But since 2006, when explosive rallies against restrictive House-sponsored crackdowns on immigration brought hundreds of thousands of protesters into the heart of major American cities, organizers have been bedeviled in efforts to make good on the “tomorrow we vote” pledge — and not simply because the nation’s contingent of roughly 12 million undocumented workers is unable to vote. Voter registration and turnout among Hispanics have always been tepid, and the high concentration of Hispanic residents in states generally not in play during presidential cycles has served to further blunt the impact of the Hispanic vote.

What’s more, those Hispanic residents who do vote regularly tend to resist ready mobilization into voting blocs. Some pockets of Hispanic voters have bucked this pattern around specific issues, such as the Cuban-American communities in Florida and New Jersey who turn out in strong numbers for candidates pushing hard-line anti-Castro policies. But the Hispanic community’s political profile is otherwise quite diffuse: often supporting some family-values platforms identified with the GOP, for example, while also coalescing around liberalized immigration plans and opposition to the Iraq War, to the apparent advantage of Democratic candidates.

Complicating matters further is the logistical hurdle of acclimatizing recently naturalized citizens to participate in a political process that can at times be treacherous — as in, for instance, a 2006 report of voter-intimidation schemes in Orange County falsely warning Hispanic voters that an incomplete or out-of-date voting certification would prompt deportation proceedings on grounds of voting fraud. In addition, a backlog of nearly 1 million naturalization applications could well pull hundreds of thousands of would-be voters away from the polls this November.

In the 2008 election cycle, organizers are hoping to overcome these obstacles. They’re betting the activist energy galvanized during the 2006 immigration battles will translate into greater electoral participation — and a hard-fought presidential contest will turn Hispanic voters into a key swing constituency. Hispanic turnout, long regarded as the sleeping giant in the American electoral process, could be stirring into a new show of strength this election cycle.

The presidential race in particular could be a key proving ground, with the presumed GOP nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, strategically tacking away from his support of liberalized immigration, and Democratic rivals Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois aggressively courting the Hispanic vote. “If the Hispanic vote turns away from McCain and the Republicans and toward Democrats, it could redraw the electoral map for the next generation,” said Frank Sharry, director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group.

Recent trends suggest that the would-be mobilizers of the Hispanic vote have a steep hill to climb. According to U.S. census data from 2004, approximately 16 million, or two-thirds of the country’s 27 million Hispanic voting-age residents, are eligible to vote. But of these, only 58 percent registered to vote, compared with 75 percent of whites and 69 percent of African-Americans. Only 47 percent — 7.6 million people, or taken as a slice of the total 2004 voting population, about 6 percent — actually cast a vote in the general election. Still, that marked an improvement over the 2000 cycle, when they accounted for just 5 percent of the overall voting population. By 2006, the percentage bumped up to 8 — an all-time high, but still well shy of expectations in the wake of the immigration protests that spring.

Before the November 2006 vote, “the conventional wisdom became a much higher number than what the Census Bureau actually reported,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Elected and Appointed Officials. NALEO is predicting that traditional growth in the Hispanic community will yield about 9.2 million voters in 2008. “That’s the figure to beat,” Vargas said. “I firmly believe that circumstances are such that we’ll see a historic increase.”

Getting Organized

Organizers say they have a key advantage this time out, though, since they’ve been able to invest greater resources — and just as important, more time — in the process than they could in 2006. “It actually takes a little bit of time to gear up to a larger voter registration effort,” said Juan Garcia, director of Somos America, a civil rights advocacy group for Hispanics. “In the same year as the massive marches, there wasn’t enough time. That’s why you’re only starting to see efforts gear up now.”

To speed along such efforts, lobbying concerns that represent major swaths of the Hispanic community have turned their attention away from the streets — where crowds calling for legislative changes have been waning in size and energy since 2006 — toward the polls, where the community has the potential to make a decisive impact in 2008. In January 2007, several lobbying groups formed a consortium, the We Are America Alliance, to direct mobilization efforts toward the November elections. Major participants include the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the National Council of La Raza, and NALEO. The alliance is trying to target several of the logistical roadblocks to higher Hispanic turnout all at once, by coordinating a citizenship drive (the Ya Es Hora, or “It’s Time,” campaign) alongside a voter registration initiative (the A!Ve y Vota!, or “Go Vote!,” campaign) and a grass-roots voter turnout push for 2008.

“In the past, everybody was doing whatever they wanted to do, so you wound up with a lot of duplication,” said Eliseo Medina, international executive vice president of SEIU. “This time, we want to make sure we maximize the work that we’re doing, so our results aren’t less than the effort we put in.”

Another key objective this cycle, Medina says, is for Hispanics to flex their electoral strength where it counts. “We want to be one of the deciding factors in elections around the country, and nationally, this year,” he said.

Hispanic Voters: Waking the Sleeping Giant

But that’s where the election map could work to the disadvantage of Hispanic organizers. Four of the five states with the largest concentrations of Hispanics — California, Texas, New York and Illinois — account for two-thirds of the overall Hispanic population, but it’s highly unlikely that any of them will be presidential battleground states this November. As a result, lead organizers are employing a basic metric to gauge where the Hispanic vote could have the most public and decisive effect: swing states where the yet-untapped pool of Hispanic voters may exceed the 2004 margin of victory in the presidential ballot.

So Florida and Arizona, for example, which George W. Bush won that year by 5 and 11 percent margins respectively, qualify; and New Mexico, which went to Bush by a razor-thin 1 percent margin, is a yet more obvious target. Organizers are also stepping up efforts in Colorado, Nevada and Virginia, where the base of prospective Hispanic voters is growing fast, even though they’re still shy of likely election-swinging force.

Ending ‘Tamale Politics’

In the past, such appeals have generally conformed to the traditional candidates’ pitch to any ethnic constituency: a snatch of sloganeering in Spanish and photo ops with local Hispanic leaders and power brokers. But the era of low-impact engagement with issues that concern Hispanic voters is over, activists contend.

“I think the time has passed for tamale politics,” Medina said. “People have become much more attuned to what candidates do, not just what they say.”

The recent fortunes of the GOP in the Hispanic community drive that point home. In 2000, George W. Bush aggressively targeted the Hispanic vote, and came away with an impressive 35 percent show of support; by 2004, Bush was able to claim almost 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.

But in the wake of the rancorous immigration battle in the 109th Congress, Republican candidates have lost ground, garnering just 29 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2006 congressional contests. McCain’s home state of Arizona tracks what looks to be a continued nationwide migration of Hispanic voters back toward the Democratic column. Less than a quarter of the state’s Hispanic voters turned out for McCain in Arizona’s February primary, with Obama and Clinton respectively claiming about 30 percent and more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton have been conducting their own battle for Hispanic support at the polls, with Clinton holding on to a consistently wide margin via a strong get-out-the-vote effort combined with pitches for small-business tax breaks and other policies that poll well among Hispanic voters.

“You cannot ignore the Hispanic community, because it’s growing so fast, and particularly in this cycle, the community has been more energized than ever before,” said Fabiola Rodriguez-Ciampoli, director of Clinton’s Hispanic outreach effort. “You have to work for the vote.”

A big part of that work involves addressing immigration, which analysts say could unite Hispanic voters into a tighter voting bloc than they’ve ever formed before. “Virtually every Spanish-dominant voter lives in an extended family with many undocumented family members,” said Sharry. “So immigration is a defining issue for Hispanic voters in much the same way that civil rights is a defining issue for African-American voters.”

Immigration First

As Hispanic activists look to recruit and organize voters, immigration, though rarely topping the issue agenda for Hispanic voters, often binds their interests together in a way that their other concerns — such as jobs, education, the Iraq War and health care — don’t. In Virginia, Juan Carlos Ruiz is heading up a group of volunteers in the Virginia New Majority campaign. Ruiz and his team are going door to door every week, committing pre-registered voters to participate in upcoming local elections, registering others, and stressing the overall importance of taking part in the political process. He talks to people about local issues: schools, transportation, the economy and spending projects. But again and again, the talk circles back to immigration.

In the past year, several towns in Virginia’s Prince William and Fairfax counties adopted bylaws permitting police officers to check the immigration status of any person they pull over or otherwise detain. The policy has pushed several Hispanic families into surprise deportation proceedings — and the affected communities are now approaching the immigration question with a new urgency.

Hispanic Voters: Waking the Sleeping Giant

“They care about it as an issue, but don’t know that it’s in their backyard,” Ruiz said. Once that changes, he notes, “all of a sudden, you can a voting community.”

He and his colleagues also expect the organizing drive to spread beyond the 2008 presidential contest and congressional races. In 2006, more than 30,000 naturalized immigrant voters, most of them Hispanic, voted for Democrat Jim Webb in his successful Senate challenge to incumbent Republican George Allen. With GOP Sen. John W. Warner retiring, Hispanic organizers are sizing up the open race for his seat, hoping to push the immigration agenda into the foreground.