Barack Obama holds a commanding lead among Hispanics in the southwest. The presumptive Democratic nominee leads John McCain by 45 points in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, according to the latest Democracy Corps survey of Hispanic voters.
Just a few months ago, analysts were questioning whether Obama had a Latino problem, given the success of Hillary Clinton among Hispanics during the primaries. Today, Obama has a chance to perform better among Hispanic voters than any Democratic presidential candidate in recent history. In the four southwestern states, he is running an average 10 points ahead of John Kerry’s share of the vote four years ago, while McCain receives only a bare majority of Bush’s 2004 Latino vote.
Obama has consolidated the Democratic Hispanic vote in a way that he has yet to do among non-Hispanic white voters.� Nationally, Obama runs 3 points below the generic Democratic presidential vote among white voters, but among Latinos his vote effectively matches the generic preference for a Democrat. He also holds a nearly 2-1 lead among independent Hispanics.
Obama has said all along that Hispanic voters would embrace him as they got to know him better, and that is proving to be the case. In our January poll, 83 percent of Hispanic voters in the southwest were able to identify Obama, and twice as many gave him a positive rating as a negative one. Today, his identification is nearly universal (96 percent), and his positive ratings outnumber his negative by three times. The share of people who give him a positive rating has risen by nearly 50 percent in that time, while the number who gives him a negative rating has barely budged.
http://www.democracycorps.com/strategy/2008/08/consolidating-the-hispanic-vote/?section=Analysis
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