Obama’s campaign coordinator for Spanish-language media, Vince Casillas, said that while Obama has promised to take up immigration reform in his first year in office, he has not yet laid out his detailed plan for comprehensive reform.
“As soon as he’s ready and has a plan in place, he’ll announce it,” Casillas said.
In the Florida Republican primary, where Latinos made up 12 percent of the total vote and where McCain edged out Romney by only 4 percentage points, the Arizona senator won 54 percent of the Latino vote compared to Romney’s 14 percent.
And many Republicans remember that it was in 2004 when 40 percent of Latino voters abandoned the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), to vote for President Bush, Munoz said.
Munoz called 2004 the Democrats’ “low-water mark” in pulling in Latino support. The “high-water mark,” she said, came in 1996, the last time a Clinton was on the ticket.
And even longtime Obama backers in the CHC — including Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) — said that Obama has a lot of work to do in drumming up support among Latinos who are still fiercely loyal to Clinton.
“I have encouraged the [Obama] campaign for a year now that retail politics is very important to us, but they don’t yet seem to have gotten the message,” Gutierrez said. “We really need to see more of that from him.”
Becerra said that once he gets out there, Obama will be a “natural at connecting with the Latino community,” but he acknowledged that more outreach is needed.
“And first and foremost, the discussion will need to be about how to reach out to the Clinton supporters and then [get] them incorporated into his campaign.”
Baca said that if Obama fails to do that, and fails to give his “strongest types of surrogates” in the Latino community the ammunition they need to help seal support for his candidacy, the record Latino turnout that was seen in the primaries could disappear.
“We have a tendency to not go to the polls to vote,” Baca said. “[The CHC] can help get them out to vote, and it’ll make a big difference. But in the end it’s up to him.”
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