We Vote.

Can Hillary say gracias? She sure should.

With her campaign for president looking like it was on the ropes, and every knowledgeable observer in the country – including her husband – saying primary wins in Texas and Ohio were crucial for her to continue, the New York senator banked on Hispanics.

It worked.

But her campaign-saving win in Texas was more than just a vital victory for the former first lady. It’s evidence that Latinos not only have the potential to make or break a candidate’s bid, it shows that in 2008 we’re actually going to the polls in record numbers and using our powerful swing vote to make the critical difference.

It shouldn’t be surprising, especially in Texas. She was only taking a page from George W. Bush’s playbook.

As I pointed out in the chapter “We Vote” in my book, Bush learned about the power of the Hispanic vote early in his political career. It made him governor of Texas twice. Then it made him president, twice.

The first time he ran for governor, in 1994, he whittled away at the Democratic hold on Latino voters. He got less than 30 percent, but that was enough to push him over the top.

Four years later, he remembered his lesson well. He targeted Latino voters, and made history: He pulled in 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, an unprecedented number for a Republican, and became the first Texas governor in a quarter of a century to win re-election.

When he ran for president in 2000, Bush went after Hispanics again, right from the start. In advance of the Iowa Caucus, Team Bush was already running a 60-second Spanish-language radio spot aimed at them.

It was true. Bush’s campaign team flooded the Spanish-language media with translated news releases, audio and video clips. They offered interview opportunities, in Spanish. He was the first Republican presidential candidate ever to run Spanish-language TV ads during the primary.

In 2004, Bush repeated his Spanish-language strategies. We all know the result. He won again, with an even wider margin of the Hispanic vote – a whopping 44 percent, according to some counts.

In Texas today, Latinos make up 25 percent of the eligible electorate. That’s one out of every four eligible voters. Yet, on Tuesday, they outdid themselves: Hispanics accounted for 34 percent of the Democratic primary vote – more than one out of every three votes cast!

And two-thirds of them voted for Clinton, according to Associated Press exit polls.

Latinos had a similar impact in California. On primary day there, they accounted for 30 percent of the turnout. That’s almost double what it was (16 percent) in 2004. And they voted for Clinton by a more than two-to-one margin – 67 percent vs. 32 percent for Barack Obama.

You can trace all of this back to a giant among Latinos, Willie Velasquez. What Cesar Chavez was to the farm workers, Velasquez was to Hispanic voters.

He believed that voting held the key to empowering Latinos. His rallying cry was “su voto es su voz” – your vote is your voice.

In 1974, Velasquez founded the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project to get Latinos to vote. Between then and his untimely death from kidney cancer in 1988, the project registered millions; it won court judgments against gerrymandering and the at-large voting districts that diluted the voting strength of Latinos and other minorities.

Velasquez died three days before he was supposed to introduce Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic convention.
But his efforts live on.

You can rest assured that once we are down to the two nominees, the Latino vote will be courted heavily by both sides. Especially now, and much to the dismay of the far right, that the Republicans have a champion for the undocumented.

Jose Cancela is Principal of Hispanic USA Inc, a full service Hispanic Market Communications firm. He has also the author of “The Power of Business en Español, Seven Fundamental Keys to Unlocking the Potential of the Spanish Language Hispanic Market” Rayo / HarperCollins

http://www.hispanicusa.net>
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