Latinos enter US election battle as Nevada caucuses loom
LOS ANGELES (AFP) — After opening contests in largely white, rural states, the US election race shifts to Nevada on Saturday with Democratic presidential candidates hoping to woo potentially crucial Latino voters for the first time in the campaign.
The Latino vote has become a key battleground for Democrats ever since several states with huge Hispanic populations shifted their presidential primaries forward to earlier slots in the calendar.
Hispanics have surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority group in the United States, accounting for 14.8 percent of the nation's 300 million population.
The majority of those Hispanics are based in a cluster of key states that will hold nominating contests starting this weekend in Nevada.
Louis DeSipio, a politics professor from the University of California at Irvine, said Latino voters' role in Nevada's caucuses was unprecedented.
"It's a unique opportunity for Latinos to be influential, which doesn't happen too often," DeSipio told AFP.
"They make up a sizeable share of the Democratic electorate and clearly the direction that they lean will have a great bearing on who wins."
While the Latino population of Nevada -- which has increased by 400 percent since 1990 to more than 610,000 -- is estimated at around 24 percent, the number who are eligible to vote is put at around 12 percent.
Of those eligible voters, many belong to the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union, an influential grouping that last week announced it had endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama.
DeSipio said the union's endorsement of Obama could prove vital in mobilizing Latino voters who usually lean towards the Illinois senator's bitter rival Hillary Clinton.
"The bias of the Latino community is towards Senator Clinton but Obama's success in winning the endorsement of the culinary workers helps his campaign, because a caucus is such a complicated thing and a large proportion of the Latino electorate in Nevada are new voters," he said.
"Not only are they not accustomed to the rigors of a traditional polling booth, they are likely to be completely flummoxed by the rules of a caucus, which are hard for anyone to follow.
"That's why the union endorsement is so important in Nevada, because many will follow the union's guidelines about how to participate."
Both Clinton and Obama have waged vigorous campaigns in Nevada, which have included Spanish-language marketing blitzes.
"I think it's important for us to get my record known before the Latino community," Obama told the New York Times. "My history is excellent with Latino supporters back in Illinois, because they knew my record.
"Nationally, people don't know that record quite as well. So it's very important for me to communicate that, to advertise on Spanish-speaking television, to make clear my commitments."
Analysts say however that Hillary Clinton benefits from the strength of her "brand," something that could help her attract first-time voters.
"Clinton has an inbuilt advantage in Latino communities because she has much more name recognition. With newer or first-time voters that name recognition plays an important role," DeSipio said.
Kenneth Fernandes, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the 12 percent bloc of Latino votes could define the caucus, cautioning however that not all would line up behind Democrats.
"It can make the difference, no question," Fernandes said. "The trouble is that Latinos are a little bit more politically diverse than other minorities.
"It's safe to say that African-Americans are about 90 percent Democrat but although Latinos lean to Democrats, they aren't even close to 90 percent. In fact there's indications they're even starting to lean to the Republican side."
Daniel Restrepo, of the Washington-based Center for American Progress, said Latinos could hold the balance of power in crucial swing states at November's presidential election.
"The fact that the Nevada's caucus are so important for the Democrats reflects the importance of the Latino vote this year," Restrepo said.
"If you look at the states where the Latino registered voters are more than 10 percent, you can see that those states are very important.
"They are swing states like Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, where in the last election the margins were inferior to the percentage of Hispanic registered voters."
