In Big Shift, Hispanics Voted Democratic

PHOENIX (By Julia Preston, NYTimes) November 7, 2008 — Hispanic voters shifted in huge numbers away from the Republicans to vote for Senator Barack Obama in the presidential election, exit polls show, providing the votes that gave him unexpectedly large margins of victory in three battleground states: Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

Mr. Obama’s pull on Hispanic voters also extended to Florida, where a majority of them voted for a Democratic presidential nominee for the first time since at least 1988, when exit polls were first conducted in the state.

In a year when turnout among many groups surged nationwide, the number of Hispanics who went to the polls increased by nearly 25 percent over 2004, with sharp rises among naturalized immigrants and young, first-time voters, according to a study by the National Association of Hispanic Elected and Appointed Officials. Hispanic support for the Democratic nominee increased by 14 points over all compared with 2004, the biggest shift toward the Democrats by any voter group.

For the first time, Hispanic voters emerged as a mobilized Democratic voting bloc in states across the country, Hispanic officials said.

“They really delivered,” said Efrain Escobedo, director of civic engagement at the Hispanic officials’ association, a bipartisan group that ran voter registration drives across the country. “This is an electorate that now understands the importance of voting, and they made a significant shift in the political landscape.”

Nationwide, Hispanics voted 67 percent for Mr. Obama and 31 percent for Senator John McCain, according to Edison/Mitofsky exit polls. In 2004, Senator John Kerry won 53 percent, while 44 percent of Hispanics voted for President Bush, a record for Hispanic support for a Republican presidential nominee.

The approximately 10 million Hispanics who went to the polls this year were 9 percent of the total of voters, up one percentage point from 2004. Their share of the electorate did not increase more substantially because turnout was high across most voting groups.

A striking increase was in Colorado, where Hispanics went from 8 percent of those who voted in 2004 to 13 percent this year, according to Edison/Mitofsky. Mr. Obama carried the Hispanic vote in Colorado by 61 percent to 38 percent, Edison/Mitofsky found.

While Mr. McCain campaigned hard in Colorado and polls showed a tight race there, in the end Mr. Obama won the state by 7.7 percentage points.

Hispanics were also crucial to Mr. Obama’s landslide in New Mexico, which, like Colorado, went for President Bush in 2004. Hispanics increased their share of New Mexico’s voters to 41 percent, from 32 percent in 2004, and 69 percent of them voted for Mr. Obama, who carried the state by more than 14 points.

“The Hispanic vote came back to the Democratic Party after a brief flirtation with the Republicans,” said New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Bill Richardson, who is Hispanic. “They turned out, erasing the fame of Hispanic voters as a sleeping giant and making them an actual giant.”

Mr. Richardson said Hispanics had been attracted to the Democratic nominee because he “spoke to them not as an ethnic group but as American voters pursuing the American dream, focusing on mainstream issues like the economy and the war in Iraq.”

In Nevada, where Hispanics were 15 percent of voters, 76 percent of them backed Mr. Obama. He carried the state by more than 12 points.

In Florida, Hispanics joined many other groups in shifting away from the Republicans toward Mr. Obama, contributing to his 2.4-point victory there. One factor was a growing group of Puerto Rican voters in Central Florida, who tended to vote Democratic while South Florida’s large Cuban-American population remained dependably Republican, said Mark Hugo Lopez, a researcher for the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.