DALLAS, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- The presidential campaigns are making no extra efforts to woo Hispanic voters in Texas although a record number are expected to turn out at the polls on Nov. 2.
The reason is, this is Bush country and everybody knows how Texas will go. The campaigns are putting their money in key battleground states, like neighboring New Mexico.
"Both campaigns understand that Texas is already in the Bush column so they are not spending any money here," said Lydia Camarillo, vice president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in San Antonio.
The local parties are making an effort to turn out the Latino vote in select races like the high-profile one in the 32nd Congressional District in Dallas where two incumbents face each other in a newly drawn district that is 36-percent Hispanic.
Democrat Martin Frost is facing Republican Pete Sessions in one of the nation's most competitive congressional contests. The district stretches from wealthy sections of North Dallas to Latino neighborhoods in the southwest section of the city.
"I've always had significant support in the Hispanic community," said Frost, who has represented the Latino area of the new district during his 23 years in Congress.
Sessions, an 8-year veteran, is also campaigning for the Hispanic vote in the district created by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature. Frost's old district was slashed into pieces so he filed against Sessions in the new district.
The Hispanic vote will also be important to Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, another target of the Republican redistricting strategy, who's running in a new district that runs from Austin to the border. He easily defeated a Hispanic challenger for the party nomination and the district is Democratic.
Jackie Soliz-Chapa, field director with the Texas Democratic Party, said many of the party's county organizations have voter registration efforts out to lure Hispanic voters to the polls in South Texas and they expect a large turnout.
"Many of them have sons, daughters and nephews in Iraq right now and they are not very happy about it," she said.
Alexis DeLee, a spokeswoman for the Texas Republican Party, said Republicans have a "excellent record" with the Hispanic community in Texas.
"In two short years under the Republican majority, Hispanics have held more statewide elective offices than Democrats did in nearly 20 years when they were in the majority in Texas," she said.
Although Texas will not be in the election spotlight in the presidential race, a record number of registered Latino voters are expected to show up in the polls and most of them will support Democrat John Kerry, according to Latino voter research.
An estimated 2.5 million Latinos are registered to vote in Texas and about 68 percent of the eventual total registration is expected to vote, according to the Southwest Project, which is working to register another 30,000 to 40,000 potential voters.
Camarillo said they hope to eventually register more than 3 million Latino voters in Texas, but that won't happen this year. The non-partisan Southwest project is the largest and oldest drive to register Latino voters in the country.
About 24 percent of the total statewide vote is projected to be Hispanic this year, which will be the highest recorded, she said. In 2000, the Latino turnout in Texas was about 16.7 percent of the total vote.
About 35 percent of Texas 21.5 million population was Hispanic last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. State Demographer Steve Murdock predicts that more than half of the state's population will be Latino by 2035.
The population, however, is not a true indication of how many Hispanics are eligible to vote because a person must be a U.S. citizen to vote in the United States. There are an unknown number of illegal aliens in the state and there are perjury penalties for lying on a registration affidavit.
Camarillo said interest is high in the Hispanic community because Hispanics understand the importance of the election and the critical issues at stake, such as the war in Iraq. Many Latino families have relatives fighting in the war, she said.
Registration is up in Bexar County at San Antonio. More than 62,000 residents have registered to vote since January, which has boosted the eligible voters there to a record level of almost 900,000, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
If half of all those who are registered to vote show up at the polls Nov. 2, it would be the largest voter turnout in Bexar County history, officials said.
About 65 percent of the Hispanic vote in Texas is projected to go to Democrat John Kerry in the presidential race and about 35 percent for President George Bush, according to the William C. Velasquez Institute, a Latino research and policy think tank.
In the 2000, 65.7 went for Democrat Al Gore and 32.5 for Bush.
Bush, a former Texas governor who speaks Spanish, has campaigned actively in the past for the Latino vote in Texas and he has done better than any other Republican. His campaign is reportedly pushing to get 40 percent of the vote this year.
Bush won favor with the state's Hispanic population as governor when he opposed California's Proposition 187, which cut off health and social services and education to illegal aliens. The federal courts eventually overturned the proposition.
A recent poll of likely Latino voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado found Kerry leading Bush 56 to 36 percent, the institute said. This compared with Gore's 62 percent and Bush's 35 percent in 2000.
"These numbers do not bode well for Senator Kerry," said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Velasquez institute. "Kerry holds a 20-point lead over President Bush, but over the past several elections we've seen the Democratic nominee hold a considerably larger margin."
Hispanics rated the war as the most significant issue, followed by healthcare, homeland security, public education, strengthening jobs and wages, according to the poll conducted Sept. 27-29 by Mirram-Global, a Latino-owned consulting firm, for the institute. There were 606 interviews and the overall margin of error was plus/minus 3.98 percent.
Although Republicans often dispute the traditional assumption that the Hispanic vote is largely Democrat, Camarillo said that that is still true. She doesn't see large numbers of Latinos in Texas gravitating to the Republican side this year.
"The Latino electorate at this point has not seen the Republican Party igniting them in a dramatic way," she said. "Some of the Republican policies still send a chilling effect to Latinos that basically resulted from the experience that Latinos faced in California because of Proposition 187. Proposition 187 basically sent a message across the country that that was truly how Republicans think. And until the Republicans change that perspective I doubt that many Latinos will shift to the Republican column."
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