EthnicMajority

(Scripps News) Republicans created the Hispanic Leadership Network last year in an attempt to re-capture the Latino vote they lost in the 2008 presidential election. George Bush claimed an impressive 44 percent of that support in his 2004 presidential run. It shriveled to 31 percent when John McCain ran against Barack Obama in 2008.

So how can the GOP's new "Network", co-chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and ex-U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, an appointee of Jeb's brother George, get back on the good side of this major voting bloc in 2012 after years of Republican assaults on the Latino community?

The second Hispanic Leadership Network conference was held late last month in Albuquerque. Neither Bush nor Gutierrez attended, but sent video welcome messages. As its keynote speaker, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez suggested having real "conversations" with the community: "They think the same as you do — they have the same values — but you have to bother to have a conversation with them about those values. If you don't, all they hear is the rhetoric."

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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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(Los Angeles Times) Early this year, Brian Sandoval and Susana Martinez made history. He became Nevada’s first Latino governor. In New Mexico, she became the country’s first Latina governor.

Just as striking as their breakthrough is their party affiliation: Both are Republicans.

For many in the GOP, the twin victories last November, along with the election of Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida, marked an important step in efforts to mend the party’s frayed ties with Latino voters, which have suffered over the last several years of hard-line talk on immigration.

For Democrats, the election of the three was something else: a warning sign at a time when Latino support has grown increasingly vital to the party’s success, especially in the battleground states of the Rocky Mountains and desert Southwest.

Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada and Michael Bennet of Colorado each withstood the 2010 Republican wave thanks in good part to Latino support. President Obama is counting on strong Latino turnout to hold on to Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico — states he won in the last White House race — and to expand the 2012 competition to Arizona and, maybe, Texas and Georgia.

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(Salon) The Republican wave produced groundbreaking results for minority candidates, from Latina and Indian-American governors to a pair of black congressmen from the Deep South.

In New Mexico, Susana Martinez was elected as the nation’s first female Hispanic governor. Nikki Haley, whose parents were born in India, will be the first woman governor in South Carolina, and Brian Sandoval became Nevada’s first Hispanic governor.

Insurance company owner Tim Scott will be the first black Republican congressman from South Carolina since Reconstruction, after easily winning in his conservative district. Scott, a 45-year-old state representative, earned a primary victory over the son of the one-time segregationist U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond.

In Florida, veteran Allen West ousted a two-term Democrat to a House seat. He is the first black Republican elected to Congress from Florida since a former slave served two terms in the 1870s.

The last black Republican in Congress was J.C. Watts of Oklahoma. He left office in 2003. There were 42 black Democrats in Congress this term.

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(Politico) National Republicans look at New Mexico’s Susana Martinez and would like to see the future of their party: conservative, Hispanic and the favorite to become governor of a key swing state this fall.

But she is dodging the most volatile and important issue to the conservative base in the southwestern U.S.: immigration. While other Republican governors are racing to copy Arizona’s toughest-in-the-country immigration law, Martinez has expressed only tepid support for it. While Republicans in Washington want to reopen debate on birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, Martinez opposes changing the amendment.

She insists that the Arizona law is a public safety issue and not a political one.

“Susana Martinez believes that states have every right to check the immigration status of someone that has been arrested of a crime,” campaign manager Ryan Cangiolisi told POLITICO.

But the Arizona law allows officers to detain and check the immigration status of people who haven’t been arrested — leaving the Martinez statement well short of an outright endorsement of the law.

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