That’s a fact that Hispanic advocacy groups are more than ready to boast about.
“From the exit polls and turnout data we do think Hispanics were crucial to victories in both of those states,” said Rosaline Gold at the National Association of Hispanic Elected Officials, referring to Nevada and California.
Gary Segura, who runs the polling group Hispanic Decisions, put it more bluntly: “The GOP wave stops in California.”
In California, Democrat Jerry Brown beat Republican Meg Whitman for the gubernatorial seat by 53.8 percent to 41.2 percent. Reid held off Sharron Angle in Nevada’s senate race by a tighter 50.2 to 44.9 margin. According to a Hispanic Decisions poll — paid for by the National Council of La Raza, SEIU, and America’s Voice — Hispanics backed Brown by a margin of 86 percent to 13 percent, giving him a 13.5 point boost. In Nevada, Hispanics voted for Reid over Angle by a nine to one margin.
Even by more conservative estimates, Hispanics overwhelmingly backed both Democrats. CNN reported 70 percent of Hispanics supported Brown, and in a state where Hispanics make up more than one in five voters, their support was key to his win. CNN reports the same percentage of Hispanics voted for Reid.
Segura of Hispanic Decisions noted the margins of victory for both Brown and Reid were approximately equal to the share of the Hispanic vote they won. “According to our calculations about 10 percent of the overall vote were Hispanics voting Democrat,” Segura said. “Hispanic margins far exceeded the margins of Reid’s win,” he said.
Both races ended up hinging on immigration in unexpected ways.
For all of Angle’s extreme ideas about privatizing Social Security and dismantling the Department of Education, immigration ended up at the forefront of the Reid-Angle race. Angle gambled on anti-immigrant demagoguery by releasing a series of ads that relied on racialized stereotypes of immigrants and Hispanics as law breakers and criminals who stole resources from white people.
“The hatred she put out toward the Hispanic community really backfired for her,” said Gaby Pacheco, an organizer with the Hispanic advocacy group Presente.org, who was stationed in Las Vegas for Hispanic voter turnout in the days leading up to the election. Pacheco said the ads were so repulsive they ended up galvanizing Hispanics to vote for Reid.
“People saw, if I don’t go out and vote, then I’m kinda going to allow whatever Sharron Angle is portraying our community as to be what our community really is,” Pacheco said. News reports of GOP-affiliated efforts to discourage Nevada’s Hispanics from voting may have played a role in ironically encouraging the vote as well.
In California, many highlighted the Sept. 29 revelations Whitman had fired her former housekeeper Nicky Diaz after she realized Diaz, who is undocumented, was a political liability. Whitman would not take responsibility for her relationship with Diaz. She first blamed the Brown campaign for the controversy, and ultimately blamed Diaz herself. Days before the election, Whitman called for Diaz’s deportation.
“They got a different narrative about Whitman,” said Fernando Guerra, a professor from Loyola Marymount University who conducted an exit poll of Hispanic voters in the Los Angeles area. “To me that is what changed the election then and there. It wasn’t just Hispanic voters, but especially Hispanic voters saw her challenged for the first time, and saw how she reacted.”
“It was deeply disrespectful to Hispanic communities,” said Segura.
Indeed, Brown’s numbers jumped from September to October as Whitman’s started to fall precipitously. According to Public Policy Institute of California numbers, Brown’s support increased among Hispanics from 32 percent in September to 51 percent in October. A Los Angeles Times/USC poll showed Brown had a 20-point lead among Hispanic voters in September, which grew to a 34-point lead in October.
“Anti-immigrant attacks just don’t pay off,” said Mike Garcia, president of SEIU United Service Workers West. Garcia said Hispanic voters were turned off by Whitman’s two-faced tactics, her well-known scheme of saying one thing in Spanish to Hispanic voters — she opposed Arizona’s SB 1070 — and another while courting white voters in English with her anti-immigrant platform.
“One of the lessons candidates are learning is in states like California and Nevada, you cannot win statewide elections if you do not have a viable strategy to reach and engage Hispanic voters,” said Gold.
But it’s not enough to just get bilingual advertisements. Whitman, who spent a record $160 million on her campaign, $140 million of which was her personal cash, appeared on Telemundo and Univision almost every day. “Hispanic voters were paying very close attention this year to what candidates were saying.”
It’s likely they will not forget. Just days before Election Day, Harry Reid took to Univision and promised to push the DREAM Act in a lame duck session, whether he won or lost. Whether it will pass is another matter, but it’s a promise immigrant communities and Hispanics will likely hold him accountable for making.
Now that Brown and Reid are back in the saddle, they’ll no longer have the buffer of anti-immigrant demagogues to act as a foil. “Democratic candidates cannot take the Hispanic vote for granted,” Gold said. “They are going to have to reach out, to engage and continue to address the issues that are important for Hispanics.”
