Penultimos Dias posts this New Yorker piece (pdf) in which Ken Auletta examines the recent spat between Senator Marco Rubio and Univision. It’s a long, detailed story about Rubio, the Republican party and Latino voters, and Univision’s dominant position in the U.S. Spanish-speaking audience. (Update: More on all this from Café Fuerte and the Columbia Journalism Review.) An interesting read, but more to the point of this blog, this caught my eye:
Republicans speak of Senator Rubio as a Vice-Presidential candidate in large part because they think he can help deliver Hispanic voters. But it’s not clear that he can. In the 2010 Senate election, he won fifty-five per cent of the Hispanic vote, but this was mostly because he won three-quarters of the Cuban vote. He won only about a third of the Puerto Rican vote and not much more of the remainder of the Hispanic vote. Jeb Bush, a Florida Republican with softer positions on immigration than Rubio—he has supported tuition breaks for the children of illegal immigrants, for example— won nearly two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in his last state-wide election, including fifty-five per cent of the Puerto Rican vote. In the December poll by impreMedia and Latino Decisions, only thirteen per cent of Hispanics said that Rubio’s inclusion on the national ticket would make them much more likely to vote Republican; ten per cent said it would make them much less likely.
