According to the corporate media's exit poll, two years ago the Republicans got 44% of the Latino vote, and the Democrats barely 53% --the first time Democrats had gotten less than 60% among Latinos in a national election since exit polls made such statistics possible.
This year, according to exit poll figures apparently noticed only by CNN's Spanish-language network, the Republican vote among Latinos crashed to 26%, and the Democrats got 73%, a full 20-point improvement on the 2004 figure.
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Andres Oppenheimer, a Miami Herald columnist appearing as an election-night commentator on CNN en Español, had a ready explanation, indeed, an obvious one, for the change in Latino voting patterns.
This was the Latino community's punishment of the Republicans for having spearheaded a racist, anti-immigrant offensive since the 2004 election.
[WS:] This does not seem quite right. Whatever one may think of Bush, he was keeping the nativist sentiments of the populace at bay. Obviously, he did it to appease business demand for cheap labor, be he reigned in the nativist animus of the populist politicos who wanted to close the borders and expulse all Spanish speaking people from the good ol' USA. So why would the Latino voters want to punish Bush and give an edge to those nativist politicos?
Wojtek