The Obama campaign will release a slew of Spanish language television ads in swing states on Wednesday, the campaign's first Spanish ads and a sign that it wants to corral the Hispanic vote before Mitt Romney shapeshifts into the son of a Mexican immigrant.
Four ads will be released in Colorado, Nevada and Florida, all swing states with heavy Latino populations. The ads feature campaign volunteers talking about the president, their own stories, and the issues facing the Hispanic community.
While Obama won the Hispanic vote handily in 2008, and remains popular with the community, his support has slipped as he has failed to realize comprehensive immigration reform, or even more modest proposals like the Dream Act, while deportations have risen. However, a PEW survey in December found that even among Hispanics unhappy with Obama's deportation policies, he would beat Romney 57-43 in a hypothetical matchup.
The key, then, is getting them to the polls (like Romney and evangelicals). If the Hispanic community stays home in November, angry over Obama's lack of progress on immigration issues, he could lose his margin of error in several states. (Which is not to say that Hispanic voters only cast their ballots on immigration issues.)
Meanwhile, the RNC is launching a Hispanic outreach campaign of its own, hitting additional states like Virginia and North Carolina, with the same pitch Romney is using to try to woo women voters: the economy. "We are going to engage Hispanics and Latinos like we've never done before," Reince Priebus told reporters on Tuesday, which is known in the business as hurdling the lowest bar.
This is all an attempt to backpedal some of the nastier positions the Republican Party has taken on immigration issues in the past few years, dating all the way back to the comprehensive immigration reform effort by George W. Bush and John McCain, which was torpedoed by Republicans, to debates in which Rick Perry was excoriated for supporting the Dream Act.
Romney participated in beating up on Perry, and has tacked to the right on immigration throughout the primary, calling Arizona's infamous SB 1070 "a model," and receiving an endorsement from Arizona sheriff and amateur immigrant hunter Joe Arpaio. Romney's pivot back to the center on immigration will be awkward at best. In fact, he might want to stay out of Arizona altogether.
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