Latinos Sunk Republicans in Mid-Term Elections
A massive wave of Latino Anti-Republican votes sunk the Grand Old Party in mid-term elections.

That is the conclusion not found in Fox News Channel, the CNN or The New York Times, but all the same a true fact, says expert Joaquin Bustelo, a specialist in tendencies among the Hispanic voters.

According to the corporate media´s exit poll, two years ago the Republicans got 44 per cent of the Latino vote and the Democrats 53 per cent, the first time the latter was below 60 per cent among Latinos.

This year, figures only used by CNN´s Spanish-language network indicated that only 26 per cent of Latinos chose to vote Republican, while Democrats got 73 per cent of their vote, a full 20-point increase on the 2004 figure.

For the whole of the nation, exit poll statistics indicate votes were 54 per cent Democrats to 46 per cent Republicans.

Experts like Bustelo affirm this was clearly an exception. In state after state, many tens of thousands of Latinos who for whatever reason had gone Republican in 2004 went Democrat instead.

In the three previous elections, the percentage of the Hispanic vote for the Democrats had been 63%, 62%, and 65% in 1998, 2000 and 2002. And the shift is even a little bigger than it seems because the Cubans traditionally vote Republican and would not be directly affected by the changes in immigration law.

This shift is almost entirely among non-CubanLatinos. In other words, the Republicans start out with something on the order of 8% or 10% of the Latino vote from the Cubans. So of the additional 34% they go in 2004, from the non-Cubans, they lost more than half.

For a party that's already a single-digit fringe party in the Black community, to relegate itself to the same status in the rapidly growing Latino community is likely to be suicidal, warns Bustelo.

The explanation of a commentator in the CNN in Spanish was that elections result was the Latino community´s punishment of the Republicans for having spearheaded a racist, anti-immigrant offensive since the 2004 election.

The last straw was the Sensenbrenner all-immigrants-are-criminals bill. The Republicans passed and sent to the president one provision of the Sensenbrenner Bill, to build a 1150 kilometer Great Wall of America along the US-Mexico border.

In Latin America and especially Mexico, as well as in Latino media throughout the US, it was seen as one more gratuitous insult, and one more reason to give the Republicans a thrashing.

Bustelo admits mass Latino repudiation of the Republicans may be meaningless, as many of the Democrats are just as bad to their interests.