Why Latino Voters Will Swing the 2012 Election

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Photographs by Marco Grob for TIME

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Pollsters in both parties believe that just softening the tone could move GOP numbers dramatically. Most Latinos still point to bread-and-butter issues like jobs and the economy as chief concerns, and on the specifics of how immigration policies should be reformed, there is a diversity of Latino opinion. Rubio's plan lacks detail, but he says he has a clear asset that the Republican Party needs. "I do look forward to making that case to them in Spanish," he says. He opposes blanket amnesty but wants to find a way to avoid deporting the 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the U.S. He would stop short of granting full citizenship to young students and soldiers who came to this country illegally. "My real goal ... is to try to figure out a way for immigration to once again be something that unifies Americans rather than divides us," he says.

Obama still faces his own climb back with many Latino voters. After promising to implement immigration reform in his first year in office--and winning 67% of the Latino vote in 2008--Obama opted instead to push health care reform and global-warming bills. At the same time, he has overseen a dramatic increase in deportations. Cecilia Muoz, one of Obama's top domestic-policy advisers, did not do the campaign any favors in 2011 when she agreed that families separated during deportation were "collateral damage" in the broader effort to enact reform. "He is the deportation President," says Daniel Rodriguez, 25, an undocumented law student and activist in Phoenix, who has been working to register voters. "That's not collateral damage. That's people. That's people's lives." The same January poll by Univision and Latino Decisions found that 37% of Hispanics said Democrats did not care about their vote and 9% characterized Democrats as hostile.

Obama recently made two changes to immigration policy in order to regain some ground: a provision that allows undocumented spouses to apply for citizenship without leaving the U.S. and a new policy that deports criminals first and strives to keep families together regardless of their legal status. "At the beginning of 2011, they said we are not going to make any administrative decisions," says Frank Sharry, founder of America's Voice, which supports immigration reform. "But they realized that they had to move."

"Republicans on Paper"?

The Rev. Eve Nuez is exactly the sort of voter Republicans should have already locked up. Pro-life and against gay marriage, she keeps two framed photographs of George W. Bush on the desk of her west Phoenix office, along with a certificate from the Republican National Committee for her work on the 2004 campaign. And yet Nuez says she is caught "between a rock and a hard place," opposed to Obama on social issues but unwilling to commit to the GOP because of its immigration stance. "The doors are being closed to conservative Evangelicals and Hispanics," Nuez, 58, says, "And I think it is really going to hurt the Republican Party in Arizona."

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