Election Post-Scripts as Tea Leaves and Footnotes

By Jesse Treviño, HispanicLatino

Whether President Obama wins re-election tomorrow, some electoral post-scripts will be engaged immediately.  We will know if the HispanicLatino vote was important as expected, especially in the swing states.  One of the two campaigns clearly will not have done enough to win – while hundreds of thousands of HispanicLatinos who did not vote could have made the difference.  In either case, the HispanicLatino vote becomes ever more important.  On the very day after the election, they will add more potential voters for 2016 proportionately than any other group.

If Obama wins with the HispanicLatino vote having proven decisive, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio will shoot to the head of the pack in his party, and his political action committees will begin to attract immediate money.  Just as important, he will draw additional, competent political advisors with national experience to make sure the young legislator does not misstep and try to turn his party away from its harsh anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric.  For those reasons, Rubio and sophisticated political analysts – not necessarily the ones on television every morning – will look closely at the results from three distinct congressional races across the country to read tea leaves about the future and to consider other possibilities.

In California’s 24th District, long-time Democratic incumbent Congresswoman Lois Capps is trying to stave off the challenge of Republican Abel Maldonado in a new district to test how far HispanicLatinos identify with a Spanish surname against an Anglo candidate who is more in tune with their needs.  Also of note will be the effort of Democrat Pete Gallego in District 23 in Texas to unseat Republican incumbent Francisco Canseco in all-HispanicLatino affair that is a strict test of party identity.  And in Florida, the all-Cuban contest contest between Democrat Joe Garcia and Republican incumbent David Rivera in the 26th District will provide clues about whether the once-stalwart Republican Cuban American vote continues to trend Democratic – abetting the ongoing conversion of Florida into a Democratic state.

So, too, analysts will wade into the numbers in Arizona, where a Democratic victory or a tight contest in the race for the U.S. Senate would augur well for Democrats there and bring to the fore the potential of Texas, the last state with a major HispanicLatino population not part of the national electoral equation.

Despite the lopsided results in Texas in favor of Romney tomorrow, its potential for the Democratic ticket in 2016 will have ratcheted up another notch.  By 2016, another 550,000 HispanicLatinos will be eligible to vote in Texas.  There were enough HispanicLatinos this year to have carried the last big-state Republican redoubt into the Democratic column, but it would have taken extraordinary lifting that Democrats were not yet ready to exert.

Some Texas Democrats have been making the case theoretically for years but no more powerful, tangible argument exists than the rapidity with which Democrats have made Colorado, Florida and Nevada competitive.  If Obama carries both of those states again, Texas by all reason should not be far behind.  Harry Reid rebuilt the politics of Nevada, a state with less effective demographics than Texas, from the ground up alongside the work of Colorado Democrats to transform their state.  But Colorado and Nevada are smaller, and it is easier to ride a pony than mount a horse.

Moving to make Texas politically relevant is not going to be on Obama’s agenda in his second term if he wins.  But the idea of taking Texas could find resonance in the Clinton camp that already might be thinking about 2016.  No one will look at the numbers from tomorrow night more closely than Bill Clinton.  More than anyone else, he will be able to discern the potential of the HispanicLatino vote in Texas that, already in Hillary’s corner in the primaries in 2008, could be the foundation of a statewide operation to carry the state in a general election.

Whatever we learn tomorrow, we know already that Marco Rubio received an enormous gift when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie stepped out of his attack-dog skin and embraced Obama as the last winds of Hurricane Sandy still swirled.  His name ironically is eerily similar to Charlie Crist, the former governor of Florida who went under in Florida after the Tea party tagged him as a friend of Obama’s.  If Romney wins, he will not forget that Christie might have been undermining him to secure an open shot at 2016.  Christie might be passing into a footnote in history.

Not so HispanicLatino voters.

This article was first published in HispanicLatino.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Staesman.

[Photo by DonkeyHotey]

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