When this campaign started up, the conventional wisdom was that the Hispanic vote was up for grabs. Hispanics had overwhelmingly supporter Hillary Clinton in the primary, and this was assumed to be as much the product of antipathy to African-Americans as preference for Clinton. Meanwhile, John McCain had been a leader in the fight for comprehensive immigration reform, and was expected to perform historically well among Hispanic voters. But as Ben Smith reports today, neither is happening. Instead, "polls show Obama winning the broadest support from Latino voters of any Democrat in a decade, while McCain is struggling to reach 30 percent, closer to Senator Bob Dole's dismal 1996 result than to Bush's historic 40% four years ago." Which is probably all to say that parties matter. John McCain's party is restrictionist with xenophobic tendencies. barack Obama's party is not. For all the talk of how these two candidates were to prove sui generis, the reality is they've performed, broadly speaking, as you'd expect the generic Democrat and the generic Republican to perform, and their demographic coalitions are pretty near to what you'd have assumed before you knew the identity of the candidates.
