The Hispanic vote

In the front page of the Sunday New York Times there's a piece about the importance this year of Hispanic voters in the Democratic primary. Here's the meat of the article:

In the last presidential election, Hispanic voters accounted for a significant part of the overall Democratic primary electorate in California (16 percent), New York (11 percent), Arizona (17 percent) and Florida (9 percent), all states that will hold primaries by Feb 5. Sergio Bendixen, a pollster hired by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign to study Hispanic voting trends, said: “The Hispanic vote has never been all that important in the presidential primary process in the United States. But that will change in 2008.”

The Times story offers no evidence for why this change will occur. It takes the "scramble for Hispanic support" for granted, and spends the rest of the article talking about the various candidates.

To my thinking there is a real shift in California moving up the primary calendar. California has more than one-forth of all the Hispanics in the US (Half of all Hispanics live in two states: California and Texas), and it is now on Super Duper Tuesday. (The primary calendar for 2008 is below.) This makes courting this voting bloc in such an important state so much more significant. But that's not due to any shift in voting demographics.

Its pretty common to overplay the Hispanic vote. Bill Schneider has this to say in the Atlantic online, for example:

The minority population of the United States is now just over 100 million, according to Census Bureau estimates. That's one-third of the country. The largest minority? Hispanics—44 million, compared with 40 million African-Americans. The fastest-growing minority? Hispanics. Their population has increased by more than 25 percent since 2000.

We can break this down, however, with some numbers from the Pew Hispanic Center. In 2004, Hispanics numbered 41.3 million people. Of this total, 14.1 million were under 18, 11 million were not citizens, leaving only 16 million eligible voters, of which 7.5 million actually voted. Hispanic turnout was 47% in 2004. Calculating the number of Hispanics who vote is very trickly business, but the percentage of the electorate who was Hispanic has been roughly the same in federal elections since 2000.

The potential is there for a significant shift in American politics when Hispanics vote in higher numbers. That will happen with continued immigration, and inculturation resulting in higher Hispanic turnout. But it is still a matter for the future, not yet the present.

One last note: Hispanics tend to vote Democratic. There's a good article on the Hispanic vote in 2004, debunking the myth that Bush won 44% of Hispanics in his reelection. It was really more like 32%--the traditional 2-to-1 Democratic to Republican ratio. (The Pew Hispanic center estimated 40%.)