Hispanics Still Solidly Supporting Obama

In just the last forty years in the United States, the Hispanic population has grown from about 14.6 million to 50.5 million. Last week the U.S. Census Bureau announced that last year there were more minority babies born in the United States than white babies. Add those two facts to the fact that the fastest growing portion of the United States population in the United States was Hispanics, and you can get a pretty good picture of just how important the Hispanic vote has become -- and how it will grow in importance with each passing election.

Back in 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain got about 31% of the Hispanic vote. Obviously, Republicans must do better than that in the future to win elections (since the percentage of the vote that is Hispanic will grow with each election). With their anti-minority, anti-Hispanic, and anti-immigrant policies (which seem to be growing more prominent within their party each year), the Republicans seem to be ignoring this growing and increasingly important portion of the electorate.

Of course this brings up the question of whether Willard Mitt Romney (aka Wall Street Willie) can do better among Hispanics this year than McCain did in 2008. Last March, a Fox News Poll showed that Romney was actually polling worse than McCain did among Hispanics. And now a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo Poll shows that Romney has not improved his position at all among Hispanics in the last few months. Here is what the poll shows:

IF THE ELECTION WAS HELD TODAY, WHO WOULD YOU VOTE FOR?
Obama...............61%
Romney...............27%
Neither...............5%
Undecided...............7%

DO YOU HAVE A POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE FEELING ABOUT. . .
President Obama
positive...............58%
negative...............23%

Mitt Romney
positive...............26%
negative...............35%

And it's not just President Obama that has the support of most Hispanics. The Democratic Party is much more popular than the Republican Party. Here are those numbers:

DO YOU HAVE A POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE FEELING ABOUT. . .
Democratic Party
positive...............51%
negative...............19%

Republican Party
positive...............22%
negative...............40%

WOULD YOU PREFER THE NEXT CONGRESS TO BE CONTROLLED BY DEMOCRATS OR REPUBLICANS?
Democrats...............58%
Republicans...............30%

Obviously Romney has a lot of ground to make up (unless he thinks he can win with only the white vote -- since a majority of Asians and African-Americans polled also support President Obama). Yesterday, Romney spoke before The Latino Coalition. He mentioned nothing in his speech about immigration (an issue very important to many Hispanics). Instead, he spoke about improving education, saying:

Here we are in the most prosperous nation, but millions of kids are getting a third-world education. And, America’s minority children suffer the most. This is the civil-rights issue of our era. It’s the great challenge of our time.

The problem with that is that about a month ago he spoke to a group of his largest donors and told them he would make massive cuts in education funding. How is he going to do that and improve education for minorities at the same time. Obviously he is lying to one of those groups (and I suspect it is the Hispanics). He seems to think Hispanics are not very bright and will believe his lies. That's an assumption that he'll regret in November.