Latino Vote Is in Play in Presidential Contest

Senator Obama is battling hard against Senator McCain for Latino voters, with both campaigns seeing Hispanics as a demographic group that could swing battleground states in the presidential election.Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Mr. McCain, the Republican, will deliver speeches tomorrow at the League of United Latin American Citizens’ conference in Washington. Both men will go to San Diego to address a meeting of the National Council of La Raza early next week. The two candidates also spoke last week before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.The aggressive stumping for Hispanic support came as daily tracking polls taken by Gallup last month showed Mr. Obama ahead of Mr. McCain among Latinos, 59% to 29%. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken in early June also showed Hispanic voters favoring Mr. Obama, 62% to 28%.However, a prominent Hispanic pollster who worked for Senator Clinton in the Democratic primary fight, Sergio Bendixen, said he doubts Mr. Obama is really up 30 points over Mr. McCain among Latinos.“Obama has a long way to go,” the pollster said. He said he thinks many surveys give a skewed impression of the Hispanic community because pollsters either don’t offer Spanish language interviews or require a second phone call to do an interview in Spanish.Mr. Bendixen, who offers Spanish interviews for his polls, just completed a survey in Miami-Dade County that found Mr. McCain beating Mr. Obama 3-to-1 among Cuban Hispanics. Perhaps more alarming for Mr. Obama’s campaign: the two men essentially tied among non-Cuban Hispanics.“In Florida, a Democratic candidate for president has never won the Hispanic vote,” Mr. Bendixen said. “Barack Obama needs to hit the middle 50s to be able to carry Florida.”Mr. Bendixen said Mr. Obama will need even larger margins in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada, if Democrats are to win the electoral votes of those states. “In the southwest states, John Kerry got about 55% of Hispanic voters,” the pollster said. “Obama needs to push that into the middle 60s in order to swing enough votes to make up the difference by which Democrats lost those three states in 2004.”Poll numbers for the Hispanic vote have been hotly debated in recent elections. However, many pollsters believe Mr. Bush got about 34% of that vote in 2000 and about 40% in 2004.Mr. Bendixen says that at least some of the confusion was due to language issues. “The people only interviewing in English never caught the huge surge for Bush that came basically from Spanish-dominant immigrants,” the pollster said. He said Mrs. Clinton’s advantage among Latinos in the primary came from the same demographic, which backed her 80%-20%, while American-born Hispanics fluent in English favored her by a narrower 55% to 45% margin.Not all the data support Mr. Bendixen’s position, A large survey taken in 2004 by the Annenberg Public Policy Project at the University of Pennsylvania found Mr. Bush, a Republican, did six percentage points worse with those who electing Spanish interviews instead of English, and five percent worse with those born abroad.Pollsters involved with the recent Gallup and NBC/Journal polls could not be reached for comment yesterday. Detailed descriptions of the polls posted on the Web don’t indicate if Spanish interviews were offered.Mr. Bendixen insists he is not trying to rain on Mr. Obama’s parade by questioning the Latino poll numbers. “Obama has quite an assignment in front of him. I think he can do it. He has issues working in his favor: health insurance, the economy, the war, public education. On those four issues, Hispanics are closer to Obama’s point of view than McCain’s,” the pollster said.A spokesman for Mr. McCain, Tucker Bounds, said the campaign believes that the presumptive Republican nominee can achieve an advantage on the issue of immigration. Mr. McCain led the attempt to overhaul the law and to give many illegal immigrants a “path to citizenship,” while Mr. Obama played a low-profile role, though he supported the same basic legislation.“There has been only one person in this race, John McCain, that has led on this issue, that has a history and understanding or how to move forward on this issue,” Mr. Bounds said. A new Spanish-language radio ad Mr. McCain is airing says Mr. Obama seems “to have just discovered the importance of the Hispanic vote.”A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Vince Casillas, said that the ad tries to “fog” the Democratic candidate’s position. “He has worked with Latinos on the grass roots level, not just on a political level,” the spokesman said.Mr. Casillas said Mr. Obama will roll out his own, strictly positive Spanish ads in the next week or two. “We’re going to respond to it, but we’re not going to put ourselves in the same boat,” the spokesman said.While Mr. Bendixen may give heart to the McCain campaign by debating Mr. Obama’s lead, the Latino pollster sees no traction for Mr. McCain on immigration and no gain for him from negative ads.“The immigration issue is like a litmus test for candidates. If you are considered to be demagoguing, you will be instantly shunned by the Hispanic community,” the pollster said. “Obama and McCain have both passed that test, but no one is going to vote for or against these candidates based on immigration.”As for the radio ads, Mr. Bendixen said, “One thing the Hispanic community truly dislikes is negative ads.”

Latino Vote Is in Play in Presidential Contest

More from the New York Sun

‘Ulster American’ Is a Bawdy Send Up of Progressive Pieties — and an Irreverent Inquiry Into Irishness

Republican Congressman Calls for Tucker Carlson To Be Prosecuted for ‘Treason’ for Pre-War Contact With Iranians

More from the New York Sun

‘Ulster American’ Is a Bawdy Send Up of Progressive Pieties — and an Irreverent Inquiry Into Irishness

Republican Congressman Calls for Tucker Carlson To Be Prosecuted for ‘Treason’ for Pre-War Contact With Iranians

American Socialists To Join New Cuba Aid Flotilla Despite Hints of Negotiations Aimed at Ousting Communist Leadership

Trump’s Pared-Back Tariffs Return to Trade Court Under New Legal Rationale

North Korean Leader’s Daughter, 13, Shows Up at Missile-Firing Exercise Looking All the More Like His Heir Apparent

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Unfaithful Hollywood Adaptation

Will Hollywood Bite Its Tongue at the Oscars?

Reuters Claims To Have Unmasked Banksy After Extensive Investigation