Latinos are a disparate swing bloc

PUEBLO, Colo. -- For Mexican-American Samuel Attias, the presidential race comes down to security. And in the Denver bank employee's mind, President Bush is the man who will keep potential terrorists at bay.

"I think [John] Kerry is a 9/10 person, and Bush is a 9/12 person. He realizes what is the importance of 9/11," said Attias, a 41-year-old former Democrat who reregistered as a Republican. "Kerry doesn't realize that. He thinks he can get foreign [governments] to fight for him."

Thousands of miles and two time zones away in Miami, Cuban-American Tessie Aral, also a Republican, said she can't vote for Bush. She said he has done a poor job handling Iraq and the economy.

"The final straw," Aral said, was Bush's new Cuba travel policy, which severely restricts family visits to Cuba. "This division of the Hispanic family is really important to me," said Aral, a 47-year-old travel-business owner who voted for Bush in 2000.

This is the look of the 2004 Latino vote: a disparate group of Americans united by language, but not by politics. While Hispanics nationwide have tended to vote Democratic in presidential elections, neither major party has a firm hold over the group, which officials and analysts say is driven as much by economic, social, and national security issues as by heritage.

"I guess because we're Hispanic, we're supposed to be the same. Nobody says to [House minority leader Nancy] Pelosi, 'How come you and [majority leader Tom] DeLay don't get along?' I get that question all the time," said Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American Republican of Florida and a Bush supporter. "There are things that unite us, but there's a diversity of opinion and thought."

Hispanics are the largest minority group in the country, and while they constitute 5 percent of the voting public, Latino concentrations in battleground states such as Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico could make a critical difference in next week's election. Further, both parties have made aggressive voter registration efforts among Latinos in those states.

Still, as campaign workers are finding out, Latinos make up a malleable, unpredictable voter segment.

In Colorado, Latino voter leanings differ "county by county," said Sean Tonner, campaign manager for Republican Senate candidate Peter Coors, with descendants of the old conquistadors -- whose families have been in the state for many generations -- trending more conservative than newer immigrants in the Rocky Mountain State.

"A lot of Latino families are conservative -- they're pro-life, pro-family, pro-military," said retiring Republican Representative Scott McInnis, describing his Colorado district. But Latinos in the city of Pueblo, an old steel town that Kerry visited over the weekend, tend to be Democratic because of their labor union roots, he said.

Immigration matters also don't resonate the same way among all Latino voters, some of whom are from families that immigrated decades ago and are concerned about an economic threat from newer immigrants, said Bruce Merrill, an Arizona State University pollster.

Arizona next month will vote on a referendum that would require residents to prove their citizenship before obtaining a driver's license or government benefits -- a proposal critics have called anti-immigrant. But Merrill said his polling indicated that some 25 percent of Latinos support the measure, because they don't want to lose their jobs to illegal immigrants coming in from Mexico.

In Florida, Republicans have long enjoyed a strong advantage among Cuban-American voters. But this state's Hispanic population is changing. Puerto Ricans, while still in the minority, are now the fastest-growing Latino group in Florida, and the Cuban-American vote itself is also shifting.

Some younger Cuban-Americans, like Aral, are upset about the hard-line travel policy instituted this summer, when the Bush administration issued new rules saying Cuban-Americans can visit the island only once every three years, instead of once a year. For the purposes of such travel, aunts, uncles, and cousins are no longer considered immediate family. Previously, those relatives satisfied the terms of "family" visit for the US government; now, Cuban-Americans must be visiting parents, siblings, or children to get a visit approved.

While the policy is popular among many older Cuban-Americans with no family in Cuba and therefore no personal interest in returning themselves, it has upset a small but potentially critical group of younger Cuban-Americans, said Joe Garcia, former head of the Cuban-American National Foundation, a virulently anti-Fidel Castro group.

While former vice president Al Gore took about 17 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida in 2000, Kerry is polling at 20 percent to 25 percent among all Cuban-Americans in the Sunshine State, Garcia said.

Given the closeness of the 2000 tally, "If one half of one percent of Cuban-Americans had stayed home, we'd be talking about Al Gore as president of the United States," said Garcia, who recently left the foundation he headed to join the New Democratic Network, an advocacy group that backs Democratic candidates.

Gore took about two-thirds of the national Latino vote in 2000, but Republicans hope that Bush, building on his popularity among Mexican-Americans in Texas, can chip away at that percentage.

Unlike African-Americans, who share a history and a common struggle for civil rights in the United States, Latinos have differing histories and never developed a group allegiance to one party, the way African-Americans did with the Democratic Party, Merrill noted.

Newer arrivals might be more concerned about immigration issues and bilingual education, while entrenched Hispanic families might be more focused on tax issues and national security. Cuban-Americans have a particular focus on punishing Castro, while Mexican-Americans tend to be more concerned with border issues.

Since Latinos have not coalesced around a joint political quest -- such as the fight for voting rights or against discriminatory Jim Crow laws -- they also have no leaders who unify the ethnic group, such as Jesse Jackson has done for African-Americans, Merrill said. While Hispanics now hold some key political jobs, "they have no historic leader," he said.

At the El Rancho Carniceria, a butcher and grocery store in Pueblo, Hispanic patrons were divided on the presidential race. "I'm voting for Bush. I feel he'll help the Mexicans, the Hispanic community," said Jose Mendes, 42.

Anthony Martinez, 46, said he would vote for Kerry because he disapproved of the postwar strategy in Iraq. "I do believe in the war, in a way, but they ought to be spending money on our own country, rather than someone else's," Martinez said.

Maria Cardona, director of the Hispanic Project at the New Democratic Network, said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton earned 80 percent of the Latino vote in New York State when she won in 2000, indicating strong Latino support for Democrats.

Yet two years later, a Republican, Governor George Pataki, won 45 to 50 percent of the Latino vote in New York, suggesting Latinos were persuadable.

"Because they were not brought up with the tradition of the two-party system, they don't know a lot about the differences between the two parties," Cardona said.