| Super Duper Latino Vote is No One's Big Enchilada |
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| Wednesday, 06 February 2008 | |
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New America Media Editor’s Note: The closely-contested Super Duper Tuesday primaries didn't yield any clear winner for the Democrats. But it proved one thing - Latino voters did not march monolithically into the voting booths to vote on racial lines. Instead, the Latino vote segmented along other vectors, the most interesting of which is regional, says NAM contributor Roberto Lovato. Asked on Super Duper Tuesday to choose between a black candidate and a white candidate, Latinos chose both -- and neither. Obama won important Latino votes -- and delegates -- in Colorado, Arizona and other states where Clinton was expected to overwhelm him. With the support of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and other members of the Latino political machine nurtured by her husband, the former president, Clinton won more than 60 percent of the Latino electorate in states like New Jersey and New York. And regardless of the final tallies in California, the Latino electorate has already proven to be a powerful, new and greatly misunderstood segment of a multi-hued electorate of the United States. "Candidates are spending tens of millions of dollars trying to capture the attention of Latino voters, mostly in the Spanish language media," said Maria Teresa Petersen, the executive director of Voto Latino, a nonpartisan voter registration organization that also uses technology and pop culture to promote the political participation of new Latino voters. "But what the campaigns haven't figured out is that 79 percent of the 18 million eligible Latino voters consume media in English," said Petersen.               |
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