Barack Obama has erased George W. Bush's inroads among Hispanics, with these influential voters consistently giving the president exceptionally strong marks and the White House employing an aggressive strategy to keep it that way.
Obama's challenge is to ensure that Hispanics pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party for the 2010 elections and keep supporting him through his own likely 2012 re-election race while he tackles the divisive issue of repairing the nation's patchy immigration system.
Hispanics are the nation's fastest-growing minority group. The government projects they will account for 30 percent of the population by 2050, doubling in size from today and boosting their political power.
If Democrats build on Obama's gains, Texas and other traditionally Republican states with huge numbers of Hispanics could be within reach in the future. That would mean deep trouble for a GOP that's already older, whiter, dwindling in numbers and lacking a standard bearer to make Hispanics a priority the way Bush did.
Yet while the latest Associated Press-GfK poll showed that a strong 68 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Obama's doing, maintaining such support is far from certain.
"Democrats speak to me, and this one in particular seems to be listening to what we need and what we want," said Tina Calhoun, 52, of Sacramento, Calif., who grew up in a family of Republicans but tends to vote Democratic. Still, she, like many others, isn't necessarily going to stick with Obama no matter what. "I want to give him a little more time," she said. READ FULL STORY
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