EthnicMajority

(The Guardian) For someone who holds the relatively modest position of county sheriff, Joe Arpaio has received an astonishing amount of attention from this year's Republican presidential candidates.

He has been wooed by Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum, who all made pilgrimages to Arizona to see him in person, Santorum as recently as last week. Rick Perry invited him to tour Texas with him and Mitt Romney, for whom he acted as Arizona campaign chair in 2008, has also been in contact.

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(Examiner.com) With the 2012 presidential election less than one year away, all eyes are focused on President Obama and the potential Republican candidates he will be running against. The biggest issue heading into the race is the economy and with positive jobs number's again in January, re-election for President Obama is looking better each month.

One of the biggest supporters of President Obama in 2008 was African-Americans. In 2008, President Obama was able to garner 96% of African-American votes, making up 13% of the electorate. If President Obama wants to win re-election he will have to repeat his support in the African-American community as well as other minorities. African-American unemployment hit a 27 year high this past summer, reaching 16.7%. That number is higher than anyone would like, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. According to the new January jobs report for 2012, African-American unemployment dropped significantly.

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(Huffington Post) The battle between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney for the allegiance of Florida's 450,000 Hispanic Republican primary voters has exposed one of the great myths surrounding the "Latino vote": despite their shared ethnicity, Hispanics are far from monolithic, politically. True, most do generally swing Democratic, but the range of that swing can vary sharply, depending on the candidate and the issues.

President Obama took 67 percent of the Latino vote in 2008, compared with 31 percent for John McCain. However, in 2004 George W. Bush won reelection with a record 44 percent of the Latino vote.

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(Huffington Post) The Republican Party is beefing up its minority outreach nationwide and preparing to put its rising Latino stars on the campaign trail amid concerns that tough immigration rhetoric in the presidential primary is taking on an increasingly anti-Hispanic tone.

But immigrant-rights groups and some political watchers say the damage may be irreversible. They argue that the GOP has severely hampered itself as it looks to woo the critical Latino voting bloc that could decide who wins key states like New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida next fall.

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(Boston Globe) President Obama is well positioned to repeat his strong performance with Hispanic voters one year before the 2012 election, according to a new Univision News/Latino Decisions poll.

In head-to-head matchups with the top three GOP presidential candidates, Obama holds substantial leads that exceed a two-to-one margin in every case. Latino voters prefer Obama 67 percent to 24 percent over Mitt Romney, 65 percent to 22 percent over Herman Cain, and 68 percent to 21 percent over Rick Perry.

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(The Blaze) The latest non-controversy surrounding a GOP presidential hopeful involves a moment where Rick Santorum allegedly said, “I don‘t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.”

As a result of this supposedly “racist” comment, some political pundits at MSNBC are convinced that, whether he meant to or not, Rick Santorum is engaged in a covert Republican operation to “lure…white working class“ voters by using racist ”dog-whistle” politics.

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(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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(Bradenton.com) With growing signs that Hispanic voters are turned off by GOP positions on immigration, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is using his national profile to deliver a message to his party: Tone it down.

(Time) Herman Cain’s improbable rise to the top of Republican presidential primary polls — and the prospect that two black men, including an incumbent, could compete head-on for the White House next year — should be proof that American politics has moved beyond race. Instead, Cain’s candidacy has been marred by empty self-promotion, embarrassing miscues and renewed allegations that may have set back the cause of black conservatism.

The Cain presidential experiment coincides with a period of new gains for black conservatives. “Americans find it hard to believe we’re a diverse group,” says Florida Representative Allen West, one of two black Republicans elected to Congress in the Tea Party wave of 2010. “But when you really understand the black community, it’s quite conservative.” West’s parents may have been Democrats, “but the things they raised me on – faith, education, individual responsibility – are true conservative principles. There are more African Americans out there starting to lean that way. It has nothing to do with party.”

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(Boston Globe) Herman Cain's rise as a presidential contender was supposed to prove that race didn't matter in the Republican Party. Cain is fast making it the only thing that does.

The black conservative is trying to navigate around allegations that he sexually harassed at least three women, implying that the accusations surfaced because he is black. Hours after the claims were reported, Cain's supporters branded his trouble a "high-tech lynching." That's the term coined 20 years ago by another black conservative, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, after his confirmation hearings for the court were rocked by allegations of sexual harassment.