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Este informe no está disponible en español. Latino.comElection 2000: A Wild Rideby ROGER HERNANDEZNovember 14, 2000 What a wild ride. First, the television networks tell us that Al Gore had won Florida and probably the election, then they retract it at 10:30 p.m., then they give it to Bush four hours later, and finally they take that back too. And then Florida had to recount its votes. Nothing like it has ever happened in American politics. There have been close races before, but even Carter-Ford just a few years ago did not have the saturation coverage we have today. The tons of statistics and exit polls give columnists plenty of fodder. So, some observations on this extraordinary election: The scary ultra-conservatism of four years ago is dead. Back then Pat Buchanan dictated what Republicans could or could not say, even without coming close to winning the nomination. Remember the peasants with pitchforks? Or were they "locking and loading?" Whatever. Fear of offending the Buchanan Brigades pulled Bob Dole, a decent man with a moderate record, so far to the right he dragged his party right over the edge into an embarrassing defeat. Now Buchanan can't even get half a million votes. The scary ultra-liberalism of the McGovern years is not making a comeback, but one has to wonder what 2.6 million Americans had in mind when they voted for Ralph Nader. Here is a guy running as the nominee of a party whose platform offers the brilliant idea of a 100 percent tax on income ten times above the minimum wage. Figure a minimum of $5.85 an hour by March of next year and a 40-hour work week. That means nobody would be allowed to earn more than $121,680 a year. Talk about class warfare. Politics once again got in the way of education, this time in Arizona. Voters there overwhelmingly approved a referendum to end bilingual ed. Wonderful, isn't it, to know that immigrant high school kids will now sit in classrooms where they can't understand the teacher. George W's appeal to Hispanic voters worked to some extent, more in some places than others. Nationally, exit polls say he took 35 percent of the Hispanic vote, about as good as any Republican ever and far better than Dole's 22 percent four years ago. In his home state of Texas he got 42 percent, more than doubling Dole's 16 percent. Among other states with large Hispanic populations he improved on Dole's performance in Arizona (34 to 15), New Jersey (35 to 18), Colorado (25-11) and New Mexico (32 to 27). Even in California, cradle of Latino anti-Republicanism, he picked up 28 percent, eight points more than Dole. New York was the exception. Bush and Dole both won only 18 percent of the Hispanic vote there. Bush's Southwestern focus with its emphasis on Mexican-Americans did not impress the very liberal and largely Puerto Rican New York Hispanic vote. In Florida, with its incredibly close race, the Hispanic vote was more decisive than in the other Hispanic-heavy states. Because Cuban-American voters were angry at the Clinton Administration for the raid that forcibly removed Elián González from his relative's Miami home, George W. expected to win upwards of 80 percent of the Cuban vote, as his father and Ronald Reagan (but not Bob Dole, who struggled to win a majority) had. Some polls in the days before the election showed he might just do it. But he did not. In a count of votes actually cast in precincts at least 85 percent Hispanic, the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections found Bush winning with a surprisingly low 72.8 percent. Perhaps those precincts include non-Cuban Hispanics more likely to go for a Democrat, but even in the nearly all-Cuban precincts of Hialeah Bush failed to break the 80 percent mark. This cut two ways. One, getting three quarters of the Cuban voters on his side (there's approximately 400,000 of them) kept him competitive in the state-without them, Gore would have won Florida without a recount. At the same time, had Bush won a Reaganesque 85 percent of instead of the 75 percent, tops, that he probably got, it would have meant some 20,000 more votes. With which George W. Bush would have taken Florida, with no need for a recount. Roger Hernández is a nationally syndicated columnist and Writer-in-Residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He can be reached via email at rogereh@prodigy.net.
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