Looking Back, Looking Forward (Page 10)

The defeat of John Kerry, combined with the Republican advances in the House and Senate, has unleashed waves of dismay and perplexity within liberal and progressive circles. What happened? Why did so many voters embrace a President whose Iraq policy was paved with lies and deceptions, who has shown contempt for science, the rule of law and many of the principles of the Enlightenment, and whose economic policies favor the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans? What lessons do we draw from Kerry's failure to win over the electorate in spite of the Bush Administration's conspicuous failures? Are the Democrats crippled, or merely wounded, and is the party really out of touch with "mainstream" values? Finally, what should the priorities of the progressive movement be in this era of Republican dominance, and what is the best formula for future electoral success? The Nation asked some of the country's leading political activists and intellectuals for their thoughts on one or more of these questions. Their brief essays follow.   --The Editors

JORGE RAMOS

THE DEMOCRATS DID NOT GET IT. Well-informed voices predicted early in the campaign that this presidential election was going to be decided by Hispanic voters. The argument was solid: In a close election, with the country polarized by the war, 9 million Hispanic voters--concentrated in battleground states--were going to be the ultimate swing vote. But John Kerry and the Democratic Party did not take this seriously enough--and they lost.

The election was decided by Latino voters in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. President Bush won Colorado with a 100,000-vote lead, Nevada by 21,500 votes and New Mexico by 6,000. That means if 64,000 Hispanic voters had chosen Kerry instead of Bush in those three states, Kerry would have had nineteen additional electoral votes, for a total of 271, which would have won him the White House. Those 64,000 Hispanic votes--which represent less than 1 percent of the total Hispanic vote--could have been gained with relative ease through more interviews in Spanish, more Hispanic TV and radio ads and by linking the Kerry campaign in Colorado with that of Hispanic Senator-elect Ken Salazar.

Democrats made three big mistakes. First, they did not choose governor Bill Richardson López as Kerry's running mate. Second, the mid-July polls that indicated a 2-to-1 lead for Kerry over Bush with Hispanic voters gave them a false sense of security; this led them to de-emphasize the importance of the Hispanic vote and to concentrate their efforts and money in non-Hispanic states. Third, Kerry gave only twenty-five interviews to the Spanish-language media (in comparison, George W. Bush gave more than 100 interviews in 2000). The consequences of these errors are plain to see: Bush got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote and Kerry 53 percent, significantly less than the 62 percent won by Al Gore four years before. What happened? Kerry never connected with the Latino voters and did not have a clear strategy to win the Hispanic vote.

On the other hand, the Bush team understood early on that their victory depended on the Hispanic vote; since Ronald Reagan, every Republican candidate who has won more than 30 percent of the Hispanic vote has taken the White House. They sensed that Hispanics tend to have conservative values, particularly with regard to abortion, religion and same-sex marriage, and they directed their message that way. In the end, Bush won the five Hispanic battleground states: Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

If Democrats cannot reverse these trends, they won't be able to regain control of the Congress and the White House for generations to come. Democrats have not recognized the importance of the Hispanic vote in the past two presidential elections. We will have to wait until 2008 to see if they have finally learned their lesson.

Jorge Ramos is senior anchorman of Univision News and author of The Latino Wave (Rayo). His upcoming book, Dying to Cross, will be published by HarperCollins this spring.

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