Democrats Bet on Shift in Hispanic Numbers to Win Arizona Race

Mr. Carmona, 62, is an untested candidate of vast experiences with a made-for-Hollywood biography. He was a high school dropout, born into poverty in New York City to Puerto Rican parents who struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse. He served in Vietnam, earning Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts and other combat decorations, and attended medical school before his eventual rise to surgeon general under President George W. Bush.

He is running for public office for the first time, challenging a six-term congressman, Jeff Flake, 49, a Republican. Both are vying for the seat held by another Republican, Senator Jon Kyl, who is retiring. Though there is little reliable polling in the contest, both camps acknowledged that the race is closer than they expected in such a heavily Republican state.

Beyond the balance of power in the Senate — enough states are in play that Republicans could regain the majority — the race carries enormous significance for Arizona, whose shifts in demographics threaten to upend its role as a Republican stronghold.

Mr. Carmona was handpicked by President Obama to run for the Senate because of his résumé and his ethnicity, which could help galvanize the state’s Latino voters. The Democratic Party then cleared the field for him, sparing him primary attacks but depriving him of the chance to test his skills before the big fight.

Mr. Flake, in the meantime, waged a feisty primary contest against Wil Cardon, a wealthy businessman who spent a small fortune on his campaign but lost by a considerable margin. Unlike Mr. Carmona, who often refers to himself as a “street kid,” Mr. Flake was raised on a ranch in Snowflake, a northern Arizona town named in part for his great-great-grandfather, the Mormon pioneer William J. Flake.

Mr. Flake says he is “for limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility and free trade,” tenets that have earned him staunch support from the Tea Party movement. He has also embraced issues of particular significance to rural voters, like environmental rules that he says have curbed the operation of coal plants, leaving many people unemployed and “devastating small-town economies.”

From his campaign headquarters in Phoenix on Tuesday, where he was surrounded by young volunteers polling voters on the phone, Mr. Flake said, “I’m fighting to have some rational policy,” singling out the Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency as agencies that “need to be reined in.”

Outside groups have been pouring money and resources into the state as the race has tightened. On Wednesday, FreedomWorks for America, a “super PAC” linked to the Tea Party, opened an office in Mesa. The operation at the heart of Mr. Flake’s base in suburban Phoenix will organize volunteers to solicit votes, said its executive director, Russell Walker, who flew in from Washington.

On Tuesday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee bought $526,000 in airtime on behalf of Mr. Carmona, its first direct expenditure in the contest. (The committee had previously given $500,000 to the state’s Democratic Party to help pay for the campaign’s field offices, among other things.) The National Republican Senatorial Committee has donated $500,000 worth of ads to the Flake effort.

Mr. Carmona, a longtime independent, is running as a Democrat. That is not because the party is “a perfect fit,” he said, but because “I was forced to pick a position, and when I looked at where the Republicans were, especially in this state — immigration, women’s issues — I chose the Democratic Party.”

He has nonetheless tried to stitch together what he has taken to calling “a coalition of reasonable people” to carry him to victory. He has focused on constituencies long believed to be Republican stalwarts, like veterans, who make up roughly 15 percent of eligible voters in the state, and seniors, many of whom dislike the Medicare plan proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Mr. Carmona has also appealed to women who are unhappy about the state’s attempts to curb reproductive rights.

All along, though, Mr. Carmona has courted Latino voters. He released his second Spanish-language commercial on Tuesday, which introduces him as “uno de nosotros” — one of us — while highlighting Mr. Flake’s vote against the Dream Act, which would have given certain immigrants brought to the country illegally as children a path to legalization.

Mr. Flake has begun to make his case to Latinos as well. He has started running his first Spanish-language ad on television and radio, trying to tap into whatever anti-Obama sentiment there is in that community by referring to Mr. Carmona as “el hombre de Obama” — Obama’s man.

A combination of factors, including the state’s legislative push to curb illegal immigration and the presence of a Hispanic candidate like Mr. Carmona in the race, — have been galvanizing among advocacy groups in Arizona, triggering the largest Latino voter registration efforts in memory.

Still, Tara Blanc, a lecturer at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University who has studied Latino voting patterns in the state, said Latinos tended to be poorer, younger and less educated than the rest of the population. Those factors generally contribute to low turnouts, she said, so “whether they’ll go to the polls is anybody’s guess.”

Their transformative power lies, most likely, in the future. By 2030, Latinos are expected to make up 25 percent of all registered voters in Arizona, up from 15 percent in 2010, according to an analysis by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State.

Chip Scutari, who runs a bipartisan political consulting firm in Phoenix, said a Latino on the ballot could be “the tipping point for the Latino vote.” But, he added, the state has “a lot of conservative, pro-life Latinos,” who are more likely to vote Republican.

“To say the Latino vote will automatically go to Democrats,” Mr. Scutari said, “is oversimplifying the situation.”

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Republicans see opening with Hispanic voters over jobs data

WASHINGTON – With last week's job report showing Hispanic unemployment on the rise, Republicans see a chance to draw voters from a group that voted overwhelmingly for President Obama in 2008.

By Charles Dharapak, AP

President Obama greets audience members after speaking at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 2011.

By Charles Dharapak, AP

President Obama greets audience members after speaking at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 2011.

It remains uncertain, however, whether presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, who staked out a position at the right of his Republican rivals on immigration, can exploit it, analysts say.

The Hispanic unemployment rate jumped from 10.3% in April to 11% in May as the economy added only 69,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported. The disappointing job numbers come as Hispanic voters — who voted by 67%-31% for Obama in 2008 — are showing signs of diminished enthusiasm about the November election.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 65% of Hispanics put their propensity to vote at 10, according to the Gallup daily tracking poll from May 7 to May 27. By comparison, 82% of white voters and 75% of African-American voters offered a similar level of enthusiasm about the election, according to the poll.

"President Obama cashed in on the favorability capital that the Democratic Party has been developing over the longest time and the damaged brand that has hurt the Republican Party," said Daniel Garza, executive director of the Libre Initiative, a conservative Hispanic business organization. "I think we're getting to a point where you have to show results, not just rhetoric. Hispanics are just waking up to that."

Obama still holds a commanding 65%-25% lead with Hispanics over Romney, but political analysts say Obama has reason to worry that a lackluster job situation could dampen Hispanic turnout in November.

Hispanic unemployment is projected to remain above 10% through 2012 in 14 states — including the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Pennsylvania, according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

"We're not going to have a scenario where (Hispanic) Obama supporters switch sides, but we could have a scenario where they get dispirited," said Gary Segura, a partner with the polling company Latino Decisions and a political scientist at Stanford University.

It is unclear how much emphasis Obama will place on trying to contrast his views with Romney's on immigration.

Last year, Romney said if Congress passed the DREAM Act— a proposal that sets a path for young illegal immigrants to win citizenship if they attend college or serve in the military — he would veto it.

"Hispanics know that the president is committed to comprehensive immigration reform and to the DREAM Act and that only by exercising their right to vote in November will these sensible proposals become laws," said Gabriela Domenzain, an Obama campaign spokeswoman.

The president's ability to attack Romney on his immigration policy is somewhat complicated by his own record, Segura said.

Obama has overseen a record number of deportations of illegal immigrants during his presidency.

A Pew Hispanic Center poll released in December found that Latinos disapprove of the Obama administration's deportation policy 59%-27%.

"He's lost the ability to bring up the topic without action," Segura said. "But a bolder move, such as stopping deportations of DREAM-eligible kids — which he could do with executive action — that would shift the conversation and energize Hispanics. And every day that Mitt Romney spends not talking about the economy is a good day for Obama."

"It is abundantly clear that President Obama hasn't lived up to the promises he made in 2008 and that his failed economic policies are disproportionately hurting Hispanics," Republican National Committee spokeswoman Alexandra Franceschi said. "With Gov. Romney in the White House, we will see a leader that has the business experience to put Hispanics back to work."

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Democrats work to scare up Hispanic vote (Daily Caller)

Multiple Democratic pundits are making a coordinated allegation that the popular immigration enforcement policies embraced by Republican presidential candidates are “extreme” and have deeply damaged the GOP’s prospects among Hispanic Americans.

“The Democrats say that every four years, and its nonsense,” Jason Poblete, a Hispanic lawyer who formerly worked for the Republican National Committee, told The Daily Caller. GOP candidates can win up to 40 percent of the redistribution-minded Hispanic vote by treating them like other voters, he said.

“I don’t think there is anything these [Republican] candidates are saying that is not supported by at last 40 percent of Americans. … Some of the things they’re pushing have 80 percent support,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

The charges of electoral damage were pushed by Democratic activists, including Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Bill Burton, a former Obama aide, who now runs an independent political group, Priorities USA Action.

Democrats see Hispanics, especially first-time voters, as a vital voting bloc in the November election. Their strategy is to spur Hispanic turnout for Obama to above 65 percent by portraying the GOP’s opposition to illegal immigration as bigotry towards the Hispanic population of 50 million.

Hispanics may provide a winning margin in several critical states, including Florida, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia.

The United States now hosts an illegal immigrant population of roughly 11 million Hispanics. The population of non-Hispanic illegal immigrants is smaller.

“The strongly held views of all the Republicans are against everything that matters in the Hispanic community when it comes to domestic issues,” Wasserman Schultz told reporters at a Dec. 3, press conference in Des Moines, Iowa. Hispanics would have felt “revulsion … from the commentary and violence” during the GOP debates, she said. “I don’t mean physical violence,” she clarified.

“Republican candidates have managed to do permanent damage to their general election prospects [by embracing] a divisive and unworkable immigration policy,” Burton wrote, adding that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney “savaged [Speaker of the House Newt] Gingrich and [Texas Gov. Rick] Perry for advocating anything less than a draconian, systematic deportation of all undocumented immigrants.”

Democrats’ criticism was chiefly aimed at Romney, who announced his opposition to the DREAM Act, which would provide a partial amnesty to many younger illegal immigrants.

“If Romney becomes the Republican nominee, his position on immigration would be the most extreme of any presidential nominee of our time,” the DNC alleged in a Jan. 4 press release.

However, a November 2010 poll of 1,000 likely voters by Stein’s organization showed that roughly 40 percent of Americans supported the act, while roughly 55 percent opposed it. A month later, a more favorable set of questions in a Gallup poll yielded only 54 percent support and 42 percent opposition for the act.

“If Romney were calling for mass round-ups and deportations, that would be a minority position, but he doesn’t call for that — he’s for attrition through enforcement and E-Verify, which polls show has 80 percent support,” Stein told TheDC. E-Verify is a computer system that companies can use to verify prospective employees’ work eligibility.

Partly because of the stalled economy, that enforcement policy is popular among white working-class Americans, who provide a larger share of the swing vote than do Hispanics.

The Democrats’ hard-edged and questionable allegations are driven by their need to boost the Hispanic vote for President Barack Obama.

His ratings are in the 40s, far below the level he needs to win critical states like Florida and North Carolina, and other potentially winnable states like Nevada and Arizona.

Obama’s support among Hispanics reached 68 percent in 2008, but has since fallen in various polls to near 50 percent.

A December poll by the Pew Hispanic Center, however, showed that 68 percent of registered Latino voters prefer Obama to Romney, despite Obama’s 49 percent approval among Hispanics.

But that low approval rate may sharply reduce Hispanic turnout in November. (RELATED: Registration race for 2012 underway)

The low approval is based on Hispanics’ desire for a strong economy, rather than Obama’s failure to push for an amnesty .

The Pew poll, for example, said 33 percent of Hispanics rated immigration as an “extremely important” issue.

But jobs scored at 50 percent, followed by education, at 49 percent, and health care, at 45 percent. Taxes scored at 34 percent, as did the federal budget deficit, putting them above immigration’s score of 33 percent

Democrats and their allied ethnic lobbies, however, continue to use the issue of immigration to rally Hispanic votes around the Democratic party, said Poblete. “They create this racial boogieman and use it around election time,” he said.

“To win this battle in the long term, you have to resist the urge” to treat Hispanics as single-issue voters obsessed with immigration, he told TheDC. GOP candidates should avoid ethnic pandering, and can successfully woo mainstream Hispanics as they would other voters, with pro-growth, pro-education and pro-family policies, he continued.

Still, he warned the GOP can’t win a majority of Hispanics when running against a tax-and-spend Democratic candidate. “Immigrants are rational, and because they’re poorer than the average American, they seek large government programs,” which the Democrats are eager to provide, he concluded.

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Florida Democrats Struggle To Connect With Latino Voters, Elect Hispanic Leaders - Huffingtonpost.com

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Florida Democrats have seen their registration numbers swell in recent years, due in large part to a surge in Hispanic voters.

But despite their success on paper, state Democratic officials are struggling to connect with Hispanics, who have little representation among the party's Florida leadership. That could spell trouble not just for the future of the party in a state that's now nearly a quarter Latino, but also for President Barack Obama and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, who will be counting on Latino support during tough races next year.

"There's no bench here. Democrats don't cultivate Hispanic leaders," said Freddy Balsera, who heads a Hispanic-focused public relations firm in Miami and serves on the Democratic National Committee's finance team.

That's a problem for the party statewide but especially true in South Florida, where Cuban exiles have long been loyal to the Republican Party and have built their influence over decades. The list of high-level Republican GOP Hispanics includes U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, South Florida's three members of Congress and state House Majority Leader Carlos Lopez-Cantera. The run-off for Miami-Dade County mayor pitted two Republican Cuban-Americans against each other.

Meanwhile, only three Latino Democrats serve in the state House, none in the Senate. And as the state begins the process of redrawing political boundaries to conform with population changes since 2000 – which will likely lead to at least one new heavily Hispanic congressional seat – Democratic party officials have been slow to respond.

Joe Garcia, a past head of Miami-Dade Democrats and former Obama appointee who ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year, said Republicans have been more aggressive in going after Latino voters.

"The Republican Party views Hispanics in terms of market share: Who are they? How do we reach them? Democrats still view us in terms of quotas," Garcia said.

Florida Hispanics, like Latinos nationwide, provided overwhelming support in 2008 for Obama thanks to a national get-out-the-vote effort. Since December of that year, 73,000 have registered in the state as Democrats and another 76,000 have registered while declaring no party. There have been 31,000 new Hispanic Republicans.

The growth in Democratic voters has come in part from younger, more progressive Cuban Americans and a wave of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos.

But that didn't help Florida Democrats in last year's election, as turnout of their Hispanic members dropped sharply – even more than among other Democratic voters – according to party leaders. It was one reason why the Democrats lost races for governor and U.S. Senate as well as other statewide contests.

For Democratic Hispanic Caucus leader Jose Fernandez in Orlando, that drop came as no surprise. The Army veteran recalled how Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink bought few Spanish-language ads and toured a local Puerto Rican community center only weeks before the election, when narrowly lost.

"People still thought she was a man with a name like Alex," he said. "We don't work like that. We have to see people, hear them."

The Democrats' challenge in Florida comes as the party expects to do well again nationally with Latinos in 2012, in part because of GOP attacks on the immigration issue.

But Hispanics in Florida are somewhat of an anomaly. Cubans, who make up the majority, are generally allowed to stay in the country as soon as they touch U.S. soil, and Puerto Ricans are already citizens. Among the state's growing South and Central American communities, many have yet to be naturalized.

Patrick Manteiga, publisher of a trilingual Tampa newspaper (Spanish, English and Italian), said the party needs to reach out to new leaders like those at the region's thriving Hispanic churches, many of them evangelical.

"The pastors may be conservative Republicans, but there are many Democrats among their congregants," he said.

Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the state Democratic party, said the party is trying to improve outreach, but he conceded his party could take a page from the Republicans when it comes to Hispanics.

"They have absolutely done a better job than we have," he said. "It's finding young school commissioners, your business and community leaders. You've got to identify those people and help bring them along."

Earlier this year, Florida Democrats hired a Puerto Rican community activist from Orlando to head Hispanic outreach efforts. But the party declined to make her available to The Associated Press for an interview.

Luis Garcia, one of the party's three state representatives, said he's urged the Democrats to hire someone to do similar work in South Florida.

"Where we have been failing, is that we have not been attracting the younger voters," said Garcia, a retired fire chief who is being courted to run for Congress against embattled South Florida Republican David Rivera.

Arceneaux blames the lack of elected Hispanic Democrats on districts created a decade ago by the Republican-controlled Legislature following the 2000 Census. But as the state gears up again for redistricting, local Democrats have missed key opportunities.

In Orange County, many Puerto Ricans were angered when officials failed to appoint any to a redistricting committee even though they make up a third of the county. Local Democrats were slow to react to the flap, even though Puerto Ricans tend to support them.

Similarly, in neighboring Hillsborough County, it took a New York-based Latino civil rights group from New York to help propose a county commission redistricting map that accurately reflected Hispanic growth. The mostly Republican commission nixed that map during a recent hearing. Local Democratic leaders were largely absent, attending their monthly meeting.

At the national level, the Obama campaign has set up Spanish-language phone banks in Florida and is planning a grass-roots organizing meeting later this month.

But Fernandez and others say engagement with Latinos should be about more than electing a Democratic president every four years.

Amy Mercado, chair of the Orange County Democrats, said she wants to see people in office like herself "who may be Hispanic, who are married and have to juggle and still do it all."

But she added: "They're not going to field a candidate just because it has a Hispanic name. I'm a Hispanic, Latina, but I'm a Democratic Latina. I'd rather have someone who's really going to push Democratic ideals than just have someone whose Hispanic or Latina."

She said the party is beginning to recognize people like herself, but that Hispanic Democrats also need to demonstrate they can act independently.

She should know. Last year, Mercado, a manager for the National Mango Board, ran a $64,000 maiden campaign against the powerful Florida House speaker, a Republican. With less than $2,000 in cash and $5,000 worth of in-kind contributions from the party, she won 40 percent of the vote.

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