California Latinos are Harbingers of a New Political Reality

As California goes so goes the nation.

As much as non-californianos hate to admit it, the adage tends to hold true, at least where culture is concerned. Politics, though, has never followed that blueprint. It’s been middle America, the bible belt, the  heartland, that has kept the political tempo. The idea is that most independent voters live in those places.

But the political wave that started in the heartland and recently took the country stopped short of the west coast. California has gone blue-er, and will stay there for a while.  Or so says a recent analysis in the San Francisco Chronicle. California bacame buler and will stay that way for a while because “The state’s rising numbers of new voters – newly minted immigrant voters, minorities and voters between the ages of 18 and 29 – are overwhelmingly Democratic in their preferences.”

So let’s project that trend into the future, where the number of young and immigrant Latinos is on a path to becoming exponentially larger. Is it a wonder that the Latino electorate has become a recently recurring theme?

Look what’s happened to the immigration debate there: “In the most recent USC College/Los Angeles Times poll, 1,501 registered voters in California were asked what they think should happen to illegal immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States for at least two years.
Sixty-one percent said they supported a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants; only 28 percent would deport them.”

I try to post stories about the Latino community in the most unexpected places. I’ve found that Latino communities are springing like tufts of grass in the cracks of the sidewalk. Wherever there’s a little soil to make a go of it, there they are.

It’s easy to see how what’s happening today in California is a prelude to what could happen across the country. And if you know the Latino community well you know that it’s just a couple of generations away.