A Latin Power Surge

Outmaneuvered and outspent, the Kerry campaign learned a definitive lesson on Election Day: Hispanics had become much more of a swing constituency than a base, and no one could take their votes for granted anymore. In the aftermath, Kerry's Latino staffers and advisers, who had warned of such an outcome, vowed never to let it happen again. On Nov. 23, about 30 Latino Democrats convened in Washington, D.C., to plot strategy for future battles. Among the results: a proposal to create a new partisan Latino organization--for which $25,000 was quickly raised for a feasibility study--and a new group called the Coronado Project, composed of several members of Kerry's Hispanic team. This week the Coronado group will send a 12-page memo to a variety of Democratic bigwigs with a caustic critique of the party's handling of Hispanic outreach and a set of recommendations. "Failure to reform the party's approach to Latino voters," the memo reads, "maintains a caste system that is ineffective, if not suicidal, for the party." Recently, Kerry himself acknowledged his campaign's anemic Hispanic effort. During a dinner for Latino backers at his Georgetown home last month, he offered what two guests called "a full mea culpa" and the assurance that he'd strive to avoid a similar fiasco in the future. (The two guests asked not to be named because they considered it a private event.)

As a party, the Democrats' renewed commitment faces its first test in the midterm elections next year. On his travels as head of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean is making sure to schmooze Hispanics along the way--granting a recent interview, for instance, to El Latino, a Spanish-language weekly in Arkansas. The DNC has also run Spanish-language ads as part of its assault on Bush's Social Security plan. And the New Democrat Network, which poured $6 million into a comprehensive program to target first-generation Hispanics during the 2004 cycle, is eying potential races to direct resources to next year.

Some Latinos see a political opening in Bush's immigration policies--arguing that the president's guest-worker program, for example, does not do nearly enough to help the community that has shown him so much support. For their part, Republican ardor for Hispanics is as caliente as ever. Dean's counterpart at the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, recently formed a Hispanic advisory committee with an impressive cast of luminaries, including George P. Bush, the president's half-Mexican nephew. Mehlman recently addressed the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas and has held a "conversation with the community" in Orlando, Fla. Underwood, the GOP grass-roots organizer, says the party will be trying to master the complex brew of Hispanic nationalities in Florida during next year's Senate contest. "President Bush has given Republicans an opportunity," says chief polling strategist Matthew Dowd. "He's tilled the soil among Hispanics. Now we have to work it."

Faced with such GOP incursions, Democrats will be studying Villaraigosa's formula for victory, hoping to replicate it in other races nationwide--where the terrain may be more challenging than two Democrats squaring off in a Left Coast city. Villaraigosa captured 84 percent of an energized Latino-base vote, combined with half the white vote and nearly half the black one. Villaraigosa's "coalition-building is a map to be followed," says U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, a Democrat, who hopes to emulate him in a future Chicago mayoral run. To cobble his alliance together, Villaraigosa had to perform an adroit balancing act--galvanizing his Hispanic supporters without coming across as ethnocentric and thereby alienating other racial groups. "He neither played [his ethnicity] nor downplayed it," says Rodolfo de la Garza of Columbia University. "It was just there." Villaraigosa assured he'd be a mayor "for all of Los Angeles," and assiduously courted other groups, most importantly blacks, who voted overwhelmingly for his opponent during their previous face-off in 2001. This time, his efforts paid off: he secured key endorsements from leaders like U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters and former L.A. Lakers star Magic Johnson.

The experiences of Villaraigosa's predecessors offer insights as well. Back when black mayors were sweeping into power in major metropolitan areas, many of them also knit together multiracial coalitions. David Dinkins--New York's first and only African-American mayor, elected in 1989--brought together black, brown and white folks on a foundation of organized labor, recalls Bill Lynch, who helped build the bloc. "If you energize your core base [blacks], it has a contagion effect on the other parts of the coalition," he says. It's what Fernando Ferrer needs to address in his current New York mayoral run if he has any chance of reviving a candidacy hobbled by some controversial remarks he made about the case of Amadou Diallo, who was gunned down by police in 1999. "If the Latino vote is going to count, it needs to be cohesive and establish a strong link to other groups," says de la Garza. "My own sense is that Ferrer is not energizing the base." But Lynch, who's advising Ferrer, says "it's still early in the process."

Increasingly, Latino candidates must confront another barrier: African-American misgivings about a surging Hispanic population. While blacks are accustomed to playing the dominant role in multiracial coalitions, says Lynch, "what happened in L.A. sends a clear signal that that could be about to change. There's always potential for power struggle in a coalition." Historically, de la Garza argues, blacks have hesitated to share the stage with Latinos. "They initially opposed extending the nomenclature of 'minority' to Latinos in the Voting Rights Act," he says. As much as things have evolved since then, "the romantic image of blacks and browns uniting is just that--romantic."