Hispanic voters in the Southwest are a coveted prize

TUCSON -- Alberto Ramirez is mighty popular lately. The Democratic candidates for president, with their promises of better health care and education, want him. The Republican president they hope to replace, with his proposal to give temporary work permits to undocumented immigrants, wants him. All of them are trying hard -- sometimes in middling Spanish -- to make inroads with Hispanic voters like Ramirez.

"They're more receptive to our needs because we're growing in numbers, and our voices are being heard," said Ramirez, 32, who teaches adult literacy classes at El Pueblo Neighborhood Center. "We've got a long way to go, but politicians are more accommodating to Hispanic voters."

Hispanic voters have never before been courted so fervently. With Arizona and New Mexico figuring more prominently than ever in this year's nominating process, the large Hispanic populations of each state could make the difference today for a candidate. Today's other primaries and caucuses -- in South Carolina, Missouri, Oklahoma, Delaware, and North Dakota -- will test the candidates' pull in the South, in the nation's heartland, and among African-American voters. Arizona and New Mexico will be their first tests among the nation's largest minority group, with wins in those two states likely to boost credibility among the rest of the country's estimated 37.4 million Latinos, particularly in the delegate-rich states of California and Texas, which also have large Hispanic populations. But Republicans see general-election potential among Hispanic voters, too, believing them more socially conservative and more receptive to GOP pitches than are other minority voters.

"The numbers in the Latino community are growing significantly, and are going to be in the future," said Jose Ibarra, a Tucson City Councilman who is an organizer for Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. "Both parties see this as an opportunity to get in on the ground level, and court the community for future elections."

In Arizona, 1.3 million of the state's 5.3 million residents -- about 25 percent -- are Hispanic, up from about 700,000 in 1990. (In New Mexico, Hispanics number about 756,000 -- 42 percent of the population). But only about 250,000 Hispanic Arizonans were registered to vote as of 2000, according to the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project -- 11 percent of all registered voters. . Activists say that unless Hispanic residents flex their muscle in 2004, they will not be as coveted in future campaigns. So the stakes are high this year for Hispanics as well as for the candidates making a play for their votes.

"We will only continue to get that investment and attention if we translate our population numbers into voting numbers," Ibarra said. "To get to that point, there has to be a significant jump in this presidential election. If not, a lot of political strategists will write us off."

On Friday afternoon, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was at El Pueblo Neighborhood Center in shirtsleeves, trying to sell Kerry to a mostly Hispanic crowd of 200. ("All the Latinos and Latinas here, John Kerry appreciates your support," Kennedy told them).

Kerry, who has been airing a Spanish-language television ad for several days, also has the support of Congressman Ed Pastor, who is Hispanic and represents Phoenix.

Several candidates were set to attend a meeting of the League of United Latin American Citizens last night in Phoenix.

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who has pulled considerable resources out of Arizona since the Iowa caucuses, is supported by Congressman Raul M. Grijalva, a longtime Tucson politician with a devoted base of liberal and Hispanic voters. Grijalva said Dean's manner won him over.

"He said, `I'm going to approach your community with the same message as every other community,' " Grijalva recalled. "It wasn't patronizing; it was inclusive. I've been a big critic of national campaigns because of the disrespect they have for [Hispanic] voters. They only go after that vote as a cattle call on election day."

But Democrats have no lock on Hispanic voters. President Bush courted Hispanics aggressively in 2000, and won 35 percent of the Latino vote. In last year's recall election in California, fully 40 percent of Hispanic voters chose Arnold Schwarzenegger (who had supported a proposition to withhold state services from undocumented immigrants) or state Senator Tom McClintock, both Republicans.

To win over Hispanic voters, candidates will have to convince them they can solve the same problems that beset the rest of the country. Conversations with Latino voters in Tucson indicate that they have the same concerns as those of many voters everywhere: the economy and unemployment, the cost of health care, the quality of schools, the president's conduct of the war on Iraq. While immigration looms large in Arizona, where many illegal migrants cross the border every day, the issue is not the first one mentioned by most Hispanic voters at political gatherings.

"Hispanic issues are very similar to Democratic issues: education, quality health care, neighborhood revitalization, crime prevention," said Ramon Valadez, Pima County supervisor and a volunteer with the Kerry campaign. "But take a look: Particularly in the Southwest, Hispanics live with these issues every day; they're lived firsthand by minority communities."

Bush's proposal to give temporary work permits to undocumented workers has not swayed Democrats like Valadez.

"We get a lot of rhetoric from the other party on immigration, but they fail to address these other issues," he said. "In the State of the Union, we got 45 minutes of foreign policy, and the president's version of domestic policy is: stop same-sex marriage, and tax cuts. There are far more important issues in terms of domestic policy."

Ramirez, the literacy teacher, said immigration is his number one issue because so many new arrivals pass through his classrooms. While some of his students are optimistic about Bush's proposal, Ramirez thinks it is "an ace up his sleeve to get some votes."

But Arizona's recent history suggests that not all Hispanic voters may be as skeptical of Bush's intentions. According to pollster Earl de Berge, who surveys Arizona's Hispanic population twice a year, Hispanic Arizonans are moving steadily into the middle class, and closer to the center politically. In 1990, his polling indicated that 82 percent of Hispanics surveyed identified themselves as Democrats, and 12 percent as Republicans. Now, 66 percent of Hispanics surveyed identified themselves as Democrats, and the share of Republicans has grown to 29 percent.

Further, 41 percent of this heavily Catholic group call themselves conservative, and 20 percent liberal. Bush won Arizona by 6 percentage points over Al Gore in 2000. About a third of Hispanic voters in Arizona chose the Republican.

"What we're seeing is partly due to assimilation, and partly due to some level of success among the Hispanic community in business," Valadez said. "The Republican Party does a fabulous job of making the argument that they are the party of business, of economic development, of jobs."

Ramirez attributes the Hispanic votes for the GOP to his belief that "a lot of Hispanics, when they become citizens, they become complacent, they become part of the status quo, and they forget where they came from. And they become Republican."

Ramirez, a first-generation Mexican-American, said his brother is a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000. "A lot of the things Bush says he believes in, my brother believes in," Ramirez said. "Gun rights, abortion, even some of the immigration issues."

But he and his parents are loyal to the Democrats, Ramirez said. And nobody discusses politics at dinner.