GOP panhandles for Hispanics votes.

From Yahoo News:



LOS ANGELES - Democrats hold an edge with Hispanics in national elections, but Latinos' growing tendency to register as independents and split their vote between parties is buoying Republican prospects for 2008.

Younger and college-educated Hispanics in particular offer fertile ground for the GOP, new data show. And while no one suggests Republicans have become the party of choice for the nation's fastest-growing minority, Democrats have been gradually losing ground.


"The Democrats began in the 1980s to slowly lose Latino registration," said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a San Antonio-based research group that studies Hispanic issues. "It's drip, drip, drip."

Although Hispanics tend to vote Democratic, the percentage of Latinos who call themselves Democrats has declined in the last decade, even as the overall number of Hispanic voters climbed.


In California — home to the nation's largest Hispanic population and a coveted cache of 55 electoral votes for the 2008 presidential election — nearly two of three Hispanic voters were registered Democrats in the mid-1990s. By 2006, that figure dropped as low as 56 percent, according to polling and registration data.


Research last year by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Hispanics in California are about equally divided among those who describe themselves as conservative, liberal and moderate.


And many Hispanic voters are choosing no party at all.