Podcast: Latino Republicans and the Florida Primary
About 11 per cent of Florida’s registered Republicans are Latino. How they vote could have a significant impact on the outcome of Tuesday’s GOP Primary.
About 11 per cent of Florida’s registered Republicans are Latino. How they vote could have a significant impact on the outcome of Tuesday’s GOP Primary.
Last week’s elections resulted in victories for a large number of Republican candidates with immigrant roots.
As primary season nears, Hispanic voters are expressing their disappointment over President Obama’s “promesa rota” on immigration reform.
Both presidential candidates spent time in Florida in the past couple of days, fighting hard for the battleground state’s coveted 27 electoral votes. Hispanics –especially those living in Central Florida– are considered an important voting population to achieving that goal. But in a troubling sign for John McCain, one of his key Hispanic supporters in Florida is apparently unhappy with how the campaign is being run.
“They have completely ignored the Hispanic vote” in the central region of the state, Bill Negron, a member of the McCain steering committee in that area, told correspondent Maribel Hastings of the ImpreMedia Spanish-language newspaper chain.
Negron expressed bewilderment over the way the Republican campaign has been conducted in central Florida. As we’ve said before, that part of the state is considered crucial because of its high numbers of swing voters. Hispanics in the area –mostly Puerto Ricans– tend to counterbalance the heavily conservative south Florida Latino voters, who are mainly Cuban American.
“People ask me where McCain’s people are, where McCain is,” Negron told Hastings. “And it’s not only the Hispanic vote, but the vote in general. I don’t know if they took it for granted, or it’s just that they don’t know what they are doing, or that they don’t have the funds. But there was no work with churches, nor with civic groups and organizations here.”