PHOENIX (By Julia Preston, NYT)
November 7, 2008 — Hispanic voters
shifted in huge numbers away from the
Republicans to vote for Senator Barack
Obama in the presidential election, exit
polls show, providing the votes that
gave him unexpectedly large margins of
victory in three battleground states:
Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.
Mr. Obama’s pull on Hispanic voters also
extended to Florida, where a majority of
them voted for a Democratic presidential
nominee for the first time since at
least 1988, when exit polls were first
conducted in the state.
In a year when turnout among many groups
surged nationwide, the number of
Hispanics who went to the polls
increased by nearly 25 percent over
2004, with sharp rises among naturalized
immigrants and young, first-time voters,
according to a study by the National
Association of Hispanic Elected and
Appointed Officials. Hispanic support
for the Democratic nominee increased by
14 points over all compared with 2004,
the biggest shift toward the Democrats
by any voter group.
For the first time, Hispanic voters
emerged as a mobilized Democratic voting
bloc in states across the country,
Hispanic officials said.
“They really delivered,” said Efrain
Escobedo, director of civic engagement
at the Hispanic officials’ association,
a bipartisan group that ran voter
registration drives across the country.
“This is an electorate that now
understands the importance of voting,
and they made a significant shift in the
political landscape.”
Nationwide, Hispanics voted 67 percent
for Mr. Obama and 31 percent for Senator
John McCain, according to Edison/Mitofsky
exit polls. In 2004, Senator John Kerry
won 53 percent, while 44 percent of
Hispanics voted for President Bush, a
record for Hispanic support for a
Republican presidential nominee.
The approximately 10 million Hispanics
who went to the polls this year were 9
percent of the total of voters, up one
percentage point from 2004. Their share
of the electorate did not increase more
substantially because turnout was high
across most voting groups.
A striking increase was in Colorado,
where Hispanics went from 8 percent of
those who voted in 2004 to 13 percent
this year, according to Edison/Mitofsky.
Mr. Obama carried the Hispanic vote in
Colorado by 61 percent to 38 percent,
Edison/Mitofsky found.
While Mr. McCain campaigned hard in
Colorado and polls showed a tight race
there, in the end Mr. Obama won the
state by 7.7 percentage points.
Hispanics were also crucial to Mr.
Obama’s landslide in New Mexico, which,
like Colorado, went for President Bush
in 2004. Hispanics increased their share
of New Mexico’s voters to 41 percent,
from 32 percent in 2004, and 69 percent
of them voted for Mr. Obama, who carried
the state by more than 14 points.
“The Hispanic vote came back to the
Democratic Party after a brief
flirtation with the Republicans,” said
New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Bill
Richardson, who is Hispanic. “They
turned out, erasing the fame of Hispanic
voters as a sleeping giant and making
them an actual giant.”
Mr. Richardson said Hispanics had been
attracted to the Democratic nominee
because he “spoke to them not as an
ethnic group but as American voters
pursuing the American dream, focusing on
mainstream issues like the economy and
the war in Iraq.”
In Nevada, where Hispanics were 15
percent of voters, 76 percent of them
backed Mr. Obama. He carried the state
by more than 12 points.
In Florida, Hispanics joined many other
groups in shifting away from the
Republicans toward Mr. Obama,
contributing to his 2.4-point victory
there. One factor was a growing group of
Puerto Rican voters in Central Florida,
who tended to vote Democratic while
South Florida’s large Cuban-American
population remained dependably
Republican, said Mark Hugo Lopez, a
researcher for the Pew Hispanic Center,
a nonpartisan research group in
Washington.
