The intensity from 2008 is no longer there, but the support is. Barack Obama bets GOP hate will drive Latinos to the polls.
There is a great deal of grumbling over President Barack Obama in the Latino community. Part of it is the jobs picture, much like everywhere else in America. But a big part of it is the administration's actions on immigration, where it boasts a higher deportation rate than the last president. That discontent is
clear in the polling:
Latino enthusiasm for Obama is down from 2008, when over 67 percent voted for him. According to a Univision News/Latino Decisions poll, only 47 percent of registered Latino voters say they are very enthusiastic about voting in 2012 and 48 percent of Latinos say they were more excited about voting in 2008 than this year — 13 percentage points higher than the national sample — and 53 percent say they are less excited about Obama than they were three years ago. Forty-four percent of Latino Democrats, a plurality, share that sentiment.
Lucky for the Democrats, the GOP is doing everything in its power to make sure Latinos have nowhere else to go, and Obama knows it.
“I don’t think it requires us to go negative in the sense of us running a bunch of ads that are false, or character assassinations,” Obama told Univision News. “It will be based on facts … We may just run clips of the Republican debates verbatim. We won’t even comment on them, we’ll just run those in a loop on Univision and Telemundo, and people can make up their own minds.”
The hate has been palpable. Just note the reaction to Gov. Rick Perry's defense of his Texas Dream act that allowed the children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition in college. Or Perry's attacks on Mitt Romney's hiring of "illegals." Or Bachmann promising to build TWO fences, because that would better thwart the use of ladders (or something). Or Herman Cain promising to electrify the fence, to better fry those dirty illegals.
That's why despite the lack of intensity, Latinos still overwhelmingly support Obama and Democrats. From the same poll cited above:
According to the poll released Tuesday — one year before Election Day 2012 — registered Latino voters in the 21 states with the largest Latino populations prefer Obama over the top three GOP presidential candidates, Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, and Rick Perry by two-to-one margins. The president is up 65 percent to 22 percent on Cain, 67 percent to 24 percent on Romney, and a whopping 68 percent to 21 percent on Perry.
Also, despite the drop in intensity, they also still approve of Obama.
Latinos are not as torn about the president as the rest of the country: 66 percent of Latinos approve of the job Obama has done, while only 29 percent disapprove. Nationwide, 50 percent of Americans disapprove of the job the president is doing, while 48 percent approve.
And also from the same poll, Democrats in general are well poised to earn Latino support:
Meanwhile, on a generic congressional ballot, Democrats leads Republicans among these voters, 58 percent to 18 percent. Democrats carried Hispanics in 2088, 68 percent to 29 percent, though Republicans made some gains in 2010, when Democrats led, 60 percent to 38 percent.
Thus, despite disenchantment with the president and Democrats on jobs and immigration, their support among Latinos remains high. That bodes well for 2012 ... if they turn out. And that's the problem when intensity drops: An unenthusiastic vote counts just as much as an enthusiastic one, but only if it's actually cast.