unique in its content.” There was “no translation of message.” Instead, it was crafted “separate and apart from the English message.”
In the last three weeks, the Obama campaign ran only positive Spanish-language ads. In contrast, the McCain campaign’s Spanish-language ads focused on Obama’s positions on abortion, and his comments on Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. According to Balsera, McCain “never once told the Hispanic voter who he was, what he was about.” Instead, Balsera explains, the McCain campaign put out a “message that is purely negative, saying ‘Say no to Barack Obama,’ while the guy you’re asking voters to say no to is talking about your hopes and dreams—in Spanish.”
Hernandez explains that pro-McCain Spanish-language ads were created, but never aired. “We would be authorized to create TV spots and radio spots related to small business, family and the economy,” says Hernandez. “The money would be spent creating them, but then fear would take over and they would not be aired, even on their campaign website.”
Balsera says the Obama campaign went to great lengths to ensure that “nothing went unanswered in Spanish-language media.” Part of that strategy included a robust line-up of surrogates, including my father, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), former Governor Bill Richardson, and celebrities such as actors Rosie Perez and George Lopez.
The work on-air and in print was matched by a well-funded %uFB01eld program. According to Carlos Odio, Obama’s Latino outreach deputy director, the campaign stuck to %uFB01eld fundamentals: identi%uFB01cation, persuasion and turnout.
But there was one major difference from previous presidential campaigns—they placed a premium on recruiting, hiring and training Spanish-speaking Latinos to become %uFB01eld organizers in Latino neighborhoods. Ramirez says that in previous elections, “it was an all-Anglo team and they’d wonder why these English-language canvassers couldn’t register Spanish speakers.” But in this campaign, the number of bilingual Hispanic canvassers and %uFB01eld organizers was “unreal.”
“These are not new tactics,” Ramirez explains. “These are tactics they’ve used on other communities for years. But they had never adapted them to Spanish-language voters.”
But the Obama Hispanic outreach program, while a step forward, was hardly perfect. As Barreto explains, “Obama came much, much later to Latino outreach, and so it wasn’t as naturally integrated into their campaign.” Barreto uses the example of Obama’s 30-minute infomercial which ran on Univision, the highest-rated Spanish language television network. Rather than dubbing a Spanish-speaking narrator, the campaign opted for Spanish subtitles. Barreto feels that this decision “revealed … that his targeted Latino advertising was an afterthought,” adding that “a much better approach would have been to create a 30-minute commercial in Spanish to run on Spanish-language TV.”
Perhaps the most important lesson one can learn from the Obama campaign was not about the nuts and bolts of polling, paid media or GOTV, but about the absolute necessity of dedicating resources to Latino voter outreach. According to Ramirez, “when you invest in the Hispanic committee you actually see a return on your investment.”What Now?
The so-called sleeping giant awoke in the midst of a near record turnout, making its rise less notable than it would have been in other cycles. But unlike the many other communities that woke up and showed up this year, this is the fastest-growing giant in the country, with an estimated 100 million Hispanics in the U.S. by 2050, accounting for 25 percent of the population. And it is growing as wide as it is deep.
In Washington State, Latinos represented 7 percent of the total electorate; they were 5 percent in Wyoming, and 4 percent in Louisiana. What is more: Latinos, a historically brand-loyal group, have yet to determine which party they are calling their own. “I don’t think Democrats found the holy grail of Latino voting,”
Mursuli says. He lists myriad challenges outside of partisanship: dif%uFB01culty fundraising even among wealthy Latinos, a dearth of Latinos in public of%uFB01ce, and the lack of preparedness for a possible negative backlash to Latinos’ increased electoral power at the state and local level.
And with Latinos’ resounding support of the president-elect comes high expectations. According to the NALEO study, nearly 70 percent of Latino voters and 3 out of every 4 immigrant voters expect their situation to improve under the Obama administration. If Democrats want to secure this community’s support, they will have to deliver policy changes or risk having this important voting bloc swing back towards Republicans. The Obama administration’s approach to the economy, the war in Iraq and immigration reform could be the deciding factors in which way the community leans for generations to come.
And Democrats will need to move quickly—overall, 68 percent of Latino voters say that it is extremely important or very important for immigration to be addressed within the %uFB01rst year of the new administration. “Democrats can really consolidate support by passing immigration reform,” says Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a communications campaign working for immigration reform. But if they don’t, he adds, “First time voters won’t show up next time. There won’t be a shift back to Republicans so much as [Latinos] staying home.”
 
If the Obama administration wants to keep voters like Segura in the Democratic column, it will carry many of the election lessons into the next year: an equally strong commitment to Spanish-language media, with community-trusted surrogates brought into the inner circle as trusted advisors %uFB01rst and talking heads second.
Most importantly, with those allies around them, Democrats must tackle immigration reform in the next two years. If they don’t, they will risk alienating the very people who put them in power. Alicia Menendez is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.