McCain and the Latino vote: Is Florida really an indicator?

The Florida primary has come and gone and it  seems the biggest benefactor of the Latino vote was indeed John McCain.  The Arizona senator won the Republican vote on tuesday aided mainly by Hispanic and senior votes. 

 Many in the media have taken this to mean that Mr. McCain’s views are not seen as conservative as he portrays and that his views on immigration have attracted many Latino voters.  However, the rhetoric is not borne out by the facts.

Indeed, Mr. McCain took 51% of the Hispanic vote compared to his closest rival, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who registered a paltry 15% from the same constituency.  But once again our sagacious national media has failed to grasp the important subtelties and crucial distinctions of the diverse American Hispanic minority. 

 Much has been said about the majority of Hispanic Republicans in Florida being of Cuban-American heritage, however this group is not entirely monolithic as many in the media would have us think.  Older Cuban-Americans for example, cast most of the ballots and tend to display more radical, hard-line tendencies at the ballot box, whilst the younger members of this demographic display at bit more diversity in their political ideology and also tend to vote in lower numbers.  Furthermore, older Cuban-Americans tend to view national security and foreign policy issues as central motivators to participation in the political process, whereas the younger members, derived mostly from the middle classes, tend to express their political concerns in terms of domestic issues which attests to the reality of their social status. 

Another fact that has recieved mere cursory mention is the effect of the structure of the Florida primary itself, the state being a closed primary which means one can only vote for the party to which one is a registered member.  Thus, a Latino voter who happens to belong to the democratic party cannot switch alliances on election day if she desired to cast her vote for Mr. McCain.

Therefore, the claim that the Latino vote in Florida reflects a broader national sentiment regarding the Arizona senator and his moderate stance on immigration, seems a rather dubious one.  I suppose we simply must wait for an open primary with a large Hispanic constituency to head to the polls in order to get a better idea of how Mr. McCain will fare nationally among this most important minority. 

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Tags: cubans, elections, florida, hispanics, latinos, mccain, primary, republicans

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