A growing Hispanic vote still favors GOP
It is impossible to understand Florida politics without taking into account the rising political influence of its Hispanic population. Hispanics are the state's largest minority group, comprising 16.8 percent of the total population of 16 million. They are also a sizable portion of the state's voters. Hispanics make up 11 percent of Florida's electorate, a number that has important implications for the 2004 presidential election. When one tries to analyze Florida's Hispanic politics through lenses ground to the prescription of other states, one comes away with a vision that is decidedly out of focus. Things work differently in Florida. Whereas Latinos are overwhelmingly registered as Democrats in other parts of the nation, in Florida, Hispanics are a pivotal faction in the governing Republican coalition. While in other parts of the country Hispanics vote at rates that are a mere fraction of the voter turnout rates of non-Latin whites, Cuban-Americans in South Florida vote at a rate comparable to non-Hispanic whites, and sometime even higher. Even the terms are different: Hispanic is preferred in Florida while Latino is favored in the rest of the country.
With dramatic population shifts in the past decade, Florida can no longer be characterized as a suburb of Havana. Today, Cubans are a minority of the Hispanic population -- just 31 percent. The rest are divided among Puerto Ricans (18 percent), Mexicans (13.5 percent), and more than a million Colombians, Peruvians, Nicaraguans, Dominicans, Venezuelans, and Guatemalans (37.41 percent of all Florida Hispanics).
But the majority of Florida's non-Cuban Hispanics are not yet citizens and therefore ineligible to vote. Still, the question remains: As this voting bloc emerges will it vote differently from its Cuban-American neighbors? Right now, Florida's non-Cuban Hispanic population is so diverse that it's difficult to mobilize around a common non-Cuban Latino agenda.
Moreover, even as they grow into their political strength, it's possible, even likely, that non-Cuban Hispanics will share the views of their Cuban-American neighbors. Like the Cubans, a large number of Florida's Hispanics immigrated to the United States because they were fleeing either communist regimes or Marxist guerrilla groups. These include: Venezuelans fleeing the leftist Chavez regime, Colombians who left their homeland because of the violence of the Marxist FRAC, Nicaraguans who left in the 1980s during the rule of the Cuban backed Sandinista regime, and Peruvians escaping from extremely violent leftist groups. Cuban-Americans have reached out to these other anticommunist Latinos in order to form political alliances. It was just such an alliance that elected Republican Juan Carlos Zapata, a Colombian-American, to the Florida House of Representative. Such strong ties between Cuban-Americans and other conservative Hispanic immigrants makes it extremely difficult to developed an alternative agenda among non-Cuban Hispanics.
Even among traditionally Democratic Hispanic groups, such as Puerto Ricans, Republicans have done better in Florida than in any other part of the country. Republican John Quinones, a Puerto Rican, defeated a Democratic Hispanic in a central Florida district heavily populated by Puerto Ricans. While Al Gore received an estimated 52 percent (98,716 to 91,123) of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote in the 2000 presidential election, Governor Jeb Bush easily defeated his Democratic challenger Bill McBride by a 2-to-1 margin among non-Cuban Hispanics in the 2002 gubernatorial contest.
As far as the 2004 election is concerned, despite the impressive growth of the non-Cuban Hispanic population, an overwhelming majority of Hispanic office holders and voters in Florida are still Cuban-Americans. If Cuban-American voters continue to give Republicans their strong support, Florida's Hispanics will be squarely in the GOP column this election year, as they were for President Bush in 2000. (Bush defeated Gore 356,357 to 131,804 among Cuban-Americans.)
Should John Kerry wish to do better, he must continue his strong advocacy of universal health care, develop an articulate and realistic policy toward Cuban democratization, and strongly support the economic embargo against the Castro regime. That's what Florida's Hispanic voters care about -- and they'll be watching.
Dario Moreno, is a professor of political science and director of the Metropolitan Center at Florida International University in Miami, and co-editor with Kevin Hill and Susan MacManus of "Florida's Politics: Ten Media Markets, One Powerful State."
