Latina Moms A Powerful Voting Block in 2012
Latina “mamás” have proven to be a strong and powerful voting block, and politicians, especially President Obama, would be wise to court them, says Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, a political scientist and Communications Director for Latino Decisions.
In the 2008 election, “34.3 percent of eligible Latinas voted while only 29.1% of Latino men did,” says DeFrancesco Soto, who adds that Latina voting patterns “buck the conventional wisdom of machismo and of women as more subservient.”
Latina women, like white and African American women, have been voting in much higher numbers than men. In 2008, 70 million American women voted, almost 10 million more women than men, according to the U.S. Census.
For President Obama, “mamás will be a particularly important electorate,” stresses DeFrancesco Soto, who explains that in a December impreMedia-Latino Decisions poll of registered voters, 56 percent of Latinas said they were certain to vote for President Obama over a Republican challenger, while only 51 percent of Latino men said the same. And in a November 2011 Univision-Latino Decisions poll, 69 percent of Latinas stated they were more likely to vote for President Obama than for Mitt Romney, compared to 47 percent of non-Latinas ...
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