A Latin Power Surge

Antonio Villaraigosa's cell phone was trilling incessantly. Every Democrat in the nation, it seemed, wanted a piece of the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, the first Latino to win the office in 133 years. John Kerry phoned to congratulate him, as did John Edwards, Howard Dean, Al Gore and Sen. Chris Dodd. Driving to city hall last Friday as he spoke by phone with a news-week reporter, Villaraigosa interrupted the interview to field yet another call on a different phone. "Yes, I would like to speak to Senator Clinton," he said. "Can I call you back?" he told the reporter. Afterward, Villaraigosa recounted his exchange with Hillary: "She said that she and President Clinton were just elated with my victory," and "if they could be helpful in any way in the coming weeks and months," they were eager to do so. Villaraigosa said he had responded with a few admiring words of his own. She was "an example of what I need to do as mayor of the city of Los Angeles," he had told her. "Not get so caught up in all of the national attention and focus on my job."

Good luck. The stream of calls may well build into a deluge. Dashing and charismatic, with street smarts bred in the barrio, Villaraigosa accomplished what Democrats dream of doing nationwide: he energized Latino voters to turn out for him at historic levels and stitched together the sort of multiracial coalition that has often eluded less-gifted politicians. Though they won the Hispanic vote last November, Democrats lost ground to Republicans for the second straight presidential-election cycle. President George W. Bush captured roughly 40 percent (the exact figure remains in dispute) of the Hispanic vote, compared with 35 percent in 2000 and Bob Dole's 21 percent in 1996. For the Democrats, the set-back came in just the year that Latino voters, long considered a sleeping giant, stirred from their slumber. With turnout increasing from about 6 million in 2000 to an estimated 8 million last year, the Hispanic vote has become the El Dorado of American elections. To remain viable as a party, Democrats need to win Latinos back. At stake is nothing less than control of the presidency and Congress. If the GOP maintains its current share of the Latino vote, says Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network, "then the Democrats will never be the majority party again in our lifetimes."

How did things become so dire for the Democrats? For starters, John Kerry's campaign botched its Hispanic outreach, according to many accounts. Latino operatives complained that the campaign leadership marginalized and undermined them at every turn. The leadership's assumption, according to Paul Rivera, a senior political adviser on the campaign: that Latino votes would break down roughly as they did in 2000, as a Democracy Corps poll last July wrongly suggested. The Hispanic team struggled constantly for resources, the operatives say, and assurances of ad buys in battleground states often went unfulfilled, keeping Kerry off the Spanish-language airwaves for days at a time. "If the Kerry campaign had won Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico," all Latino-rich states, says Tom Castro, the campaign's deputy national finance chair, "John Kerry would be president right now."

Over at the Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters, where Latino outreach was embraced zealously, a different world order prevailed. "We were sitting at the big kids' table," says Frank Guerra, a consultant on the national media team. He and Lionel Sosa--a Hispanic marketing guru and veteran of six presidential campaigns--joined weekly conference calls with campaign strategists and chimed in freely with suggestions for Hispanic ads and even general-market ones. A master of the softly lit spot saluting Hispanic heritage and patriotism, Sosa built his ads around a consistent theme: "Nos conocemos" ("We know each other"). As he puts it, "We have a great leader, a man of his word, a man that truly is close to us." But Sosa also cut attack ads, an infrequent tactic in Hispanic political marketing. For one series of spots, he dispatched a cameraman to a Latino neighborhood within miles of Kerry's Beacon Hill home in Boston. "Have you ever seen him here?" the interviewer asked people on the street. "Has he been to any fiesta?" (He hadn't.)

With Karl Rove, a direct-mail devotee, at the helm, Republicans tailored messages to particular segments of the Latino electorate--a strategy they hope will keep winning over converts on the road to 2008. They targeted first-generation Hispanics with Spanish-language ads and second- and third-generation Latinos with English-language spots. "The day of advertising simply in Spanish to reach the Hispanic voter is dead," says Guerra. The campaign also tweaked some messages to appeal to particular nationalities clustered in different regions--like Cuban-Americans in Miami or Mexican-Americans in the Southwest--using radio announcers who could summon an array of accents and local idioms. "You don't dare use one accent in the wrong place," says Blaise Underwood, a grass-roots organizer for the campaign.

But the segmentation strategy that most worries Democrats involves religion. As with voters generally, last year the campaign courted Hispanic evangelical Protestants, who make up a growing portion of a traditionally Roman Catholic constituency. "In some states, such as New Mexico," says Underwood, "most of the evangelicals we were targeting were Hispanic." By reaching out to such churches, the campaign tapped into large concentrations of potentially sympathetic souls. "Many evangelical communities are greatly identified with the Hispanic community," says Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center. "That explicit ethnic connection is considerably more rare in the Catholic Church." The Republican effort reaped rewards. According to a Pew Hispanic study scheduled for release this week, Bush's support among Latino Protestants--who comprise one third of the overall Latino electorate--grew from 44 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2004. Democrats were caught flat-footed. They "were so focused on the 527s, I'm not sure... they paid sufficient attention to the 3:16s," says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Center on Faith and Public Life, referring to the Biblical passage from the Gospel of John. Unlike black churchgoers who remain mostly Democratic for socioeconomic reasons, Lugo says, Latinos are "not a community in which economic issues alone are going to win it."