03.21.12

Changing tactics: NALEO enlisting Latinas to increase Latino turnout

Posted in Around The State, Commentary, Elections at 2:54 pm by wcnews

As noted in a recent post one of the reasons that Democrats in Texas are struggling is because “.. Democrats have been far too slow in embrace minorities and women as the new base of the party”. This recent DMN article highlights the issue, Hispanic voter numbers slip even as population soars.

As the fastest-growing population group in the U.S. over the last decade, Hispanics seemed poised to have a huge impact on the 2012 presidential and congressional campaigns.

Why then, political experts and demographers wondered, had the number of Hispanic voters declined significantly between 2009 and 2010?

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the number of Hispanic registered voters fell from 11.6 million in 2008 — a presidential election year — to 10.9 million in 2010, when congressional races led the ballot in many states. In Texas, where the Hispanic population grew by 65 percent over the previous decade, the number of registered Hispanic voters dipped from 2.4 million to 2.3 million between elections.

Experts had expected 11 million to 12 million Hispanic voters to visit the polls in November. But the survey cast serious doubts on that. Some wondered whether the economy had forced Hispanics to move to find work. Others said the drop was strictly cyclical.

While voter registration typically slips in nonpresidential years, some experts say the scope of the 2010 declines were completely unexpected at a time when the overall Hispanic population in the U.S. continued to soar.

From 2000 to 2010, the number of Hispanics in the U.S. jumped from 35.3 million to 50.5 million, a growth rate of 43 percent. Hispanics made up 16 percent of the U.S. population in 2010, and 37.6 percent in Texas, which added 2.8 million Hispanics over the decade.

And the decline was evident in Texas even before the controversial voter ID law that the Justice Department blocked this week amid worries that it could discourage registration among Hispanics.
Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, blamed the recession for the decline in registered voters, especially the housing bubble and foreclosure crisis, which forced many Hispanics to move to find work.

That certainly could be a factor, agreed Mark Lopez , associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C., but probably isn’t the only one.

“The general trend in mid-term elections is you have fewer people participating and fewer registering to vote,” Lopez said. “We’ve seen that trend before with Latinos. You can see it for whites, blacks and Asians, too.”

Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration and civic engagement for the National Council of La Raza, said the bottom line is simple: Government, the major political parties and other groups haven’t done nearly enough to register qualified Hispanics to vote.

While the number of registered voters fell after a presidential election, a comparison of mid-term elections shows consistent growth in the number of Hispanic voters. Presidential elections show the same, she said.
“If the present patterns remain constant with what we saw in the 2004 and 2008 elections, you could project about 2.75 million Hispanics in Texas registered to vote in 2012,” she said, a significant increase over the 2.4 million who were registered for the last presidential campaign.

But that requires “hard work and resources,” Martinez said, to draw more voters and to overcome potential pitfalls in Hispanic demographics.

Significantly younger than the nation at large, Hispanics add 50,000 to 60,000 or more potential voters a year as people turn 18, Lopez said. Trouble is, young people are less likely to vote or even register to vote than any other group.

“They’re 18,” Lopez said. “They might not even know where to go to vote, or to register.”

[...]

“We know Latinos are a very young population and we know young people across the board are less engaged in the electoral process, and their mobility is higher,” said Martinez. “And another problem is the lack of flexibility in being able to vote on election day.

“A lot of times people think of tight schedules for executives,” she said. “But there isn’t much flexibility when you’re working two jobs, either.”

At the same time there was good news on this front. Via the Express-News, To boost Latino turnout, group will enlist Latinas.

NALEO researchers are redirecting their aim to improve Hispanic voter turnout, pointing efforts at the most influential target inside Latino households: the women.

The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials is using new findings from recently gathered focus groups to retool its campaign for the Hispanic vote, after participants in Houston revealed that a nudge from wives and mothers could be the key.

“We will develop a strategy where we speak to Latinas,” said Arturo Vargas, longtime executive director for NALEO. “There’s something there that we need to tap into to get our Hispanic mother and wife and sister to get their husbands and brothers and sons to vote.”

The groups — eligible-but-nonregistered and registered-but-not-voting Hispanics — were assembled in December to determine if they were tuned in to the political issues and candidates of the day, Vargas explained.

Participants showed that they closely follow platform issues, and demonstrated awareness but no engagement.

Asked who among them planned to vote in the 2012 elections, none raised a hand. Who might influence them to vote? Participants said they would listen to their wives and mothers.

“What do we have to do to get this great unengaged segment of our community to care?” Vargas said. He chuckled, “If it’s nagging, so be it.”

NALEO’s plan for a Latina-centric strategy is a change from when longtime community organizer Rosie Castro began voter registration efforts in San Antonio in the late 1960s.

Fifty years later, the mission — to empower Latino voters — remains difficult but has made major advances, Castro said.

“When I was young and doing voter registration we often would go to a house in the Latino community and the wife would say: ‘I really can’t register to vote right now. I have to ask my husband.’ It’s incredible to me how much that has changed,” said Castro, mother of Mayor Julián Castro and state Rep. Joaquin Castro.

Joaquin Castro said his mom has emphasized the importance of voting since he was a child. “People in government won’t listen to you if you don’t vote,” she would tell the twins.

“She taught us to believe that through public service you can help create opportunities in people’s lives,” he said.

He said his mother “had all the influence in the world, not only on why I vote, but also why I entered public service.”

NALEO’s new strategy is a smart one, he said. Women “are often the glue” in growing families.

[...]

The struggle to have Hispanics participate in voting is decades old.

Former Gov. Ann Richards often lamented about the dismal turnout for Texas’ largest minority group — now at 9.5 million, including 2 million projected voters in 2012.

NALEO is expecting a record Latino turnout in November, with an estimated 12.2 million casting ballots, up 26 percent from 2008 and accounting for 9 percent of the country’s total voters.

Yet the Hispanic voter is often characterized as a “sleeping giant.”

“It’s more like a giant that is maturing to its size,” Vargas said. Each month 50,000 young Latinos turn 18, voting age in this country, he noted.

“We are just growing so damned fast. Just by sheer inertia, Latinos will become a larger segment of the U.S. electorate,” Vargas said.

Low turnout is a real issue, “but our numbers are so massive that we will have an impact, regardless,” he said. “We’re not willing to wait it out. We have to do something now.”

Finally, this sounds like a strategy that has a chance of increasing Latino turnout.  But it is a plan that will take hard work and resources ($$).  The only real way to change the electoral outcome in Texas is to change the electorate.  Which is why the battle Democrats battle against shrinking the electorate – aka the GOP Voter ID law – was, and still is, so vital.

While Democrats should be attacking bad election law, (laws that shrink the electorate), they should also be proposing election reform that makes registration and voting easier, (expanding the electorate).  All the while continuing to keep it free of fraud.  It’s always good to keep this is mind, The GOP War on Voting.

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

The bigger the electorate the better, and making it more convenient to vote will help that come about.  Here are some great suggestions for reforming and increasing, registration and turnout. From Why Tuesday?

But the fact is that voting at the polls has become a distinctly difficult and unpleasant experience for way too many voters. We need to find ways to make the experience something positive. Here, Congress and the states need to consider many other approaches to accomplish that goal. A key is to provide more money to hire and train poll workers, and to expand the universe to include students and other young people who can easily absorb the training to operate the voting machines, check the registration lists and know the rules in each jurisdiction.

Another is to change Election Day, an issue the new organization Why Tuesday? has focused on this year. (Check out its Web site, with great videos of major political figures from all sides trying to answer the question of why we vote on Tuesday.) I favor weekend voting, either a 24-hour period beginning noon Saturday, or long hours on both days to avoid Sabbath problems and give many opportunities to workers who otherwise can only go during peak voting hours.

We should couple weekend voting with a sharp expansion of vote centers, consolidating many scattered precincts — each with inadequate facilities, parking, voting machines, technicians and poll workers — into bigger sites like Wal-Marts, supermarkets and stadiums, which can pool the poll workers, experts and machines. This process requires up-to-date registration lists to match each voter with the appropriate ballot, and will take time, money and effort, but Larimer County in Colorado has shown that it can work, sharply expanding turnout and voter satisfaction. Vote centers also resulted in an upgrade of poll worker quality and a reduction in average age.

Certainly making registering to vote, and voting more convenient, with voting centers, same day registration, motor voter, etc.. would go far to help turnout across Texas and the US.

This will not happen over night, and will take time.  Right now is the best time to start.  The sooner this effort gets started the sooner we can get turnout to the numbers needed to change the electorate in Texas.

Further Reading:
Gerrymandered Texas Congressional Map for the next decade.

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