Associated Press
AUSTIN, Texas -- Barack Obama has erased George W. Bush's inroads among Hispanics, with these influential voters consistently giving the president exceptionally strong marks and the White House employing an aggressive strategy to keep it that way.
Obama's challenge is to ensure that Hispanics pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party for the 2010 elections and keep supporting him through his own likely 2012 re-election race while he tackles the divisive issue of repairing the nation's patchy immigration system.
Hispanics are the nation's fastest-growing minority group. The government projects they will account for 30 percent of the population by 2050, doubling in size from today and boosting their political power.
If Democrats build on Obama's gains, Texas and other traditionally Republican states with huge numbers of Hispanics could be within reach in the future. That would mean deep trouble for a GOP that's already older, whiter, dwindling in numbers and lacking a standard bearer to make Hispanics a priority the way Bush did.
Yet while the latest Associated Press-GfK poll showed that a strong 68 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Obama's doing, maintaining such support is far from certain.
"Democrats speak to me, and this one in particular seems to be listening to what we need and what we want," said Tina Calhoun, 52, of Sacramento, Calif., who grew up in a GOP family but tends to vote Democratic. Still, she, like many others, isn't necessarily going to stick with Obama no matter what. "I want to give him a little more time," she said.
Indeed, it's unclear whether Hispanics will back Democrats to such strong degrees next fall when Obama is not on the ballot. Minorities and young voters who turned out in droves for Obama in 2008 didn't show up this year for Democrats in the Virginia and New Jersey governors' races.
There's also a lifetime before Obama's expected re-election campaign, and he's promised to push immigration legislation before then, including an eventual path to citizenship for some 12 million people in the country illegally.
That's no easy task. The spectacular failure of such a measure in 2007 proved as much.
Immigration is a galvanizing issue on both the left and the right, with pitfalls for both parties. Republicans could alienate Hispanics if the vocal right again takes control of the debate with angry rhetoric. Democrats risk seriously disillusioning Hispanics by inaction, delay or a piecemeal approach. A fight in Congress is assured.
"Our community will judge him based on how he delivers on the promise he made to see immigration reform early in his administration," said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, suggesting the issue trumps everything else.
Much was made during the Democratic primary of Obama's perceived weakness among Hispanics but he won 67 percent of their vote in the general election to 31 percent for Republican John McCain. It was a huge jump from 2004 when Democratic nominee John Kerry won Hispanics by 53 percent to 44 percent for Bush, a Texan who focused heavily on Hispanics.
