September 29, 2008 07:32 PM UTC

Failure To Engage Hispanics Lethal To Schaffer?

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reports:

Early in April, a group of high-power Republican Latinos sat down with GOP Senate candidate Bob Schaffer and pressed him to reach out to the state’s Latino voters. They advised him to hire Latino staffers, offered to introduce him to community leaders and reminded him of the importance of attending the community’s political events, such as the annual Bernie Valdez luncheon.

Schaffer “had a little bit of a problem” with it, said Gil Cisneros, who attended the meeting and is now helping John McCain coordinate a Latino outreach in Colorado.

“He said, ‘Well, I’ve never campaigned like that. I consider myself to be an American first,’ ” Cisneros said in an interview the day after the parley, suggesting Schaffer didn’t like to think about voters based on their racial or ethnic group.

In hindsight, the meeting may turn out to be a key moment in the campaign, especially given the latest Senate poll numbers released Tuesday by Quinnipiac University and The Wall Street Journal.

The poll shows Democrat Mark Udall with an overall lead of 8 percentage points, but he trails Schaffer among white voters 45 percent to 44 percent. Among Latinos, Udall leads by a gaping 43 points, 64 percent to 21 percent. [Pols emphasis]

That means Latinos – and to a lesser extent African-Americans – are almost entirely responsible for the Democrat’s edge in the race and that the failure by Schaffer and other Republicans to make inroads among those voters may be an Achilles’ heel for the party in 2008…

The article goes on to make some interesting points: President Bush’s inroads with Hispanic voters in 2004, the Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature’s passage of onerous immigration “reform” in 2005. But the particular case of Colorado’s immigration follies doesn’t seem to have hurt the Democrats in the long term based on these numbers–a frank recognition by Hispanic voters of who is really behind anti-immigrant political posturing, as was demonstrably the case in 2005?

The Post continues:

…political analysts say those have largely been wasted opportunities. Latino voters appear to be trending even more Democratic in 2008 than they have in the past. (Barack Obama leads among Latino voters in Colorado by 68 percent to 26 percent, the Quinnipiac poll showed.)

For the Republicans in Colorado, “what you’re dealing with in a close race is not to win the Hispanic vote but to keep from losing it by as large a margin as you might have,” said Norman Provizer, a political-science professor at Metro State College in Denver…

We see no evidence that Colorado Republicans have bothered to try narrowing their losses with Hispanics, another component of what looks increasingly to be a disastrous election for them five weeks from now.