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Este informe no está disponible en español. FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAMBush Made Few Gains Among Hispanic Votersby Jay RootNovember 23, 2000 AUSTIN -- If Gov. George W. Bush ultimately wins his bid for the White House, he will have done it with little help from the Hispanic voters he so vigorously courted, according to election surveys and interviews with Latino voter experts. Perhaps most dramatic were the results in California, where Bush had hoped his inroads among Texas Hispanics would lay the groundwork for a strong showing among traditionally Democratic Latino voters in the Golden State. But after spending several million dollars on advertising in Spanish, and despite making countless direct appeals to Hispanic voters in more than 30 trips there, Bush got less than a quarter of the Latino vote -- far short of his goal of getting at least 40 percent, two post- election surveys showed. "He had people actually believing he might win the Latino vote," said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, which studies Hispanic voting trends. "He never even had a remote chance." On the other hand, Bush did make improvements over past GOP presidential nominees. Gonzalez said 1996 Republican candidate Bob Dole, for example, got about 15 percent of the vote in California, compared with Bush's 22.9 percent in a Velasquez poll, and 23 percent in a Los Angeles Times Poll. Nationwide, Bush got roughly a third of the Latino vote, a figure that includes pro- Republican Hispanics in Florida, polls show. While that failed to live up to expectations many Republicans had, it is the best showing at least since 1988 if not earlier. Bush's father, former President George Bush, won about a third of the Hispanic vote against Democrat Michael Dukakis, according to exit poll data gathered by Voter News Service. Ronald Reagan appears to have hit the high-water mark for Republican presidential candidates, garnering some 44 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally in his landslide re- election in 1984 according to a VNS poll. "Clearly Gov. Bush made significant inroads into the Latino voting community, and did better than any Republican presidential candidate in a decade," said Bush spokesman Ray Sullivan. "He helped lay the groundwork for future efforts and helped make the Republican Party competitive when it comes to Latino voters." Rodolfo de la Garza, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, agreed that Bush had made improvements over his most recent predecessors, saying Bush had "re- established the historical pattern" of Republican candidates. "I predicted they [Bush- Cheney] would come in at about the mid-30s which is about where I think they've come in. It's about what you would expect a good Republican to do," de la Garza said. "But to be in the 30s means you've suffered an overwhelming defeat." Not surprisingly, Bush's best showing among Hispanics (outside Florida, where Cuban- Americans vote overwhelmingly Republican) appears to be in Texas, where he got 34.6 percent of the Latino vote compared with 65.4 percent for Vice-President Al Gore, according to the Velasquez study. But the figure falls short of the estimated 39 percent of the Hispanic vote Bush received in Texas in his 1998 re-election campaign, when he crushed Democrat Garry Mauro. That year, Bush became the first Republican governor ever to carry heavily Democratic El Paso County. But with a much higher turnout for the presidential election, Gore easily took the predominately Latino county, and also won the South Texas counties of Cameron and Hidalgo, which Bush narrowly carried in 1998. "I think this time you had a combination of the presidential election-year voter, plus everybody perceived this as a real contest," said Peck Young, an Austin-based Democratic consultant. Bush's Texas, of course, was never really in play in the presidential race. Nor was New York, solid Gore territory -- and home to a Hispanic population that voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the presidential race. That left two big states with large Hispanic populations -- Florida, where Bush received heavy support from Republican-leaning Cuban- Americans, and California, where he made a serious effort to peel Hispanics away from Gore. Bush spent an estimated $5 million on advertising aimed at Hispanics and, starting in early 1999, made some 31 campaign trips to California, according to the Hotline political newsletter. At first, it seemed to be working. A poll by Hispanic Trends Inc. last summer showed Gore leading Bush 54 percent-32 percent among Hispanics, a surprisingly strong showing for Bush given the political climate in the state. The GOP has suffered from a backlash against the anti- immigrant policies espoused by former California Gov. Pete Wilson, among others. But Bush tried to overcome that built-in disadvantage. He criticized Wilson-style policies, spoke Spanish in interviews and stump speeches, and appealed to immigrants directly by telling crowds that compassion "doesn't stop at the Rio Grande River." "I think he had an excellent campaign among Hispanic voters," said Sergio Bendixen, president of Hispanic Trends. "He separated himself from the Pete Wilson type of image." But Bendixen said things went south in the last two weeks of the campaign, when Congress was considering legislation to extend amnesty to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who entered the country after 1986. Bush's failure to support the legislation was widely criticized in Hispanic media outlets, and Bush's numbers dropped precipitously, Bendixen said. In the last week of October, Bush saw his poll numbers plummet 22 points among foreign-born Latinos -- going from five points ahead of Gore in that segment to 17 points behind, according to Bendixen's tracking poll. In his last national survey, conducted Oct. 30-Nov. 4, Gore led Bush 64-28. "Univision and Telemundo every night were hitting that issue and basically calling Bush a hypocrite for saying he was a different type of Republican, and yet when he had a chance to show it, he looked the other way," Bendixen said. "That basically swayed a big group of people." Fernando Oaxaca, a Republican Latino who sat on Bush's California steering committee, said he was heartened that the Texas governor did better than past Republicans, but he acknowledged that it was difficult to overcome the "residue of anti- Republicanism." Still, Oaxaca sees a silver lining: If Bush becomes president, Oaxaca said he will use the formidable power of that office -- such as appointments, appropriations and political persuasion -- to boost his support among Latinos to levels never seen. "The re-election campaign will begin on the day that he's declared the winner," he said. "If that happens, he will build a network and a base among Hispanics that will be far more pervasive and all-encompassing than any Republican president has ever had." Jay Root, (512) 476-4294 Send comments to jroot@star-telegram.com
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