Getting the Edge on the Latino Vote : Bush Is Working His Corner as if It Counts--and It Does

Latino activists, who tend to be more sympathetic to Democrats than to Republicans anyway, like to poke fun at the gaffes that Vice President George Bush has made in dealing with Latinos during his campaign, like referring to his half-Latino grandchildren as “little brown ones.” But, with only seven weeks left until Election Day, it appears that Bush is doing a better job of courting his Latino supporters than Gov. Michael S. Dukakis is.

Even before the election campaign got into full swing, political pundits were predicting that 1988 would be the year in which Latino voters, for the first time, would play a pivotal role in determining who is elected President. The main reason is that Mexican-Americans are the biggest ethnic minority in the two states expected to be pivotal in the voting this fall--Texas and California.

Between them, the two states represent 76 electoral votes--more than a quarter of the 270 votes that a candidate needs to be elected President. There are other big states with significant Latino populations, of course, including New York, Florida and Illinois. But California, with 47 electoral votes, and Texas, with 29, offer the biggest electoral prizes where the presidential race is expected to be closely contested.

Which is the other reason both states are getting lots of attention from the national campaigns and the news media--they are perceived as being up for grabs. Bush claims Texas as his home state, but the selection of Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen as Dukakis’ running mate may negate any Republican advantage there. And while California is home to President Reagan, many doubt that his personal popularity here has transferred to the vice president.

So it appears that California’s 6.6 million Latinos and Texas’ 4.1 million are strategically located to have a major effect on the outcome of the election--a fact that must seem ironic to the Chicano activists who have long complained that Mexican-Americans are an “invisible” minority because they live so far from the political and media centers of the East Coast.

But, according to at least some Chicano Democrats, Eastern insularity is still a problem for Dukakis’ campaign. For, aside from widely publicizing the fact that their candidate speaks fluent Spanish, Democrats have done little of the hard work needed to bring out Latino voters in cities like Los Angeles. And, as if this slow start weren’t bad enough, when the “Viva Dukakis” effort was finally launched in Los Angeles last Thursday it was undercut by Bush’s similar announcement in Southern California a day earlier.

Bush’s approach in launching “Hispanics for Bush” was itself revealing. He had a Mexican breakfast in conservative Orange County with a select audience of Latinos invited by County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez, one of the few Latino Republican officeholders in California.

Republicans have preferred that kind of campaign event since 1972, when Richard M. Nixon became the first GOP candidate to make a serious pitch for the Latino vote. Nixon got 30% of the Latino vote in defeating Sen. George McGovern that year, and the figure is still a benchmark for national GOP candidates. The Bush campaign would be happy with 30% Latino support this time around.

GOP campaigners prefer small, safe campaign events because they know who their Latino supporters are--prosperous business leaders and young, upwardly mobile suburbanites. They may be few, but they are true Republican believers, so GOP candidates don’t have to do much to keep them happy. Besides, doing too much for Latinos could upset the Anglo voters who are the GOP’s main base of support. Small campaign events don’t get lots of attention from the news media, but they do get noticed by the Latinos with whom GOP candidates are comfortable.

Democrats, on the other hand, have a bigger base of potential Latino supporters, but must work harder to get them out. That takes time and money, and a common complaint that one hears from Chicano Democrats in almost every national election campaign is that they don’t get enough of either from their party’s strategists. Several have told me, for example, that the Dukakis campaign was approached by an impressive group of Latino politicians at the Democratic convention in Atlanta and offered help in fund-raising and Latino voter-registration and get-out-the vote efforts. Yet Dukakis’ Boston brain trust decided to launch a “Viva Dukakis” campaign only last week.

Bush told his Orange County audience that economic conditions in the Reagan years have been favorable for Latinos. They probably were, for the Latinos to whom he was talking. But probably not for the 26% of the Latino population who still live below the poverty line, according to the latest Census Bureau figures. These poor and working-class Latinos are the voters whom Democrats need to turn out in large numbers. The fact that Dukakis has been so tardy in gearing up to reach them may not bode well for him come Nov 8.