EthnicMajority

(Washington Post) Four years ago in Iowa, Republican caucus-goers chose illegal immigration as the most important issue facing the country. The issue of how to deal with more than 10 million unauthorized immigrants is not playing a central role in the 2012 GOP race. But fresh numbers from the Pew Hispanic Center reveal that Republicans have made little progress since 2008 in courting a fast-growing Hispanic voting bloc, two-thirds of whom voted for Barack Obama.

In their basic political party identification – the continental plates of American politics – 67 percent of Hispanics identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared with 20 percent who lean toward Republicans. The 47-point Democratic advantage is larger than at any point in more than a decade of polls, including 2008, when 26 percent of Hispanics sided with the Republican Party. As we noted Thursday, Obama leads Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney by 68 to 23 percent among Hispanic voters in a hypothetical general election match-up.

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(Examiner.com) A survey released Wednesday, December 28 by Pew Hispanic Center shows that Latinos disapprove how President Obama has handled the deportation of illegal immigrants. However,  the poll also shows that they would vote to re-elect him.

According to Pew, deportations under Obama reached record levels, and rose to an annual average of nearly 400,000 since 2009; double the average of George W. Bush’s first term and 30% higher than his second term.

The record deportations came after president Obama promised an immigration reform and stating in an address in front of La Raza National Council that “communities are terrorize by ICE’s immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies,” when he was a candidate.

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(USAToday) A record number of Asian Americans are running for Congress next year, reflecting population gains and a growing sense of the need to flex political muscle.

Republican Ranjit "Ricky" Gill has already outraised Democratic incumbent Rep. Jerry McNerney in California's newly configured 9th District. In Illinois, two Democrats — Raja Krishnamoorthi and Tammy Duckworth — are vying in the new 8th District. And two current Asian-American officeholders — U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and state Rep. William Tong of Connecticut, both Democrats — are running for U.S. Senate seats.

In all, at least 19 Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) candidates have declared their bids for Congress so far in the 2012 election cycle, up from eight candidates in 2010.

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(The Hill) Democrats are counting on enthusiastic support from Hispanics to propel them to victory one year from now, even though a lack of progress on immigration reform under President Obama and increasingly harsh rhetoric from Republicans has left many Hispanics disenchanted with both parties.

Increasingly, no party or candidate with an eye toward Washington can afford not to appeal to this fastest-growing voter bloc in the country. Hispanics supported Obama by a two-to-one margin in the 2008 election over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then set a record for midterm voter turnout in 2010 when 6.6 million Hispanics showed up to the polls, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Obama remains much more popular with Hispanics than he does with the overall population. A poll released Nov. 8 by Univision/Latino Decisions showed 48 percent of Americans overall approved of his job performance; among Hispanics, it’s 66 percent.

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(AP) Jeff Adachi says he grew up hearing the stories of his Japanese-American family's internment during World War II.

"They lost everything. But they taught me not to be bitter, to get an education and to stand up for what's right," Adachi, San Francisco's public defender, writes on the website devoted to his campaign for the city's mayor.

He's one of six Asian-Americans candidates who are drawing on their life stories of immigration, discrimination and empowerment as they try to become the first Asian-American elected mayor in the city's history.

San Francisco already has an Asian-American mayor in Ed Lee, who was appointed in January. But the Nov. 8 election is being seen as an historic moment in a city that has the largest percentage of Asian-Americans in the continental United States and boasts the nation's oldest Chinatown.

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(Hispanic Ohio, Ruben Navarrette) Latinos in the United States have been betting on the numbers – their numbers.

In the last three decades, I’ve heard politicos, academics, activists and others boast that a swelling population would eventually bring the Latino community power and respect.

They include President Barack Obama, who just last month told a group of Latino online journalists gathered at the White House that he was confident that he’d see a competitive Hispanic candidate running for president during his lifetime.

“Just look at the demographics,” Obama said. “With numbers comes political power.”

Not necessarily, Mr. President.

The assumption has been that, at some point, the Latino population would become so large and its influence on everything from business to sports to food to pop culture would be so profound that it would be impossible to ignore.

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(USAToday) As vice president of the Pocono Republican Hispanic Association, Friedman says she constantly battles a stigma that Republicans dislike Hispanics, and tries to show them how the party's ideals of self-reliance, limited government and family values line up with their views.

That's why Friedman cringes when she tunes in to Republican presidential debates, where the only mention of Hispanics is through the candidates' harsh rhetoric on illegal immigration, making her job of recruiting Hispanics that much harder.

"People don't even have electric fences around their homes," said Friedman, referring to a comment by Republican presidential contender Herman Cain that he would electrify a U.S.-Mexico border fence — a comment he would later call a joke. "They're all making comments and suggestions from a point of view that's very different from the Hispanic community. That's precisely why they need Hispanics who can help them with that."

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(Statesman.com) New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio are popular, relative political newcomers in presidential battleground states.

The rising GOP stars are also Hispanics, something the Republican Party makes no secret of hoping to capitalize on in the upcoming national elections.

National Republicans are inviting them on international fact-finding trips, courting them for high-profile public appearances and whispering their names as possibilities for vice presidential nominations.

"They represent the American Dream," said Fred Malek, founder of the conservative American Action Network and its spinoff, the Hispanic Leadership Network, whose mission is to bring Hispanics into the party. "They represent what America is all about: how to succeed. How to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, reach success and show leadership. They all share that."

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(FoxNews) The growing number of Republican presidential candidates threatening to sit out an upcoming Univision debate signals the party may not deem the country's largest Spanish-language network as essential to reaching Hispanic voters. 

But that population is still considered critical to GOP success in 2012 — and the flap underscores how important it is for Republicans to build up their outreach to the Latino electorate over the next year. 

Analysts say Republicans will need to make an impression on Latino voters one way or another. They urged the candidates to broaden their outreach, instead of relying on one-shot debates to make an impact — and making amends with Univision couldn't hurt either.

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(US News) It's been a particularly bad week for President Barack Obama.

His new jobs bill seems to be going nowhere fast despite his stumping the country in support of it. The Democrats lost two special elections for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives—one of which they had held since the Coolidge administration—in what was widely seen as a referendum on the job he is doing as president. Newspaper headlines are screaming that some members of his party are ready to push the panic button, and the bankruptcy of a so-called "green energy" firm that received heavy financial backing from Obama's Department of Energy—and which involves at least one of the president's major campaign contributors—is taking on all the earmarks of an emerging scandal.

To put it simply, the magic is gone.

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