Latino Democrats Rally The Faithful For final Push

Victor Landa, NewsTaco

If politics is anything like religion, then caucus meetings at national party conventions are old fashioned revivals and instead of  dusty tents they have them in convention center ballrooms with state of the art visual presentations. The rest is coming-to-the-light speechifying with a little organizing talking points sprinkled in.

So it was at the Democratic Party convention’s Hispanic caucus meeting Monday morning. Rowdy, electric and…well, predictable. The effort was laudable: to get a room half-filled with Latino convention revelers who had woken too early on a Labor Day extended weekend to concentrate on the matter at hand – get Latinos to the polls come election day.

When I walked into the room Congresswoman Debbie Wassermann Schultz, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, was at the podium rousing the crowd into a frenzy. These party loyalists need little fodder to work themselves up, that’s why they came here. The plan, as Wasserman and the speakers that followed explained, is workable only with spirited help and volunteers: get feet on the ground to mobilize Latinos in battleground states. Namely Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio…

Depending on who’s counting, Latinos in those states make up either 4% or 8% of the electorate and the Democratic party leaders would like Latino volunteers to descend on those states to make the difference. “Spend a week, a month, the next 60 days if you can going door to door in those states…” Obama Campaign National Latino Vote Director Adrian Saenz told the crowd.

Truth be told, if you don’t vote in those states not too many people are looking your way to make a difference. The electoral map is a stalemate at this point with red and blue states spoken for. The hand full of states in play – and more importantly the handful of undecided voters in those states – are the ones that everyone here is talking about. Undecided Latinos in those states are a precious commodity, but so are the regular decided-but-not-necessarily-likely-to-vote Latinos. And that may be why the revival atmosphere this morning was especially poignant. The conventional wisdom is that if eligible Latino voters go to the polls they’ll vote for the Democratic candidate.  And if that happens they could swing the election President Obama’s way. These Democrats need to be fired up in order to fulfill their potential.

This was just the first day of this revival and the tent is about to get bigger. We’ll see if it lives up to the expectation.