INTRODUCTION
Every four years, during the election season, Latinos
1
are re-discovered by political
parties, the media and political pundits (DeSipio and de la Garza, 2002; Ramos 2004).
Every four years, Republicans and Democrats spend millions of dollars on Spanish
language advertisements to court Hispanics. Every four years, thanks to the new
demographics of the nation, the Latino vote is depicted by the media and political
analysts as having the potential to determine or swing the outcome of the presidential
election. In the past two presidential elections Republicans have made significant appeals
for Latino votes. Since 2000 (see Marbut 2005) and continuing in 2004 Republicans have
been "abriendo caminos" (forging new paths) into the Latino electorate and have been
trying to persuade them on the assumption that because of their social conservatism and
upward mobility Latinos and Republicans “know each other” and are not far apart
ideologically and politically. These unprecedented appeals had the purpose of gaining
enough of the Latino vote to tilt the election to their advantage.
This strategy is based on the potential that the Latino vote could have –given its size
and its concentration on rich-electoral-college-states– on deciding an election by
swinging from the Democratic to the Republican Party. This strategy, in other words,
assumes that Latinos are a “swing vote” or that the Latino vote is up for grabs (de la
Garza 1996), i.e., that they will abandon their historic support for Democrats and support
Republicans instead.
Given the future political implications of these claims, it is reasonable to ask why the
Latino vote has received so much attention. The answer to this question is in the rapid
growth of the Latino population. This demographic expansion has had two effects. First,
the Latino population has become the biggest minority in the United States, and second,
the Latino population appears to be having a significant impact on national and state level
politics meditated through one of the most distinctive characteristics of the American
political system. This unique characteristic is that all people residing in the United States
1
In this paper, we use the terms Latino and Hispanic interchangeably to refer to persons in the United
States who can trace their ancestry to the Spanish speaking regions of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Convention