Energized Latino Voters? Do They Matter, and When?

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco Editor

At face value the recent Supreme Court rulings regarding immigration and health care will do nothing to move the needle on Latino votes. Don’t misunderstand such a simple statement – these are issues that affect Latinos’ daily lives in direct ways, but most Supreme Court rulings on their own don’t resonate at kitchen tables, where daily lives swirl and layer and are laid out in their most stark reality.

All the talk about whether the Affordable Care Act is a tax or a not, or about which states will or will not accept the Medicaid extension money is a scrambled nuance that doesn’t distill to the work-a-day Latino voter four months away from November. Right now the good news is that gas prices are falling, and that the summer months are ahead. And soon there will be back to school stuff to think about and whether there will be work over the winter months. It’s not that Latinos are unsophisticated voters, it’s that they’re American voters. And they’ve got other things on their minds at the moment.

So somebody does a poll to gauge the Latino vote in July after the headlines read that the Supreme Court upheld  Healthcare Reform and the “show me your papers” law in Arizona, and it will have an affect on the outcome – but that’s because someone asked, today. Does it mean that more Latinos will be energized to vote four months from now?

None of that is up to the Supreme Court or it’s rulings.

The LVEI (Latino Voter Energy Index – my own invention, not sanctioned or followed by any political party or, goodness forbid, nationally syndicated Latino opinion leader) depends largely on the decibel level of the partisan drumbeat between now and November. In that sense, whether the Latino voting block is energized or not depends on the same factors as whether the general electorate is energized or not: targeted political hype, or GOTV as the pols call it (the more up to date term is voter mobilization, but it boils down to the same idea: get folks riled up, then get ’em to the polls).

The trick is to take the Supreme Court rulings and turn them into slick political messages. That’s what’ll energize the voters. The fact that the message targets Latinos is a matter of adjusting the scope.

The rulings on immigration and healthcare are political opportunities, and those can either be carried, fumbled or missed. It’s too early to say whether Latinos will be energized in the fall because of two weeks worth of Supreme Court decisions at the beginning of summer. It’s not too early to guess that given the nature of the decisions and adding those to the recent Presidential directive on DREAMer immigrants, Latinos may be inclined to favor President Obama in July polls.

But what both presidential campaigns know well is that polls or not, the Latino votes that matter are the ones in Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Virginia and North Carolina. And the time they matter is November, not July.