Letters to the Editor
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Obama wins latte liberals, loses Latinos big-time in Cali
Great LA Times cover story today, check it out:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-me-calif7feb07,0,3415944.story
A couple of excerpts:
Latinos went for Clinton by a 2-1 margin. What made that margin even more significant was that Latinos made up a record proportion of the electorate. Three in 10 of those who voted in the Democratic primary were Latino, the exit poll said, almost double the proportion in 2004.....
Clinton's emphasis on healthcare and the economy also helped, allowing her to trade on the prosperity that many Latinos enjoyed during her husband's administration.
The Obama campaign, by contrast, aired Spanish-language radio ads promoting his support for issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. That was a "classic Northeastern assumption" that licenses were the primary concern of Latinos, according to Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC.
"It's not. I think he would have had much more traction on issues like education, or the loss of jobs . . . issues that resonate with Latino homeowners," Pachon said.....
Clinton's dominance in Latino neighborhoods contributed to a huge margin in the state's most populous county, Los Angeles. By late Wednesday, vote tallies showed her winning Los Angeles by more than 162,000 votes. That dwarfed Obama's margins in his Bay Area power base, where his leads in Alameda, San Francisco and Marin counties totaled only 37,000 votes combined.