Will Latinos Continue Moving Democratic?

After last year's elections, Lionel Sosa watched the returns and saw more than 30 years of his life's work endangered. Sosa, the advertising executive who, along with close ally, Karl Rove ("we've been good friends a long, long time"), engineered the GOP's historic advance among Latinos in the 2004 elections, had warned party leaders of the consequences of the anti-immigrant policies of certain of its members.

Latino support for Republicans rose from 21 percent in 1996, to 31 percent in 2000, to between 40 to 44 percent in 2004 (the number is still being debated). In 2006, after the final results were tallied, less than 29 percent of Latinos voted Republican, and Sosa publicly "I told you so'd" the GOP with comments like, "We as a party got the spanking we needed." The much-vaunted rise of the Latino Right had reached, at the very least, a pause.

From his office in San Antonio, Sosa told me, "I don't think everything I worked for is lost." Asked why, he relayed an insight given him by Ronald Reagan, who said that Latinos "are Republicans and they don't know it yet." Democrats should not see Latinos "in their hip pocket," Sosa added, because of their "conservative values" -- rooted in their religion, strong work ethic, and traditional families. Sosa is not entirely wrong. What will happen to the rightward-leaning tendencies among the country's ultimate swing voters depends not just on the political machinations of the GOP, which just appointed Cuban immigrant Mel Martinez as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Nor does the direction of Latino politics depend solely on what the Democrats -- who just appointed Tejano congressmember Silvestre Reyes as head of the powerful House Intelligence Committee -- do or don't do.

While influential and important, the Machiavellian movements of the strategists and pollsters take place atop more important institutions and subterranean trends that will ultimately define the direction of the Latino Right -- and, possibly the Latino politic. Chief among these influences are the soft-power effects of things like culture and religion, as well as the hard-power pull of militarism and jobs. The rightward tendencies among Latinos have more to do with things like some Latinos' embrace of a "white" identity (50 percent checked off "white" in the 2000 Census); the intensive focus on Latinos by Roman Catholic and evangelical Christian churches, the military, and the criminal justice system; and trends not as easily measured by surveys or exit polls. Such factors will determine how deep into the rabbit hole of rightward tendencies Latinos will go.

The stunning drop of support for George W. Bush and his party from approximately 40 percent (the best analyses confirm this number, not the 44 percent touted by Rove and the Republicans) in 2004, to the less than 29 percent support in 2006, demonstrates only that the consolidation of a Latino Right is not a completely done deal. Sosa and Rove know better than most Democrats and media pundits the cultural, identity, and economic realities that change minds. They expanded the conservative base by building on segments and issues in the Latino community that do tend conservative.

Nowhere is this clearer than among reliably conservative Latino evangelicals. A study by the Pew Hispanic Center concluded that much, if not most, of the growth in the GOP's Latino support came from Protestant evangelicals. While Latino Roman Catholic support for Bush was at 33 percent in both 2000 and 2004, support for Bush among Latino evangelicals mushroomed from 44 percent in 2000 to a 56 percent majority in 2004, according to the study. While no detailed analyses of the Latino vote in 2006 have been published to date, it is safe to assume that these numbers reflect the discontent expressed by Latino evangelical leaders since the introduction of the Sensenbrenner immigration bill in December 2005, which offended many with its call for a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and other harsh measures.