If you’re not already familiar with it, CandidatoUSA is a new website that covers Hispanic politics and voting issues.
The have a really interesting post today on Hispanic political involvement and the “Sleeping Giant” that is unused Hispanic voting power.
The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute released a report (pdf) projecting that the number of US Latino voters in the 2008 elections will be 20% higher than in 2004, an increase in over 1.8 million voters to a total of 9.3 million Latino voters.
Considering that just those 1.8 million new voters is about half the margin of victory President Bush had in the popular vote in the 2004 election, that is a significant number. It will be interesting to see how candidates and political parties reach out to this substantial voting bloc as the 2008 campaigns heat up.
Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo is not participating in the Republican Presidential Forum on Univision tonight. He wrote an op-ed in the Miami Herald this week, saying that the reason he won’t participate is because he feels it encourages Hispanics to not assimilate into American life and isolates the Hispanic community from the rest of the country.
America has always been a country of immigrants. Lots of Americans conduct their daily lives and business in other languages. It seems that we should do what we can to encourage engagement in the political process, and candidates should reach out to the voting public in whatever way they can, whether it be in “Korean, French, Farsi or Spanish.”
[Note: These opinions are strictly my own.]