Here's an interesting article I just read on Reuters:
Republicans losing grip on Miami Cuban vote?
... Miami has changed and the sometimes violent scenes of Cuban exile passion appear to be in the past. That could spell trouble for President George W. Bush's Republican Party in November's general election, opponents and analysts say.
As Miami's hardline anti-communist tendencies start to fade, so may the party's once-unassailable grip on congressional seats in south Florida.
I know next to nothing about the Miami political scene, but the potential impact of melting the icy grip of the Anti-Castro Mafia seems to me to be very important. So the purpose of this diary is to excite some writers more familiar with the scene to write a diary about the subject.
As an admittedly barely informed NorCal white liberal male, Here's what I think is interesting about this trend:
Reuters compiled these anectdotes:
A battle for custody of a girl between her Cuban father and Miami-based Cuban-American foster parents sparked no mass protests, as occurred in 2000 when U.S. authorities sent shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez out of the care of Miami relatives to live with his father in Cuba.
When anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles was released from a U.S. jail last year, despite accusations he masterminded the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, the only people who paraded in victory in Miami were a few dozen Bay of Pigs veterans.
What should have been major Republican Values events were ignored. The obvious reason, younger voters are more liberal, is offered, albeit with qualifications:
"It's really over foreign versus domestic," said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. "Younger generations, younger Cubans, are very much more influenced by domestic policy than foreign policy," she said.
My question for Macmanus is, "Really? Younger Cuban Americans have simply no opinion about Cuba? Not a different opinion about Cuba?" I really would like to know her rationalization for leaving out a wholly different opinion about Cuban relations from the realm of possibilities.
I'm going to engage in uniformed speculation and suggest that younger Cuban Americans are similar to any other younger American, in that they aren't blind to the damage done by their parent's rigid adherence to Republican values, and are frankly frightened by it.
So the most exciting implication of this is the impact on local, state and national elections. A generational change is the worst kind of change for the loosers; they tend to be permanent and to keep growing as more younger voters gain voting age. Recall this bit of recent demograhic news:
You might think millennials are liberal only because they are young. Not true. Political viewpoints, in fact, are remarkably stable over a lifetime. Take the baby-boom generation, for example. Today, 25 percent of boomers say they are liberal. Twenty years ago, when boomers were in their twenties and thirties, almost the same proportion (27 percent) identified themselves as liberal. Today, 35 percent of boomers say they are conservative, nearly equal to the 36 percent who called themselves conservative two decades ago.
So can we look forward to a Democratic Miami? Will this mean a Democratic Florida? Will Miami's Cuban-American communities be the symbolic beginning of the end for Republican supremacy in the US Congress and Presidency? Again from the article:
Cuban American support could be crucial for Republicans in a state that gave Bush his wafer-thin victory in 2000.
Lets hope so! Little signs like these make my day, but I am seeking more from people who know more. How about some more info about these guys?:
In big challenges to the Republicans, Democrat Raul Martinez, a Cuban American and popular former mayor of Hialeah on the outskirts of Miami, has announced he will run this year for the congressional seat of South Florida Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart.
And Joe Garcia is running for the Republican congressional seat of Lincoln's brother, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.
On DK, I've discovered these diarists covering these races:
Progressive America
Larry Thorson
I haven't seen a lot of front page stories about this topic, perhaps there should be. These candidates deserve some fund-raising help, so here you go:
Donate to Raul Martinez
Donate to Joe Garcia
Joe Garcia needs some web tips; his main website did not come up in the top 20 of a Google search for "Joe Garcia for Congress." (The "Draft Joe" site is the top.) I also find it kind of odd that no other blog here on DKos has posted the donate links, but maybe there's a good reason?
So, I'm just a consumer of this stuff, I'd gladly read more news about the candidates (besides that they're Dems, which is great), these races and the demographic trends in this part of the country, from either of the above bloggists, or an amateur like me with more direct experience. Anyone?