Democrats warned on GOP, Hispanics

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Democrats must step up the courting of Hispanics who have voted Republican in recent years or risk losing this year's presidential election, states a Democratic campaign strategy memorandum.

In a surprisingly frank analysis of the political challenges their party faces this year in the largest and fastest-growing minority voter group, Democrats were told that Hispanic immigrants do not have the same loyalty to the Democratic Party that second- and third-generation Hispanic voters have; that President Bush and his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, are seen as especially popular among the voting bloc; and that the president only needs to increase his Hispanic vote by a few percentage points to win re-election.

"The Republicans are not aiming to get the majority of the Hispanic vote, they don't need it -- they only need 5 or 6 more percentage points to win. And they are being incredibly aggressive about making it happen," according to the strategy memo that was presented at the Democratic congressional retreat last week. A copy of the memo was obtained from a Democratic official.

Hispanics made up about 6 percent of the electorate in the 2000 election, and Mr. Bush won 35 percent of their vote, while Al Gore drew 62 percent. But Democratic Party officials estimate that the Hispanic vote has since grown to about 9 percent of the electorate, and the Bush campaign is preparing an unprecedented voter-outreach campaign to pull a larger percentage of the voting bloc into the Republican column in November.

"They have aggressively and very effectively used Spanish-language TV as the vehicle to reach the mostly swing, Spanish-dominant part of the electorate, which is now a majority of Latino voters in this country," the memo said.

Maria Cardona, vice president of the New Democrat Network (NDN) and the memo's author, who presented these and other findings to the Democratic Congressional Caucus last week, says that Hispanics represent the target group that can be more easily drawn to the GOP's message.

"They were not brought up in the farm labor movement. They don't really have this loyalty to our party, so they are more persuadable. Also, they come from places where the government wasn't necessarily friendly," Ms. Cardona said in an interview yesterday.

The size of this Hispanic target group has mushroomed over the past two decades. In 1988, the share of foreign-born Hispanic voters who spoke mostly Spanish was 18 percent. By 2003, that number "has skyrocketed to 51 percent," the memo said.

Most worrisome of all to the Democrats, the memo said, is that this is a "swing vote" group that "swings harder and quicker than any other constituency."