Posted on Sun, Aug. 17, 2008


Latino voting bloc rises at a bad time for black pols

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
is an author and political analyst

Two eye-catching things were buried in the new Census Bureau projection that, by 2042, America will no longer be a white man's country. One is that the proportion of African Americans also will fade, or at least not get much bigger. The other is that the number of Hispanics will soar, to about 30 percent of the country's population.

Not only will America not be a white-majority country; but it will almost certainly be a bilingual nation. In many cities, Spanish will as likely to be heard on the streets, in schools and workplaces as English will. This seismic demographic revolution is already happening in many urban neighborhoods. There has been huge growth in Latino-owned businesses and media ownership, and a growing employment dominance in retail and manufacturing industries. In years to come, in entire areas of the country, the economic shake-up will be colossal.

The biggest shake-up will be in politics. That's the area with greatest angst potential for blacks.

In 2000, the 23 million blacks eligible to vote outweighed the 13 million eligible Latino voters, even though Latinos had by then virtually reached parity with blacks in the population. More than one-third of the Latino population was younger than 18. Forty percent of Latinos of eligible voting age were noncitizens, compared with only 5 percent of blacks.

Those numbers have radically changed. Since the 2000 election, the number of citizen Latinos of voting age has jumped. Beyond just eligibility, there are now an estimated 15 million registered Latino voters. Compare that with the 15 million black voters in the 2004 election.

That's not the only shift in ethnic politics in America. In past elections, the majority of the Latino vote was concentrated in California, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. In the 2008 national elections, helped by the sharp increase in the number of legal and illegal immigrants in the Midwest and Northeast, the Latino vote will have national impact.

In the next couple of months, presumptive presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain will dump millions into Spanish-language ads, pitches, and pleas for votes on Spanish-language stations. When, not if, Democrats and Republicans cut an immigration-reform deal, one of its features almost certainly will include some legalization plan that within a few years will turn thousands more Latino immigrants into vote-casting U.S. citizens. Democrats and Republicans will pour even more time, money and personnel into courting Latino voters. The potential political gain from a massive outreach effort to Latinos is far greater than putting the same resources into courting black voters.

It's sound political reasoning. That effort worked for Republicans in 2004, when Bush got nearly 40 percent of the Latino vote. The Democrats, meanwhile, maintain a solid lock on the black vote. In every election since 1964, blacks have given more than 80 percent to 90 percent of their votes to the Democrats. They will give even more of their vote to Obama this election.

With the tantalizing prospect of a small, nonetheless important, segment of newly enfranchised Latino voters going Republican, there's no political incentive for Republicans to do more to get the black vote. That even includes their relentless pursuit of black evangelicals. Hispanic evangelical churches have an estimated 20 million members, and those numbers are growing yearly. According to a survey by the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life project, the majority of Latino evangelicals are conservative, pro-family, antiabortion and antigay marriage. Latino evangelicals are GOP-friendly, and they have political clout. They got several mainstream evangelical groups to back the Senate compromise immigration-reform bill. And while the National Association of Evangelicals stopped short of backing the Senate bill, it still urged "humane" immigration law.

The leap in Latino voting strength comes at a bad time for black politicians. Although the number of black elected officials has held steady in state offices and in Congress, the spectacular growth of prior years has flattened out. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies reported only a marginal increase after the 2004 elections in the number of black elected officials, mostly in a handful of Deep South states and Illinois.

Politicians already are de-emphasizing traditional black issues. Obama and McCain have been virtually mute on miserably failing inner-city schools, soaring black unemployment, prison incarceration, and the HIV/AIDS crisis that has torn black communities.

The new reality is that immigration, both legal and illegal, has drastically changed the ethnic and political landscape. As whites fade into a minority, the great fear is that blacks could fade just as fast in numbers and political power.



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Earl Ofari Hutchinson (Hutchinsonreport@aol.com) is author of "The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House."




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