Latino Vote Still Lags Its Potential
Tuesday, September 28, 2004 at 07:14PM Much of the Electorate is Latino but not on Election day:
Latino Vote Still Lags Its Potential
Slowly but inexorably, activists across the Southwest region of teh
country are moving more Latinos to the polls; the Citizenship Project,
has registered 3,000 new Latino voters in Las Vegas this year. Such
progress is gradually strengthening Democratic prospects not only in
Nevada and New Mexico, swing states in recent presidential elections,
but also in Colorado and Arizona, which the GOP has dominated. In all
four states, Latinos make up a larger share of voters today than in
1992. And they are a reliably Democratic block. Experts in both
parties agree that eventually, this demographic trend could give the
Southwest the largest concentration of tossup states outside of the
industrial Midwest. But Latinos are still not registering and voting in
numbers large enough to maximize their influence. As a result, in
Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, Latinos represent a smaller
share of the vote -- in some cases much smaller -- than their share of
the population, according to exit polls on election days. Although
Latinos are growing more important with each election, they are
unlikely to become a decisive factor in these states until they
overcome the barriers to political participation that plagued the
canvassers in Las Vegas. . [more]
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