The Latino Wave

How Hispanics Are Transforming Politics in America

Jorge Ramos

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061748226
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With a population of 40 million and growing, the United States witnessed Latinos becoming the largest minority in America in 2003—creating a voting bloc with the potential to determine the outcome of elections throughout the nation.

In The Latino Wave, award-winning journalist Jorge Ramos argues that the political party that can correctly understand the wants and needs of Hispanics will triumph at the polls. Ramos deftly clarifies these points, among many others, and explains why it's necessary to bridge the gap of misunderstanding that exists between Latinos and non-Latinos.

With insight from the nation's Latino political luminaries and interviews with Hispanics living across the United States, Ramos reveals who these New Americans really are—and what it means for the country.

CHAPTER ONE

MAKING HISTORY: HOW LATINOS DECIDED THE 2000 AND 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

HISPANICS REELECT BUSH

The big news from the 2004 presidential election was that some 9 million Hispanic citizens used their votes to reelect George W. Bush. No, the election was not decided in Ohio. It was decided long before that in states with high percentages of Latino voters: Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico. Bush won those five states, and because of it he was able to gain four more years in the White House.

Never have so many Hispanics voted in an election. They represented roughly 8 percent of the total votes counted, and 3 million more voted in this election than in 2000. And never before had a Republican candidate won such a high percentage of the Latino vote: 44 percent, according to the exit polls. This represents a surprising increase over the 31 percent won by Bush in 2000, according to The New York Times.

In other words, many Hispanic Democrats decided to jump ship and vote for the Republican candidate during the 2004 election. This shift explains Bush’s victory, and it also shows that, for the first time, Democrats were beginning to lose the command that they’d had over the Hispanic vote for decades.

John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, only managed to win 53 percent of the Latino vote, which was nowhere near the 67 percent won by Al Gore in 2000. What happened?

“Kerry had no strategy for winning the Latino vote,” Raúl Izaguirre, president of the National Council de La Raza and one of the most well-respected Hispanics in the country, told me. “He never connected with Latino voters; part of it was his personality, but also it’s because, from the very beginning of his campaign, he never had a coherent strategy for convincing Latino voters that they should side with him.”

Izaguirre, who represents a nonpartisan organization, felt that Bush, on the other hand, did have “a very effective strategy for winning the Latino vote, with good, creative, and emotional TV ads. The president managed to connect with Latino voters.”

The results are impossible to ignore.

If Kerry, for example, had spent more time addressing the Hispanic and Spanish-speaking voters in Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, he would have won the election. I’ll explain.

Bush won Colorado by a 107,000 vote margin over his Democratic opponent, Nevada by 21,000, and New Mexico by 6,000. In other words, if 67,000 Hispanic voters had sided with Kerry instead, he would have won an additional 19 electoral votes, giving him a total of 271, enough to reach the White House.

How could the Democrats have underestimated the importance of the Latino vote when it came to winning the presidency? Those 67,000 votes—which represented less than 1 percent of the total Latino vote—could have been won with relative ease had the Kerry campaign simply conducted more interviews in Spanish, run more ads on Spanish-language radio and television, and linked itself with the ultimately successful senatorial campaign of Colorado’s Ken Salazar. But for some reason, they didn’t. Why?

When Bush was a candidate in 2000, he gave more than 100 interviews to the Spanish-language media. In 2004, Kerry ought to have matched or exceeded that. Instead, he gave a mere 25 such interviews. In other words, Kerry hamstrung himself and was unable to counteract the pointed, unequivocal messages emanating from the White House.

In many ways, Kerry committed the same general errors that Gore did. Gore lost in 2000 because of the Hispanic vote in Florida; Kerry lost in 2004 because of the Hispanic vote in Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, among other states.

The Democrats were confident in their belief that in 2004 they would win the Latino vote by a wide margin, which is why they didn’t spend significant amounts of resources to guarantee that. Proof of this can be found in a July 26, 2004, memorandum from the Democracy Corps group, whose members advised the Kerry campaign.

The memo—directed at all Democrats involved in attracting Latino voters—noted that the Republican Party considered increasing Bush’s support among Hispanics to be one of its highest priorities. In fact, in a July 17 interview with NBC’s Tim Russert, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd unequivocally stated that one of the campaign’s chief goals was to win at least 40 percent of the Latino vote. This was no secret. What’s surprising is that the Democrats—despite knowing their opponent’s strategy—did so little to even maintain their traditional advantage over Republicans among Hispanic voters.

The memo sent by Kerry pollster Stan Greenberg (one of the founders of Democracy Corps, the other being James Carville) established that “Bush is not only failing to reach that goal, he is failing to hold on to what he had—with his support dropping to just 30 percent.” In a triumphant tone, this report asserted that Bush was losing support among the Hispanic population in Florida, as well as southwestern states such as Nevada and New Mexico.

This information was based on a poll conducted by the Democratic Party that stated that 61 percent of Hispanics would be voting for Kerry and only 30 percent would be voting for Bush. It added that “Bush’s approval rating among Hispanics has suffered steep declines over the past five months,” and that even “after Kerry is attacked here on abortion and gay marriage, his support among Hispanics does not drop a point.”

Nevertheless, even at that late summer date, Democrats were concerned that the Republicans might be able to convert many Hispanic voters based on the president’s conservative moral values. “Hispanic voters are more socially conservative and potentially conflicted on issues like abortion and gay marriage,” the report cautioned. And this is exactly what happened shortly thereafter, with the Democrats being unable to do anything effective to contradict the Republican message. The Democrats saw that they were in danger of losing the Hispanic vote four months before the election, but evidently they did not give the warning serious consideration.

The assessment done by Democracy Corps seems to be supported by two other independent polls: one done by The Washington Post, Univision, and the Instituto Tomás Rivera, which polled 1,605 people between July 6 and 16; the other poll being conducted by the National Annenberg Election Survey from July 1 through 21 of 3,715 registered Hispanic voters. The first poll gave Bush no more than 30 percent support among likely Hispanic voters, while the second asserted that the number of Hispanic voters identified as Latinos had risen 6 percent from 2000.

This was good news for the Democrats. But instead of seizing the opportunity to reinforce their support among the Hispanic community, they let it slip away.

This memo was fundamental within the Democratic campaign. Some Kerry advisors believed that the Latino vote was without a doubt assured, and thus they decided not to expend any extra effort toward recruiting more Hispanic voters. This proved to be a fatal error. Such thinking permeated the Kerry campaign, and ultimately eroded it.

What the surveys said in July was very different from what the voters said in November. Why? First of all, there were about 3 million more Hispanic voters in 2004 than there were in the previous election, and it was difficult for pollsters to know who and where they were. Secondly, unlike the Democratic Party, the Republicans did not depend on external groups to plan, produce, execute, and distribute their publicity among the Latino community, which made their message more pointed and effective. Finally, the majority of Latino voters—who had been born in the United States—were not really all that different from the rest of the population, and thus they reacted favorably to Republican messages of patriotism and conservative moral values.

The organization that did the most to support Democratic efforts to secure the Latino vote was the New Democratic Network (NDN). In the spring of 2002, the NDN created a Hispanic project whose objective was “to communicate the message that, with the Democratic agenda, Hispanics everywhere will have a better life.” They spent some $6 million on advertisements, messages, and conferences that reached out to Hispanic voters during the 2004 campaign, much more than either of the two major political parties. But, in the end, their frustration was palpable.

In an email sent 10 days after the election, the NDN’s founder, Simon Rosenberg, and his colleagues, María Cardona, Sergio Bendixen, and Joe García, issued a stinging critique of John Kerry and the Democratic Party:

It is our conclusion that the Kerry/DNC coordinated campaign never took the [Hispanic] vote seriously enough. We now know that there was talk at the highest levels of the campaign that Bush would not make gains from his 2000 number—35 percent—and that little money or attention was needed to speak to Hispanics in the final months. From what we saw, despite having a determined and talented Hispanic team in place, the campaign’s decision makers did not spend the money or make the commitment needed to swing this vote, potentially allowing states like Nevada and New Mexico to slip away.

In the months leading up to November 2, there were many, many voices crying out with the message that the election would be determined by the Latino vote. And whoever did not heed these voices would lose. “These results are explained, in part, by what Kerry declined to do,” summarized Raúl Izaguirre, agreeing with the NDN’s conclusions.

These results are also explained by what Bush did do. The Republicans knew full well that Hispanics tend to have very conservative moral values, especially on the issues of abortion, religion, and gay marriage. According to exit polls, 80 percent of voters listed “moral values” as a determining factor in their choice, and they preferred Bush to Kerry on the subject. Hispanics were no different.

Ralph Nader, the independent candidate, and his running mate, Peter Camejo, who is of Venezuelan origin, carried 2 percent of the Latino vote.

After the electoral dust had settled and spirits had calmed, Kerry and the Democrats came to realize that the Latino vote truly was what ultimately decided the 2004 presidential election. But by then, it was too late.

Here is how the battle for the Hispanic vote began:

Early in 2004—Wednesday, January 7, to be exact—President Bush proposed issuing temporary work permits, a move that would benefit millions of undocumented immigrants for years. This was the first indication that the Bush campaign would go on to win the election that November with the help of Hispanic voters.

In a White House speech, President Bush admitted that current immigration policy was not working, and he spoke at length about the enormous contributions that immigrants have made to U.S. history, culture, and economics over the years. Bush also said that the United States needed foreign manual labor to continue growing, and that for humanitarian reasons and those of national security, he was in favor of granting temporary legal status to thousands of undocumented workers. The objective, he said, was to unite immigrants seeking work with employers who were unable to secure American employees.

Republicans have rarely spoken in such terms.

The problems with Bush’s immigration proposal are that it’s not entirely realistic, and that it only offers temporary legal status to workers and their families. What happens after the special visas expire, and there is no way to renew them? Bush left the details up in the air.

It would take an infantile sense of naïveté to think that immigrants who worked legally in the United States for years would pack up and go home once their temporary visas expired. This just won’t happen. Any serious immigration proposal must include the possibility of becoming legal residents and eventually U.S. citizens. But these possibilities were not provided for in Bush’s plan.

Bush’s proposal was unilateral. He made the announcement himself from the White House without consulting any members of the Hispanic Caucus—the group that has done the most over the years to protect immigrants’ rights and is most familiar with the issue—or any of his neighbors. Mexican president Vicente Fox was given much of the credit for bringing the proposal about, but the reality of the situation was that the U.S. chief executive only phoned Fox the morning of his announcement so that he could tell him, in a 15-minute conversation, what he was going to say that afternoon. There were no negotiations at all with Mexico before the proposal was unveiled, which is why it seems so incomplete.

Nor does Bush’s plan solve the problem of undocumented immigration in the long term. On the contrary, it only delays and complicates the issue. Under his plan, millions of undocumented workers would become legal for a period of time—three, or perhaps six years—after which they would simply return to being undocumented. This will not solve a thing.

Temporary legalization could also become a trap. These temporary workers—like the braceros of the 1940s and 1950s—could easily be exploited and manipulated by the employers who sponsor their permit applications. And when their visas expire, they could be deported fairly easily by the new INS, since it would know where to locate each and every worker.

Bush’s proposal says nothing, absolutely nothing, about stopping the violence and death that takes place along the border between Mexico and the United States. On average, one immigrant dies every day along this political line.

Nor does Bush explain how he expects to regulate or control undocumented crossings of the United States’ southern border. Every day, an average of 1,000 immigrants cross over illegally from Mexico into the United States, or violate the terms of their visas by remaining on U.S. soil after the expiration date. It is patently absurd to speak of national security and immigration reform when the United States’ southern border so closely resembles a colander.

The only realistic way to confront the problem of undocumented immigration is through an agreement with Mexico and Central America. But even so, as long as there is such a great disparity in wages between the United States and Latin America, it will continue to happen. For that reason, any logical reform must include an investment program—similar to the European Union—designed to equalize wages throughout the American continent.

The majority of Latinos rejected the president’s plan. According to a poll conducted by Sergio Bendixen for the organization New California Media, almost half—45 percent—did so because the plan contained no provisions for people to eventually become permanent legal residents or citizens. Additionally, 63 percent believed that Bush was more concerned with winning the Latino vote than with actually addressing the problems of undocumented immigrants.

In order to bring the Bush plan’s deficiencies into sharp relief, the Hispanic Caucus drew up their own proposal, which addressed such things as family reunification, permanent legalization, the protection of immigrants along the border, and aid for undocumented students. According to Bendixen’s poll, 85 percent of Hispanics favored the plan devised by Democratic and Latino congressmen. The issue of immigration clearly shows that the two parties were quite literally fighting for the Hispanic vote.

Bush’s proposal skirted the problem’s real issues. It offered no permanent solutions for the 8 million undocumented workers currently in the country, nor did it establish a plan for a safe and orderly flow of immigrants. But on a campaign level, it was seen as a positive move by Latino voters. And Bush had beaten Democrats to the punch in a key election issue.

It happens every four years. Every election year, that is. Presidential candidates and top political figures turn their attention to the Latino community after a period of almost total disregard. Why? Because they know that the vote needed to win the White House is the Hispanic vote. And the 2004 election was no exception.

I call it “Christopher Columbus Syndrome.” Every four years, both political parties and the English-language media “rediscover” Hispanics. Oftentimes they treat the community as if it hadn’t existed before, or as if it had only recently arrived. Many don’t realize that the majority of Hispanics were born in the United States, and their ancestors lived here even before the country was founded.

Hispanics are changing the face, the culture, the politics, and the economy of the most powerful nation on the planet. Here at the start of the 21st century, they make up 42 percent of the population in New Mexico, 33 percent in California, 32 percent in Texas, 25 percent in Arizona, 16 percent in Florida, 15 percent in New York, and 12 percent in Illinois.

Plus, Latinos had the power to decide the 2004 presidential elections. They were the most highly sought after swing vote in the country. Whichever candidate won their support also won the White House.

Ways to woo Latino voters were innumerable, and they took on countless forms. The most obvious and hackneyed of these was to speak to them in Spanish.

Former Vermont gov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE: MAKING HISTORY: HOW LATINOS DECIDED THE 2000 AND 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
• CHAPTER TWO: THE NEW NEIGHBORS NEXT DOOR
• CHAPTER THREE: WHY LATINOS ARE DIFFERENT: THE MELTING POT MYTH
• CHAPTER FOUR: HOW TO WOO LATINOS: A GUIDE
• CHAPTER FIVE: THE SECRET LIFE OF LATINOS
• CHAPTER SIX: THE INVADER INVADED
• CHAPTER SEVEN: THE TRUE POWER OF IMMIGRANTS
• CHAPTER EIGHT: THE LATINO AGENDA
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX: HISPANICS AT A GLANCE
• NOTES
• About the Author
• Praise
• ALSO BY JORGE RAMOS
• Copyright
• About the Publisher