President Barack Obama’s top campaign officials said Wednesday that the Republican candidates’ intensifying efforts to appeal to the most conservative segment of the GOP were alienating Hispanics and other potential voters.
Citing a Fox News Latino poll released this week that showed that Latino voters favor Obama by six-to-one over any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, the president’s re-election adviser David Axelrod recalled the hard-line positions that front-runner Mitt Romney and other GOP candidates have taken on immigration.
Fox Latino
And from the original Fox News Latino story:
But the poll shows that the overwhelming choice among likely Latino voters is President Obama. In head-to-head match-ups none of the GOP candidates would garner more than 14 percent of the Latino vote come November, the poll said.
Despite the Fox News sourcing, the poll appears legitimate.
The Fox News Latino/Latin Insights poll was conducted by Latin Insights, a New York based independent research company, and compiled through a telephone survey conducted among a nationally representative sample of 1,200 likely Latino voters. The respondents were given the option of completing the survey in English and Spanish.
Which leads to this wry observation from a GOP strategist:
If we don’t do better among Latinos, we are not going to be talking about how to get back Florida in the presidential race, we are going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”
And he was talking about the 2-1 margin which Obama beat McCain by as a looming catastrophe. A 6-1 ratio might put Texas in play in 2012.
If Democrats can get Latinos to go out and vote. The story notes that while Obama gets high marks from Latinos overall, one remaining area of concern is immigration policy.
Paradoxically, immigration is also the issue in which President Obama receives his lowest approval rating among Latino voters --some 41 percent disapprove of the job he is doing regarding immigration, with the number climbing higher to 56 percent among Latinos between the age of 35 and 44.
A little more effort on this front, combined with the ongoing GOP hate-fest, and Democrats will be reaping the sorts of numbers from the Latino voters that they do from the African - American ones. And yes, Texas will be in play.