11/01/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos:  Did you know that, despite running exceedingly racialized anti-Latino advertisements in Nevada’s Senate race, Sharon Angle got 30% of the Latino vote? Jan Brewer also did well, attracting an above-average 28% share of Arizona’s Hispanic vote just months after signing SB1070 into law.  Moreover, Meg [...]
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10/31/12 President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are making it clear that, after the immediate post-election psu to deal with the impending fiscal cliff, immigration reform is at the top of their second-term agenda. In recent interviews with both English- and Spanish-language media outlets, both members of the Democratic ticket predicted that an Obama/Biden [...]
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10/31/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, Daily Kos:  The Latino electorate continues to be one of the most intriguing story lines of the 2012 election cycle, with the role of immigration policy in Latino voting behavior dominating discussions of the Latino vote in this critical election. Here at Latino Decisions we have provided in-depth [...]
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10/30/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos: With the election less than two weeks away there has been a great deal of speculation about the Latino community’s support for President Obama, particularly in Florida. Most recently, an Interactive Voice Response survey, or “robo-poll,” conducted on October 10-11 by Florida International University showed that 50.7% [...]
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10/29/12 Yesterday, Mitt Romney’s health care advisor Avik Roy appeared on Up With Chris Hayes, where the conversation veered toward President Obama’s recent comments that if he wins a second term, it will have been because Republicans “have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.” That means, Hayes said, that there [...]
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10/29/12 It looks like Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R) of California’s 36th District is in trouble—this morning, Daily Kos has downgraded her tight Congressional race against Democrat Raul Ruiz from “Lean Republican” to “Tossup.”  As David Nir at Daily Kos wrote: Indeed, Bono Mack’s relationships with minority communities in her district seem to be a real [...]
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10/29/12 Earlier today, ImpreMedia/Latino Decisions released its latest tracking poll of the Presidential race, finding that Obama leads Romney by a whopping 73% – 21% margin among Latino voters. Much of the focus is, of course, on the key battleground states, including Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and Virginia, where Latinos comprise key voting blocs. As we’ve reported, a number [...]
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10/29/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos: The latest impreMedia-Latino Decisions tracking poll shows that Latinos are more enthusiastic and more likely to vote than ten weeks ago when the initial poll was fielded.  Forty-five percent of Latino voters say they are more enthusiastic about voting in 2012 compared to 2008.  That number is [...]
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10/26/12 Rep. Steve King (R-IA) again promised that he would sue President Obama over his deferred action program (DACA) yesterday during his final debate against challenger Christie Vilsack (D). “I intend to follow through on that,” King responded to a question about whether he still had plans to file the lawsuit.  “I ran into a few [...]
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10/26/12 Arizona Governor Jan Brewer this week decided to inject herself into the super-close Senate race between Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and former Surgeon General Richard Carmona (D), using her political action committee (JanPAC) to spend $100,000 printing and supporting mailers supporting Flake over Carmona. As Capitol Media Services reported yesterday: PAC spokesman Paul Senseman said his boss believes she [...]
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10/26/12 Yesterday, we explained “the Harry Reid Effect” – when pre-election polls under-count the Latino vote in such a way that underestimates the actual standing of the candidates that Latinos support. The Reid Effect is caused by (a) methodological problems in pre-election polls that create a skewed Latino voter sample, which can lead to an under-representation of [...]
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10/26/12 After Arizona passed the viciously anti-immigrant law SB 1070, raising questions about whether the state was legalizing racial profiling, Congressman Brian Bilbray (R-CA) jumped into the fray by claiming that police officers wouldn’t have to resort to race in order to identify undocumented immigrants.  ”They will look at the kind of dress you wear,” he said [...]
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10/25/12 When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) awoke on Election Day 2010, he was, in the words of Tom Kludt of Talking Points Memo, “a goner.”  As Kludt explains: In the dying embers of the 2010 midterms, the Senate majority leader appeared to be on the ropes.  Polls from a variety of well-known outlets showed [...]
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10/25/12 As we’ve been reporting, the DREAM Action Coalition has been traveling across the country, protesting and rallying against anti-immigrant candidates up for election this year. One of their targets is Connecticut’s GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon, the WWE magnate who famously spent $50 million to lose a Senate campaign. McMahon hasn’t been completely unreliable on immigration-related [...]
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10/25/12 The same day that the Des Moines Register released previously off-the-record comments from President Obama recognizing the importance of the Latino vote and promising that he will prioritize immigration reform if he is reelected–his campaign released this television and radio ad from Michelle Obama encouraging Latinos to turn out and vote. Watch the ad below: In the ad, [...]
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10/25/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos:  Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the United States at 16.5 percent of the population and are one of the most sought after groups of voters in swing areas across the country. However, surveys reveal that Hispanics, compared to non-Hispanic whites and African-Americans, [...]
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10/24/12 A delegation of DREAMers from the DRM Capitol Group and DREAM Action Boston visited one of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA)’s campaign’s offices yesterday, but were left to wait outside before they could speak with the campaign about Brown’s stance on the DREAM Act. “We wanted to simply speak on the DREAM Act, which is personal [...]
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10/24/12 With Latino voters playing such a critical role in the 2012 political cycle, we offer some important numbers regarding Latino voter projections, Latino polling and methodology, and the relationship between Latino voter behavior and immigration: 74% to 26%: Latino Decisions’ LD Vote Predict projection tool now predicts that President Obama will beat Mitt Romney by [...]
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10/24/12 Cross-posted at Latino Vote Matters, Latino Decisions, and Daily Kos: While President Obama’s support among Latino voters has fallen slightly from its peak prior to the first debate (week 6 of the tracking poll), effects of a poor debate performance by President Obama have been minimal. Furthermore, we find that any small Romney gains were [...]
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10/23/12 Between Otto Reich’s comments that Latino voters are not supporting Mitt Romney because they “are not well-informed” and Rep. Mary Bono Mack’s comments to the Desert Sun today, Republicans are coming up with more and more excuses for the fact that they’re not doing better with Latino voters.  In Mack’s case, she’s not even trying. [...]
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10/23/12 The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) held a briefing on the impact of the Latino vote in 2012 and beyond this morning, and we attended the event so that we could live-tweet.  Arturo Vargas, the executive director of NALEO Educational Fund, was there to moderate Democratic strategist Maria Cardona and Republican [...]
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10/23/12 UPDATED: Unbelievable! The Maricopa County Elections Department has just admitted that they once again gave Latino voters the wrong date for next month’s election. This time, it’s bookmarks distributed by the elections department that incorrectly lists the general election date in Spanish as November 8, while the correct date (November 6) is listed in English on the [...]
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10/23/12 In an interview with Spanish news agency EFE yesterday, Otto Reich, a Mitt Romney campaign surrogate for Latin America, attributed Romney’s low level of support among Latino voters to his belief that Latino voters “are not well informed.” Reich further lamented that “We’re not communicating (with those voters) as we should” — as if the Romney campaign’s [...]
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10/23/12 Cross-Posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos:  In 1998 Harry Pachon and Rudy de la Garza wrote a report for the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute titled “Why Pollsters Missed the Latino Vote – Again!” in which they argued that polls across California failed to accurately account for Latino voters in their samples, and [...]
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10/22/12 Campaigns and political observers are in agreement that Latino voters will be one of the key factors in this year’s presidential race.  As we have pointed out, Latino voters’ influence will hinge on both margin (head-to-head polling) and mobilization (eventual turnout).  While margin has remained relatively unchanged in the presidential matchup, with President Obama enjoying a massive lead of 71%-20% [...]
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10/22/12 Cross-posted at Daily Kos. As the final days of the 2012 campaign draw near, America’s Voice is launching a six-figure radio and online ad buy to inform Arizona and San Diego Latino voters about the immigration positions taken by some of their local candidates Starting today, the ads will run in heavy rotation through Election [...]
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10/22/12 The impreMedia-Latino Decisions tracking poll latest results reveal a high level of interest and engagement by Latino voters in the upcoming congressional and presidential elections.
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