February 17, 2008

Young Latinos Say Obama or Nada


Many Black political bloggers have wondered why Latino voters favor Team Clinton over the 'O-Man'. Of course, it wasn't too long ago that the same thing could be said about Black voters. Many of us were posting about whether or not Black women would vote for Obama before the South Carolina primary. It was only after that primary that the vast majority of Black voters demonstrated support for Obama's campaign.

Can the same thing be happening in the Hispanic community? LatinoPundit pointed me to surveys conducted after the Potomac Primaries last week show that a growing majority of young Latino voters are excited by the Obama campaign -- but if he doesn’t win his party’s nomination, they may not vote at all in the November general election.

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Do you have any sense on the reasons that Hispanic voters favor one candidate over the other?

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I am not sure why, but I work with a lot of Latinos and they are very loyal to the Clintons, in part, because of name recognition and that under his administration there was "prosperity" and no one really bothered the illegal immigrants. This is what I have been told by a few of my Hispanic coworkers. Additionally, many find Obama suspect because he is "new" on the scene and they don't really know what he stands for. Go figure, but that's what I was told during a discussion at work last week.

Unknown said...

Janet - Your comment confirms my reason for using the Team Clinton moniker so often. Hillary Clinton had no more to do with prosperity in Bill Clinton's administration than Kobe's wife has to do with his success on the basketball floor. Yet, she gets credit for experience when she doesn't have much (IMHO)...

Unknown said...

That is the unfortunate thing about Hillary Clinton is that she can never stand alone on her own merits. I think if she was able to do that, then the outcome might be different. She comes as a package--Team Clinton and personally, I don't want to deal with another Clinton in the White House because he would be front and center with a lot of things. Besides, I believe he was given way too much credit for the so-called prosperity we "enjoyed" during his administration. She doesn't have a whole lot of experience, which says that she is running on her husband's name, as an incumbent, if you will.

SheCodes said...

Neither one of the candidates is strong on the experience dept, in my opinion. I think that they are both compelling for different reasons though.

I think that Latinos (at least older ones) simply don't know Obama that well. But he seems to be able to win people over very quickly, so I do think that he will get a significant share of the Latino vote.

Unknown said...

All - I appreciate that the Hispanic community may bring home Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico to Obama in another 10 days!