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The first rule for winning the Latino vote is to realize it's a voter bloc in name only. There is a common ancestral language that binds nationalities, family histories and geographic allegiances. But that's about it. A recently naturalized Mexican in Los Angeles is more likely to vote Democratic than a fourth-generation immigrant in New Mexico, who is more likely to be liberal than a 65-year-old Miami Cuban, whose 23-year-old daughter is more likely than her father to have voted for Obama in 2008. Last year, when Democrats ran Spanish-language TV ads pushing the President's jobs plan, they hired two actors: a South American to read the script for Florida and a Mexican for Nevada and Colorado.
Local differences matter, but so do those things that distinguish Latinos from other ethnic groups. Latinos tend to be younger--their median age is just 27--and more socially conservative on issues like marriage and abortion, and they are less politically active than non-Latino whites and blacks. They have also been hit harder by the recession, with median household net worth dropping 66% from 2005 to 2009, according to the Pew Research Center. When it comes to voting, one issue obscures all the others: respect. "Once any group senses that you really don't like them and you really don't want their support," Republican pollster Whit Ayres says of Latinos, "it really doesn't matter what you say after that."
The 1994 campaign ad that turned California from a purple to a blue state began with grainy black-and-white footage of Latino migrants sprinting the wrong way down a six-lane freeway near San Diego. "They keep coming," the narrator announced over an ominously thumping soundtrack. The ad helped re-elect GOP governor Pete Wilson and pass a ballot measure, later tossed by the courts, that barred undocumented immigrants from nonemergency public health care, education and social services. The California GOP, however, has yet to recover from that double win. "It absolutely damaged the Republican brand," says Jennifer Korn, who led George W. Bush's Latino-outreach effort in 2004. "Conservatives have not realized how their tone and rhetoric has turned people off." Over the next six years, the chances that California Latinos would identify as Republican dropped from 34% to 12%, while the odds they would identify as Democratic rose from 38% to 63%. At the same time, Latino voter registration boomed as unions and community groups mounted citizenship and registration drives. Richard Nixon won California three times, Ronald Reagan won it twice, and George H.W. Bush won it once. Since Wilson, no Republican other than Arnold Schwarzenegger has won a top statewide office.