Hispanic Mind Hard to Read in Mid-Term Voting

A fact sheet from the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center reviewing voting in this month's mid-term elections finds it difficult to draw any definite conclusions about the Hispanic vote, no matter what pundits may claim.

The one clear trend, illustrated both by the 2006 national exit poll and through independent exit polling by the William C. Velazquez Institute in eight states with large Hispanic populations, is that Hispanic voters definitely favored Democratic congressional candidates. The national poll found a 69 percent/30 percent split for Democrats, while Velazquez noted a 67/29 split. Both show a smaller percentage of Hispanic voters favoring Republicans than the 44 percent who reportedly voted to re-elect President Bush in 2004 (although Pew prefers its own 2004 analysis that showed only 40 percent of Hispanics voted for George W. Bush).

"Does that mean the Latinos who flirted with the Republican Party are now firmly back in the Democratic camp?" the factsheet asks. "Or is it possible that Latino voters behaved like the rest of the electorate and simply rode a Democratic wave?"

The numbers, which exceed the swing seen among Anglo voters, ultimately suggest that "something distinctive" did occur among Hispanic voters.

Adding to the difficulty of making hard-and-fast determinations, Pew notes that some individual Republican winners did much better among Hispanic voters than did their party, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (39 percent of the Hispanic vote), Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons (37 percent) and Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (44 percent).

Many Hispanics split their ballots, Pew surmises, noting that in Arizona 67 percent of Hispanics voted to re-elect Gov. Janet Napolitano while 41 percent voted to re-elect Senate incumbent Jon Kyl, a Republican.

Mr. Kyl's victory points out another unusual aspect of parsing the Hispanic vote – how immigration affected it. Mr. Kyl favors tougher immigration enforcement and clearly opposed efforts for an amnesty for undocumented immigrants already living in the United States. And yet conventional wisdom is that Hispanics as a bloc voted against candidates, or parties, that favored a more punitive approach.

Arizona offers another counter-intuitive example, Pew notes. Some 48 percent of Hispanic voters there backed a successful measure making English the state's official language