Presidential candidates seek votes from bloc of new American citizens

SAN FRANCISCO — SAN FRANCISCO From Florida to Virginia, Massachusetts to California, candidates and political parties seeking to squeeze every vote from a divided electorate are targeting America's newest citizens. It's a relatively small bloc but one that can be substantial enough to make a difference in razor-close races.

In Florida, which President Barack Obama won by less than 5 percentage points four years ago, a new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows people who naturalized as Americans since 2000 make up 6 percent of the population of voting-age citizens. For months, the Obama campaign has been sending volunteers to citizenship ceremonies to register people and canvassing Miami-area neighborhoods where immigrant families live.

In California, where new citizens comprise nearly 9 percent of potential voters, Republicans hope House candidates Ricky Gill and Abel Maldonado can reach that group by highlighting their families' journeys from India and Mexico.

Georgina Castaneda, who grew up in Veracruz, Mexico, and now lives in Los Angeles, is the type of person the campaigns are targeting. After years of waiting for her citizenship application to go through, she passed the U.S. civics test and swore her allegiance to the flag along with thousands of others at a ceremony in March at Los Angeles' Staples Center.

Castaneda said Democratic Party workers walked down the aisles handing out brochures to the crowd. She filled one out while still seated.

"My idea was that one more vote could do something, so I registered at the ceremony," she said.

Political parties have tried to engage new arrivals since at least the 1790s, when New York City's fabled Tammany Hall political machine organized immigrants.

"The trick with politics is to get to people early, so what you want to do is make sure that your party gets in on the ground floor of any new citizen's thinking," said Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va.

First-generation citizens historically have leaned Democratic and registered at lower rates than U.S.-born voters. But during the past decade, the registration gap has narrowed, partly because the newest Americans have been motivated by the immigration debate, said Manuel Pastor, director of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California.

Nationwide, there are 7.8 million people of voting age who naturalized since 2000, or 3.6 percent of all potential voters. Two swing states -- Florida, at 6 percent, and Nevada, at 5.1 percent -- have higher concentrations than the national average.

States like California, Massachusetts and Illinois that are considered likely to go for Obama have significant populations of new citizens who could decide congressional races.

In Massachusetts, where the newest Americans make up 5 percent of all potential voters, GOP Sen. Scott Brown often emphasizes his support for legal immigrants who have "played by the rules" as he competes with Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren for the swath of undecided voters.

In downtown Oakland, Calif., the Alameda County Republican Party has been erecting folding tables with voter registration forms in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog and English outside naturalization ceremonies.

The success rate for Republicans in this traditionally Democratic stronghold is unclear -- local GOP Chairwoman Sue Caro noted sometimes new citizens pose with the party's cardboard cutouts of Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan, then walk down the sidewalk to the Democratic Party's table and take family photos with likenesses of Michelle and Barack Obama.

In Florida, the Obama campaign for months has sent volunteers to the conference halls where the federal government holds its citizenship ceremonies.

"Our campaign is about inclusiveness, and to that end we encourage all citizens, including our newest citizens, to get involved in the democratic process," Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher said.

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Presidential Geography: New Hampshire

Today we continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the political peculiarities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Today’s stop: New Hampshire, the Granite State.

Every four years, the glare of the nation’s political spotlight fixes on New Hampshire. But the moment is usually brief. For most of the period since World War II, the state’s outsize influence on presidential politics has been limited to the nominating process. During the general election campaign, New Hampshire has been shunted offstage, turned into a background player.

The reason: There was no suspense about the results. The Republican candidate carried the state in every election but one from 1948 until 1988, winning by 29 percentage points in 1980, 38 points in 1984 and 26 points in 1988.

Since then, however, population shifts have helped make New Hampshire one of the nation’s presidential battlegrounds. In 2012, the state — despite carrying just four electoral votes — is among the most important and is a major focus of both campaigns. Mitt Romney began a recent bus tour of America’s small towns in Stratham, N.H., and President Obama is scheduled to visit Strafford County on Monday.

For Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney — both of whom are mapping out routes to the 270 electoral votes needed to take the presidency — New Hampshire represents not just four votes, but four of the final votes needed to get to, or stay in, the White House. On some of those maps, New Hampshire is the final push across the finish line.

FiveThirtyEight spoke with Andrew Smith, who knows New Hampshire as well as almost anyone. Mr. Smith is the director of the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center and an associate professor of political science there.

New Hampshire has gradually become more competitive because of a political imbalance in the voters who are being added to the rolls and those who are leaving them. New voters — both people who have moved into the state and younger people who have reached voting age — are more Democratic than the residents who are leaving the state or dying.

“A third of the potential electorate in 2008 couldn’t vote in the state in 2000, either because they didn’t live in the state or because they weren’t old enough,” Mr. Smith said. The changes have dramatically changed New Hampshire’s political landscape from among the most Republican states in the Northeast to one where Mr. Obama was able to win every county in 2008.

But Mr. Obama is unlikely to do as well this year. The recession has slowed the number of newcomers, arresting the state’s shift to the left. Moreover, Mr. Romney’s brand of Republicanism — fiscally minded but less strident than many Republicans on social issues — resonates with many New Hampshire voters. The state, like many others, swung wholly to the right in 2010, and both parties now have areas of support they can count on. The winner in New Hampshire, Mr. Smith said, is likely to be determined by which campaign can get more of their people to the polls.

The Democratic strongholds in New Hampshire start with the Connecticut River Valley in the southwest, which runs from the Massachusetts border north through Keene to Hanover and Lebanon. It is an area filled with college students and is a popular destination for affluent retirees from New York who have bought second homes in the area’s mountains.

New Hampshire’s coast is also a left-leaning region, with a heavy concentration of Democrats in Portsmouth and Durham, where the University of New Hampshire is located, and in old mill towns like Somersworth, Rollinsford and Rochester.

The heart of the Republicans’ territory lies between the coast and Cheshire and Sullivan counties in the west. Though the cities of Nashua and Manchester vote Democratic, the small towns around them are solidly Republican (Hudson, Windham, Salem, Derry and Pelham, for example).

Somewhat paradoxically, the towns close to New Hampshire’s border with loyally liberal Massachusetts are also Republican territory. “Democrats call that area ‘the Bermuda Triangle,’ where Democratic candidates go to die,” Mr. Smith said.

The Bellwether: Merrimack County

Merrimack County, which is home to New Hampshire’s capital, Concord, has been a close barometer of the Democrats’ statewide strength since 2000, with Democratic support in the county consistently about 2 percentage points stronger than their statewide share of the vote. Concord itself, with its government workers, is solidly Democratic, but the towns surrounding it are Republican, almost balancing out the county.

The Bottom Line

According to the current FiveThirtyEight forecast, Mr. Obama is a 71 percent favorite to win New Hampshire, just slightly better than his current odds of winning the election over all, 63 percent.

But New Hamphire has an unusually large number of swing voters and may be especially responsive to changes in the national mood. The state is eighth on FiveThirtyEight’s list of top Tipping Point states, ahead of electoral-vote-rich states like Michigan and North Carolina. It is also third on our Return on Investment Index, which measures “the relative likelihood that an individual voter would determine the Electoral College winner.”

There are a fair number of plausible cases under which its four electoral votes might prove to be decisive, securing a second term for Mr. Obama or a first for Mr. Romney.

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Presidential Vacation Reading

The Supreme Court has ruled, the 4th of July has arrived, the heat is sweltering, and the presidential candidates have been taking a few days off from the campaign trail – President Obama at Camp David, and Mitt Romney at his lake house in New Hampshire. But since no American vacation would be complete without a batch of summer reading, here are a few titles, old and new, that the president might profitably leaf through while he waits for the rest of the country to stop sweating and tune back in to politics. (His challenger is busy overseeing the Romney clan’s annual regimen of sports and games – a hypercompetitive affair known as the “Romney Olympics” – so I’ll save his reading list for next week.)

First, as he tries to put his first term in context, the president could benefit from the historical perspective provided by Jonathan Rauch’s “Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working.” Originally published in the early 1990s and then revised and reissued after the Gingrich Revolution petered out, the book is a dense and depressing look at how and why the modern administrative state resists attempts to overhaul it.

Rauch’s arguments apply to reformers in both parties, but they have a particular relevance for the current president, who inspired sky-high, New Deal 2.0 expectations and then struggled mightily to live up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s example. Obama-era liberalism, Rauch’s book suggests, is a victim of the Democratic Party’s past success: The programs and bureaucracies that were created in liberalism’s heroic age are precisely what make it impossible to bring that heroic age around again. The system is too complicated, the government has too many stakeholders and its various clients too much power, and would-be revolutionaries end up thwarted, corrupted, or (all-too-frequently) both.

“In a society dense with professional lobbies,” Rauch writes, “F.D.R.’s brand of experimental central government cannot exist.” Obama would no doubt cite some of his legislative feats as evidence to the contrary. But he should turn to “Government’s End” if he wants to understand why even his victories feel compromised, and why he’s achieved less than so many of his supporters hoped.

To reckon with a more specific instance where those hopes have fallen somewhat short, he should turn to last year’s “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America,” by Richard White. One of the president’s preferred themes is the idea that government “investment,” broadly defined, has been crucial to America’s economic success. And the transcontinental railroad is one of his favorite examples of this kind of domestic nation-building, consistently invoked in presidential speeches as an example of the good old days when even Republicans (Abraham Lincoln, in this case) supported industrial policy.

But White’s new history of that endeavor – written from a left-wing, muckraking perspective – tells a rather darker story, rife with corruption, back-room dealing, and private investors using public subsidies to line their pockets and enrich their allies. The federal government’s railroad investments, the book strongly implies, had a little more in common with contemporary follies like Solyndra than the president’s mythmaking suggests.

It’s not an account that will woo Obama away from his faith in green jobs and high-speed rail, necessarily – but at the very least it should unsettle that faith a little.

Finally, speaking of faith, a president who chose to start a fight over religious liberty with the Roman Catholic Church might profit from reading 2010’s “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” in which the sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell examine the ways in which religious practice tends to make people better neighbors and citizens.

Putnam and Campbell are not writing about religious freedom per se. But one of their major themes is the extent to which both individuals and society benefit, not from belief alone, but from faith communities in all their myriad forms. This suggests an implicit perspective on what the Bill of Rights means when it protects not just freedom of conscience, but the free exercise of religion. The First Amendment isn’t just there to defend private conviction. It’s there to protect public and communal expressions of faith as well.

The controversy over the contraception-sterilization-morning-after-pill mandate erupted because the Obama White House decided to take an extremely narrow view of this protection, crafting a religious exemption that would apply to houses of worship but not to religious hospitals, charities and schools.

But the “grace” that Putnam and Campbell are describing works precisely because it isn’t confined to the churches where it’s nurtured: It spills out of the pews and into society as a whole. And there are worse things President Obama could do with his summer vacation than ponder that reality, and then shorten by one the list of controversial policies that he’ll need to defend this fall.

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Presidential Race Pits Government Against Business

An Obama campaign video shows the president’s national political director, Katherine Archuleta, tearfully crediting Mr. Obama with having saved her daughter’s life. She portrays the president as a hero of government whose health care law assures her daughter, a cancer survivor, insurance coverage forever.

A video by a political committee backing Mr. Romney follows a nearly identical tack: evocative music and a tearful description of Mr. Romney as “the man who helped save my daughter.” But the testimonial, from a former partner at Bain Capital, depicts Mr. Romney as a hero of business who once shut down his firm to aid search efforts until the partner’s missing teenager was found.

Those competing stories are rooted in more than the biographies of the Democratic incumbent, a former professor and community organizer, and his Republican challenger, a onetime financial industry titan. They also reflect the divergent ideologies and core constituencies of the two parties.

Mr. Obama champions government as a linchpin of future economic growth and the average American’s protector from the excesses and failures of the free market.

Mr. Romney condemns government as a menace whose excesses and failures imperil the free market’s ability to enhance individual opportunity and make the nation prosperous.

Each has more negative than positive material to work with. Their back-and-forth is a clash between institutions reduced to equal levels of public disdain after years of economic weakness, Wall Street’s collapse and bailout, high unemployment levels and shifting election outcomes.

A Pew Research Center poll found in February that only 22 percent of Americans rated the federal government as having a positive effect on American life — precisely the same proportion who rated banks and other financial institutions positively.

“It’s clearly a standoff,” said Pew’s pollster, Andrew Kohut, though one involving coalitions of different shapes.

Blacks and Hispanics were twice as likely as whites to rate government positively, for example, and nearly four times as likely as white evangelicals. Mr. Obama’s argument draws stronger support from single women, Mr. Romney’s from white men and married women.

The contours of the partisan debate have grown familiar since Ronald Reagan called government the problem, not the solution, and the 2000 election established how closely it divides the nation.

But each side sees an opening for a breakthrough in November.

For the Romney team, it is the juxtaposition of a Democratic incumbent struggling with hard times against a Republican candidate uniquely suited to extend the arc of conservative ascendancy that began with Reagan’s antigovernment campaign in 1980.

“We haven’t had a candidate that’s been as successful from a business standpoint as Romney has been,” said Carl Forti, a strategist for the pro-Romney “super PAC” that produced the advertisement featuring his business partner. As hostile as swing voters may be toward Wall Street and big corporations, he added, “they absolutely know government’s worse.”

For Mr. Obama’s advisers, the opening lies in their ability to tie Mr. Romney to the market’s generation-long failure to deliver rising living standards to average Americans. “The country tried everything Romney says, and it brought the economy to the brink of collapse,” said Mr. Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson. “The American people know our country has a big role to play in investing in education, in R&D to produce new industries and in infrastructure.”

That explains the Obama campaign’s recent attack on Mr. Romney’s record at Bain Capital. An Obama campaign video with sorrowful former steelworkers cast Mr. Romney as a corporate “vampire” who with his partners bought a Missouri manufacturer, siphoned away profits for themselves and bankrupted it. Mr. Obama’s defense this week of his campaign’s Bain attacks underscored the ideological clash. The president asserted that pursuit of private-sector profits was insufficient preparation for service as chief executive of government, who is obliged to consider the interests of all constituents, including workers.

The Romney campaign answered that tale of villainy with one of heroism. Its ad highlighted a different company that “Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team” helped start, creating 6,000 jobs.

“If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is,” a grateful worker concluded.

The route to the American dream sketched by Mr. Obama involves critical assistance from the government. In an interactive Obama campaign graphic, the fictional character “Julia” benefits from programs like Head Start, small-business subsidies and the new health care law. The campaign recently spent $1 million on a targeted mailing to women in swing states trumpeting benefits they would lose if Mr. Romney won a repeal of the health law.

Mr. Romney dismissed the “Julia” device as an illustration of the centrality of government to Mr. Obama’s vision. He said at a rally this year, “If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy.”

Mr. Obama promotes the two-year-old financial regulation law as protection against the depredations of Wall Street, with all the more urgency after JPMorgan Chase’s recent multibillion-dollar trading loss. Mr. Romney insists that the law inhibits private-sector-led growth and supports its repeal.

He takes the same view of the government’s involvement in bailing out auto companies, saying it rewarded unions friendly to Democrats at the taxpayers’ expense; his campaign’s new Web video features nonunion workers complaining that Washington had not helped them. Mr. Obama says the government bailout saved the industry.

Both sides supplement philosophical arguments with practical ones. Mr. Romney casts the administration’s interventions as simply ineffective; Mr. Obama’s campaign says Mr. Romney failed to deliver on jobs and government-slimming promises as governor of Massachusetts.

Yet they consistently offer voters a fundamental contrast of outlook.

Mr. Obama wants government to enhance opportunity and temper inequality through investments in education, research, infrastructure and new energy technologies — paid for with help from higher taxes on the wealthy. Mr. Romney, speaking in Des Moines last week, articulated the opposite view.

“The private sector is by far the most efficient and cost-effective” at generating economic growth, Mr. Romney said. “As President Obama and old-school liberals absorb more and more of our economy into government, they make what we do more expensive, less efficient and less useful.”

“They make America less competitive,” he concluded. “You do not owe Washington a bigger share of your paycheck.”

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‘Presidential’ vs. ‘Political’ Trips: A Blurry Line for Obama

And that was the nonpolitical stop on Mr. Obama’s swing-state itinerary for that day early this month. The president sandwiched the 34-minute speech, billed as an official address on his so-called Buffett Rule for a minimum tax rate for the wealthiest Americans, amid three overtly partisan fund-raisers that accounted for the bulk of his time along the south Florida coast.

Mixing policy and politics, Mr. Obama is picking up the pace of his travel with that ultimate incumbent’s perk — unlimited use of Air Force One. The trips are mostly to about a dozen swing states that will decide the election and to two reliably Democratic states, New York and California, for campaign money.

And Mr. Obama is not the only frequent flier with a re-election agenda. Both Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the first lady, Michelle Obama, are increasingly stumping around the country as the campaign seeks to repeat its fund-raising success of 2008 and counter a building wave of G.O.P. cash.

The trips yield a payoff not only in donations — collected at small-crowd, big-dollar events in the sumptuous homes of donors and at small-dollar, big-crowd rallies — but also in local headlines trumpeting Mr. Obama’s message of the day. Taken together, they raise the quadrennial question of how much of a president’s travel should be paid for by taxpayers and how much by his party.

“It’s very opaque,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group. “You’re kind of left in the position of, ‘Trust us; we’re doing it right.’ ”

Since Mr. Obama filed for re-election a year ago, he has taken 60 domestic trips, of which 26 included fund-raisers, according to Mark Knoller, a White House correspondent for CBS News who for years has compiled such data.

Mr. Knoller’s count shows that since Mr. Obama took office, his most frequent destinations besides Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, his home state, have been fund-raising centers and swing states: New York (23 visits), Ohio (20), Florida (16), Pennsylvania (15), Michigan (11), California and North Carolina (10 each), Massachusetts (9), Wisconsin (8), Iowa and Nevada (7 each), and Colorado (6).

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama made an official visit to an Ohio community college and a political trip to Michigan for two fund-raisers. This week, he is scheduled to visit North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado for official addresses on student loans at three campuses, prime territory for his drive to motivate young voters.

Officials at the White House, the Chicago campaign headquarters and the Democratic National Committee declined to say how they decide which events are political and how much to reimburse the government. That secrecy has a tradition dating at least to the late 1970s.

Katie Hogan, a campaign spokeswoman, said, “The campaign will follow all rules and pay for the portion of travel that relates to political events, as has been true for previous incumbent presidential candidates.”

A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said, “As in other administrations, we follow all rules and regulations to ensure that the D.N.C. or other relevant political committee pays what is required for the president to travel to political events.”

While it is not possible to know for sure, the Democratic Party is probably paying more than other presidents have for Air Force One because of a regulatory change in 2010. Instead of repaying the government based on the cost of first-class commercial airfare, as presidents had since Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald R. Ford, reimbursements must now reflect the cost of chartering a 737 aircraft. (Air Force One, the name for whichever plane in the fleet carries the president, is usually a 747.)

Past presidents have been accused of adding official events to political trips to reduce their campaign’s spending, but Mr. Schultz said that was no longer an issue. “The fact that there is an official event on the schedule doesn’t reduce the travel costs paid by the campaign to the federal government,” he said.

The Democratic Party’s latest monthly report of travel reimbursements, filed last week to the Federal Election Commission, had precise entries like $3.82 for “White House Airlift In-flight services” — a sandwich from the Air Force One galley perhaps? — and 23 payments totaling nearly $100,000 for airfare, including $95,759.10 to White House Airlift Operations and $3,833.19 to the Treasury Department. Aides would not describe what trip, traveler or expense were reflected by each entry.

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

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