GOP pollster aims to expand Latino base - Inside Politics - Brief Article

Raul Damas remembers very clearly how pollsters and consultants reacted to the 2000 Census. "It was a wake-up call," Damas said. "The Latino vote became the most analyzed factor in the [2000] election."

Results from the once-a-decade national survey showed that Latinos had become the country's largest and fastest-growing minority group. Since then operatives from both major parties have stepped up efforts to court an estimated 17 million Hispanic-American voters. Democrats are aiming to retain Latino votes, while Republicans strive to gain them. Damas, director of operations for the newly-created polling group Latino Opinions/Opiniones Latinas, heads arr effort that the GOP can call on to test the solvency of conservative candidates and ideas.

Latinos handed Democrats a lopsided majority in the 2000 presidential election, splitting an estimated 62 percent for Al Gore and 35 percent for George W Bush. However, those numbers actually represented a swing towards the GOP. The figures had edged more toward Republicans during Bush's first year in office, and a 2001 poll by McLaughlin & Assoc. (R) revealed 47 percent of Latinos approved of Bush's performance. The conservative sentiments reflected by the poll convinced the firm to work with Carlos Rodriguez, head of Rodriguez & Company in Newcastle, California, to found Latino Opinions/Opiniones Latinas to conduct such polls on a permanent basis. Damas is Rodriguez's nephew, and he left his job as a legislative staff member in the office of U.S. Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-NJ) to join the new firm.

"We saw a gap in Republican strategy and we aim to fill it," Damas said. This year, Damas and his fellow pollsters found encouragement from an unlikely source: a Hispanic Trends Polling survey for the moderate New Democrat Network. Only 25 percent of respondents classified themselves as liberal, and 63 percent were anti-abortion, according to the survey.

Damas said the organization intends to conduct surveys for Republicans "on every level of elections." Latino Opinions' next national survey is expected to be released in mid to late September.

Damas' group represents a more substantive effort to reach out to Latinos, a preemptive response to organizations like the National Council of La Raza, which is critical of Republican efforts to attract their votes.

"We want to make clear that it's not just about catching our eye," said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, director of state/local public policy for La Raza. "It's about substantive policies."

Democrats are expectedly critical of the GOP's attempts to branch out.

"They're desperate," said Andres Gonzales, director of the Democratic National Committee's Office of Latino/Hispanic American Outreach. "They come up with gimmicks and a lot of soundbites. Our approach is to bring Hispanics to the table, make them candidates, have them do the outreach instead of just teaching our party regulars Spanish."

Gonzales and the Democrats are emboldened not by polls but by the current breakdowns of Latino elected officials. Nearly 90 percent of the nation's 5,170 Hispanic elected officials are Democrats. DNC officials attribute that figure to better candidate selection and "a better platform for Hispanics," Gonzales said, on issues like immigration, crime, education, job training and the minimum wage.

Elected Republicans stressed that they did not need to alter their message to bring Latinos out of the Democratic fold.

"The Republican message is the message of Hispanics," said U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who represents a district on the U.S.-Mexico border. "Extreme liberalism is running headlong into the community's values, and it is losing."

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