In Iowa, Latinos Bask in New Political Glow

Rosa Mendoza, who heads the multicultural center in this fading “Pearl of the Mississippi” known for a Heinz ketchup factory and little else, used to have a hard time commanding the attention of elected officials.

Nowadays, Mendoza can’t get two of the most powerful men in America, George W. Bush and Al Gore, off the phone. Their presidential campaigns want her help in Muscatine and won’t seem to take no for an answer.

“They’re calling me all the time, telling me they need me to take part in this event or that event, join this committee or that committee,” a bemused Mendoza said. “It’s sad, really, because these politicians never seemed to care about our problems before. But, hey, we Hispanics need to take advantage of this.”

Improbable as it sounds, Iowa, with only 56,000 Latinos statewide, has become an early testing ground for the national strategies Gore and Bush are formulating to capture Latino votes--and the support of community activists such as Mendoza.

The early effort reflects the increasingly active and influential role of Latino voters, particularly in states key to the presidential election, like California, Texas and New York.

The embrace of Latinos in Iowa carries a symbolic message too. It allows Bush and Gore to package themselves as the candidates of choice for non-Latino voters looking for more inclusive, softer-edged candidates.

“They don’t want to miss the boat, and they think this could be important for the future of the caucuses,” said Julio Raya, owner of Voces Weekly, a Spanish-language newspaper here. “People are asking, ‘What’s the big deal with the Hispanics all of a sudden?’ The local [English-language] papers are making a big issue of it. But they are not just appealing to Hispanics here, they’re appealing to people nationwide.”

The vice president has dispatched bilingual volunteers throughout the Iowa countryside, not just to find Latinos, which can be difficult to do outside a few pockets, but to recruit them as part of his “Ganamos con Gore,” or “We Win With Gore” outreach effort. And he’s about to float a targeted “message component” to Iowa Latinos through the mail and over the airwaves.

The Texas governor is already chasing Iowa Latinos in radio and print ads and is running his Spanish translations by consultants throughout Latin America to make sure Bush ads don’t say something stupid--and that the vocabulary falls equally well on Mexican ears as on other Spanish-speaking populations. “Es un nuevo dia,” Bush tells Iowa Latinos in a recent radio ad. And it is, indeed, a new day in Iowa.

Predominantly of Mexican descent, many of Iowa’s Latinos have come here within the last decade to work in meat-packing plants. They make up less than 2% of the population and are not expected to have much of an effect on January’s Iowa caucuses.

Even so, the intense competition to court Latinos in places like Muscatine is above and beyond traditional polling and focus-group discussions usually reserved for the pivotal, and later, primary states of California and New York, both camps said.

In California, both Gore and Bush have already launched grassroots efforts to court the state’s Latino voters. Campaign officials said California voters will also see Spanish-language television commercials when the presidential contest moves west.

The focus on Iowa Latinos is a sign that the truncated primary schedule is forcing candidates to deliver certain messages earlier than they would have in the past, said Democratic consultant Garry South.

“There will be an unprecedented effort to reach out to the Hispanic community in this campaign,” said Gore’s campaign manager, Donna Brazile. “Yes, even in Muscatine, Iowa, there is a sizable Hispanic population that we have targeted for persuasion.”

“Sizable” by Iowa standards, perhaps. Latinos make up 12% of Muscatine’s 22,000 inhabitants, but that’s still the largest concentration of Latinos in the state.

Other Democratic and GOP candidates are eyeing Latino votes, though they may lack the resources and field operations of Gore and Bush in Iowa.

Last month, for example, when Democrat Bill Bradley, a former senator from New Jersey, stopped by a Latino Health Access clinic in Santa Ana during a California campaign swing, he carefully pointed out how his health care proposal relates to Latinos, who make up a disproportionate share of Americans without health insurance.

Republican candidate John McCain, a senator from Arizona, has also made a priority out of attending a variety of Latino events.

Democrats have long been beneficiaries of a lopsided percentage of Latino voters, who cast about 4.6% of the ballots nationwide in the 1996 presidential election. But Bush hopes to slice into that margin by going national with the same high-visibility strategy of inclusion he rode to success in Texas.

The heart of that strategy, one Republican expert said, is “just showing up” at Latino neighborhoods that Republicans have overlooked in the past. On a broader level, Bush is banking that his Latino efforts will pay off with moderate voters who in recent years have viewed the GOP as “demagogues and race-baiters”--to use the words of South.

“What it comes down to,” said Ted Cruz, Bush’s domestic policy advisor, “is communicating the message that George W. Bush believes everyone is part of the American dream and the model is really the Texas experience.”

The Bush approach could reap dividends, said Harry Pachon of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

“It’s a very smart thing,” Pachon said of the Iowa ads. “He gets to test his ads in a small Latino market before getting to the big Latino states of Florida and California. And he also gets positive coverage in the media, which Latinos around the country hear about.”

Bush, who hopes to capture 40% of the Latino vote nationwide, has already succeeded in coaxing some influential Iowa Latinos to his side.

Maria Rundquist of Sioux City, a translator and local Spanish-language columnist, worked on the Clinton-Gore campaign eight years ago and served as an Iowa delegate. This time around, after meeting Bush during a lavish fiesta at the Iowa straw poll, she is in Bush’s 13-member state “Hispanic steering committee.” Dressed in a yellow “Un Nuevo Dia” T-shirt, the Mexico native knocks on doors and is hosting seminars at her home on registering voters and explaining the importance of the upcoming caucuses to recent immigrants.

“After being on the other side for many years, I feel new,” said Rundquist, who said she left the Democratic Party in disgust over President Clinton’s marital infidelities. “There are a lot of people that have never cast a vote in their life, but they say they’re going to vote for Bush. He’s from Texas, where grandma and grandpa live. That’s a plus here.”

The Bush and Gore campaigns say they are exhibiting a new sophistication in courting the Latino vote, and there are some indications that is true. Both are making unprecedented efforts to provide campaign information in Spanish through their Web sites and are planning to use the Internet to launch Latino voter registration drives.

Gore and Bush have backed up their messages of inclusion by appointing more Latinos to high-profile campaign positions than any presidential hopefuls before them. It was no coincidence, for instance, that the first official named to the Gore 2000 campaign was Jose Villarreal, a Texas attorney serving as Gore’s national treasurer.

Despite these efforts, there are critics who say the campaigns are not nearly sophisticated enough. They point to Gore’s all-too-frequent entrances at Latino events to the pseudo-Latin pop of Ricky Martin, and to Bush’s predisposition for photo-ops with dark-skinned schoolchildren as signs that the much-hyped Latino strategies are, at best, only skin-deep.

Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, said, “There is a difference between form and substance.” To really reach Latino voters, he said, candidates must go beyond language and cosmetics and address the issues that interest them.

“They’re not suburban, middle-class issues, which is where the parties seem to want to go, but urban, working-class issues,” he said. “Hispanics do not want HMO reform, they want an HMO to reform. These are class issues. Who will step up on them? That is the $64,000 question.”