Clinton Campaign Touts 99 Percent Increase In Latino Early Voting In Florida

[DonViejo]

Source: Talking Points Memo

Hillary Clinton's campaign is touting an "unprecedented" rate of early voting among Latino voters in Florida, citing a 99 percent increase from 2012 in the number of ballots cast so far.

According to a report put out by the campaign Monday, more than 133,000 Florida Latinos have already voted. José Dante Parra, a former senior adviser to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and a Democratic strategist, said that the figure was "significant for many reasons."

"Minorities in general tend not to vote until Election Day," Parra told TPM. "The fact that people are turning out earlier tells you that people are more attuned to the election and everything that’s happening."

Avi Green, former executive director of voting rights organization MassVOTE, told TPM via email that the Clinton campaign's number could indicate a "backlash surge" against Republican efforts to strengthen voting restrictions, including attempts to limit early voting.

-snip-

Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/clinton-increase-florida-latino-early-voting

[getagrip_already]

1. there is a very old adage....

Don't kick a sleeping dog.

Humans have been around dogs for tens of thousands of years. That isn't just an idle homily.

And no, I'm not comparing minorities to dogs. I am comparing them to a very potentially dangerous entity if you startle them and show aggression to them.

It rarely ends well.

[47of74]

7. As Londo Mollari said,

"If you do not bother them, they will not bother you."

[TomCADem]

2. Any Reports of Election Vigilantes Directly Challenging Voters?

I am glad that people are taking advantage of early voting to avoid potential drama.

[47of74]

3. Yeah, about that Hispanics not voting, Jan Brewer....

...idiot.

[neeksgeek]

4. Shared that quote with my father-in-law this past Sunday...

He's Hispanic. He replied to me with one word: "Tomorrow." As in, "tomorrow, I'm going to go to early voting."

[47of74]

6. I just hope Hispanics all over the US prove Jan wrong.

[forest444]

5. The GOP has to be worried; they know that FL Hispanics are not the Republican bloc they once were

For decades, Cuban-Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican with the understanding that a GOP president might one day rid them of Castro.

They eventually realized the GOP had been stringing them along from the start - as the GOP is very much prone to - and that they moreover despise Cubans or anyone else with too many vowels in their name.

[Eleanors38]

10. ...then there is the Puerto Rican vote in the I-4 Corridor, 2nd biggest concentration in U.S.

[forest444]

12. Exactly - thank you. The Hispanic vote is increasingly diverse.

In the 1970s and '80s, to be Hispanic in Florida generally meant being Cuban-American - just as Hispanics in New York were mostly Puerto Rican, in California mostly Mexican, and so on.

But just as there are 20 Latin American nations (21, if you count Puerto Rico), the Hispanic electorate is becoming just as diverse.

And there's the racial factor to consider as well.

It was an open secret in the Hispanic community writ large that the whiter the Hispanic individual was, the more likely he or she was to vote Republican. Being white, you see, is a privilege in most of Latin America, and many of these voters were loath to have others (i.e. white Americans) put them in the same bag as darker-skinned Latinos.

Voting Republican was, for many, an easy way to create distance from their Mestizo and Afro-Latino counterparts.

It was, irony of ironies, Republicans themselves who probably did more than anyone else to encourage Latin unity at the polls through their almost universal - and intensifying - hostility toward anyone from Latin America.

Other minority groups who historically leaned Republican - including Armenians, Indians, Iranians, and Vietnamese - have been having the very same problem with the GOP: they simply feel hated (and let's face it, usually are). To say nothing of tens of millions of moderate and liberal white Americans who want nothing to do with ethnic hatred.

Until Republicans as a group learn to tolerate others, they'll be up a creek without a paddle. Yes, they can try to cheat (and they've certainly been trying); but that will only make them look even more - how shall we put it - deplorable.

[Eleanors38]

13. When I left FL for grad school in TX, the Puerto Rican vote was hardly worth measuring.

Now, it is big, and carried FL for Obama twice. To a great extent these "growths" are an uniquely Florida cultural trait: Cuban-Americans, Jews, Italians (after a pogrom in New Orleans), AAs in a counter-national trend in the late 19th Century (better jobs than the rest of the South), even the Crackers were nomadic poor whites displaced by plantation economics in the Deep South, and seeing the Civil War on the horizon. The morphing never stops.

A year ago I went to a family reunion in Hillsborough State Park (adjacent to Tampa), and sought out the old "clinking" sound of Cracker horse shoe games I heard as a little kid in the early 50s. I found it -- after passing through two Pakastani cricket games.

[forest444]

14. What imagery, Eleanor. I love it.

An old-fashioned game of horseshoes being played within a stone's throw of two Pakistani cricket matches. Something tells me a group of Cuban retirees was playing dominoes somewhere nearby, and parlor-full of Jewish ladies were matching wits at Mah-Jong.

Ain't that America.

[Eleanors38]

15. Thanks. There was a time when I made a few bucks throwing out that imagery.

But literary description is a product of time, and the content and means are foreign or obsolete to most, now.

"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently, there."