For Barack Obama's campaign, the Jan. 19 Nevada caucus was a wake-up call when it came to Latino outreach. Despite the endorsement of the powerful Culinary Workers Union, which is 40 percent Latino, Clinton won 64 percent of the Latino vote.
"Obama was able to get these endorsements from immigrant-heavy unions, but often idealistic, nonimmigrant people [were] the organizers," explained David Ayón, an expert on Mexican-American immigration and politics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. "The organizers were sold on the idea of uniting black and Latino workers under Obama, but they weren't able to deliver the vote."
Hillary Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen, an expert on the Latino electorate, made headlines during the run-up to the Nevada vote when he suggested Obama's deficit could be attributed to Latino antipathy toward African Americans. Other experts say tensions between the two communities are real, but there's little evidence they are a significant factor in the Democratic primary. Rather, Latino voters are comfortable with the Clinton name, and Obama may have waited too long to appeal to the Latino community outside of Illinois.
Now the challenge for Obama is to chip away at Latino voters' loyalty to the Clinton brand before Super Tuesday. Latinos are expected to make up almost a quarter of the California electorate tomorrow, as well as 37 percent of voters in New Mexico, 17 percent in Arizona, 12 percent in Colorado, 11 percent in New York, 10 percent in New Jersey, and 8 percent in Illinois. But many observers say his campaign is targeting the demographic too late to make up for a lack of name recognition.
The campaign's mistake may have been in believing Obama's more aggressive stance on immigrants' rights would speak for itself, without active promotion. While both Obama and Clinton supported the comprehensive immigration reform bill that failed in Congress last year, only Obama has promised, if elected, to return to the issue during his first year in office. Obama also supports driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants; Clinton does not. And during the Jan. 31 Democratic debate in Los Angeles, Obama struck the more conciliatory tone on illegal immigration. In response to a question that blamed immigration for African American unemployment, Clinton agreed with the premise, while Obama called it "a case of scapegoating that I do not believe in, that I do not subscribe to."
Yet for months, national opinion polls have shown Clinton enjoying a two-to-one lead over Obama among Latino voters. In part, that's not surprising: Bill Clinton's administration enjoyed a reputation for promoting Latino leadership (Henry Cisneros, Bill Richardson, and Federico Peña all served in his Cabinet), and many of today's Latino voters became naturalized citizens in the 1990s, casting their first ballots for President Clinton.
Hillary Clinton's campaign -- headed by Campaign Manager Patty Solis Doyle, the daughter of Mexican immigrants -- has made consistent efforts to reach out to key members of the Latino political class. That attention earned Clinton early endorsements from Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles; Dolores Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers; and a host of other Latino luminaries.
While Chicago's Latino community has long been behind Obama, key endorsements from California leaders, including Maria Elena Durazo, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and Rep. Linda Sanchez (her sister Loretta, also a congresswoman from California, supports Clinton) have come only since the new year. Last Friday the California SEIU, which had originally supported John Edwards, endorsed Obama. And on Saturday La Opinion, Los Angeles' largest Spanish-language daily with a circulation of 50,000, endorsed the Illinois senator, even though the paper usually stays neutral in primaries.
Those endorsements, while helpful, may have come too late in the game to shift voters on the ground. Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Project in San Antonio, is familiar with both campaigns' Latino outreach strategies. "The Clintons are experienced operatives," he said. "They don't make stupid mistakes like forgetting to call the United Farm Workers. With Obama's people, it's like herding cats, chaos. [Obama's campaign] is creative though, there's innovation."
Clintons' record on domestic policy issues such as health care, as well as her advocacy on behalf of children, could also be giving her a leg up in the Latino community, whose policy preferences don't always mirror those of the general population. While Latinos have long opposed the Iraq War, a December 2007 survey from the Pew Hispanic center showed Latinos are less concerned about foreign policy than they are about education, health care, and the economy and jobs. And Clinton speaks more often than Obama does about the sub-prime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately affects Latinos.
"She has run an 'it's the economy, stupid' campaign," Gonzalez said. "That corresponds to the general profile of the Latino voter, which is sort of a working-class populist with an ethnic twist."
In its recent grassroots outreach in the Southwest, the Obama campaign has tried to poke holes in the argument that Clinton is uniquely suited to solving Latinos' economic woes. Indeed, immigrants' rights activists remember that Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare reform legislation was designed to deny public assistance to even legal immigrants. Obama hasn't promised to change those laws, but he has focused his appeal on economic solidarity.
At a rally in downtown Los Angeles on Jan. 31, Obama spoke about bringing the African American and Latino communities together when he worked as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. A new Obama television advertisement airing in California and Arizona features Rep. Luis Gutierrez from Chicago saying in Spanish, "We know what it feels like to be used as a scapegoat just because of our background and our last name. And no one understands this better than Barack Obama." The ad shows a photograph of Obama marching for immigrants' rights on May 1, 2006.
Such a cross-ethnic appeal, emphasizing the similarities between minority groups, could be especially powerful among young people, a key Obama constituency. No poll breaks Latino voters out by age, but most observers believe Obama garners significantly more support among Latino Democrats under 30 than he does among their parents. While Obama may lag behind Clinton in establishment Latino support, Sen. Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Obama as the heir to Robert Kennedy's legacy can only help among baby-boomer Latinos, who remember RFK marching arm-in-arm with United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez.
The UFW, though, has endorsed Clinton.
In the end, Obama may be running less against the establishment than against the clock. Most voters in the 22 Super Tuesday states, regardless of their ethnicity, are just now tuning in to the presidential race, and just now meeting a guy named Barack Obama. That means it will take a leap of faith for many voters to support Obama -- especially if their community has a long-standing relationship with Team Clinton.
