Yesterday KOS wrote a diary about Obama winning the Latino vote. His diary was the anti conventional wisdom that Latinos are a conservative bloc and supported Hillary and will not support Obama. I had a discussion with some Latino community organizers here in Los Angeles who have long histories with voter turn out and worked on the Southwest Voter project. I offer their comments below for your commentary.Here is what they say about the KOS diary from yesterday.
Overly optimistic assessment, Latinos will vote majority Obama nationally, but the campaign has to keep to things in mind: 1. in order for the Latino vote to be a swing vote Obama has to get 75%+ of their voter turnout. 2. the key is winning that percentage in key states not nationally. Obama does not need 75% in California, New York or Illinois all three with large Latino populations, but he does need 75%+ in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado all battle ground states and states were republicans have done well among Latino voters in the past. I never give that much credence to polls that use such low universe population like the 800 cited in the article. The big polling services have done that in the past to us and they come up with data that off from the final results. Based on experience those polling agencies don’t invest the same level of resources into Latino polling as they do with other population groups, they have done small under resourced polls and passed them off as authoritative results, very frustrating.
But on a whole yes the majority of Latinos will vote for the democrats, the only question is how many will come out to vote in the key states and how high the percentage will be for Obama and the other democrats.