President Barack Obama won Hispanics in 2012 by 44 points (71%-27%) over Mitt Romney, as Latino voters continued the trend of voting for Democrats in greater numbers over the past decade.
In 2004, 44% of Hispanics voted for the Republican ticket. In 2008, only 31% voted for Republican John McCain for president. And in 2012, only 27% voted for Mitt Romney.
According to Pew Hispanic Center, the share of the Hispanic vote in 2012 increased in states such as Arizona, Nevada, Florida, and Colorado.
In Nevada, Obama won 70% of the Hispanic vote. In Colorado, he won 75%.
In Florida, the trends are even more disturbing.
Consider this: Obama won Cuban-Americans, once the staunchest of Republicans, by two points over Romney.
In 2004, 78% of Cubans, the majority of whom are in Florida, voted Republican. In 2012, 47% voted for Mitt Romney, compared to 49% for Obama.
Cubans who came to America from Cuba and became citizens still voted Republican. But Americans of Cuban descent (those who were born here) voted overwhelmingly for Obama.
“An increasing portion of Cuban-Americans are not the people that fled from Cuba at various times but people who have grown up (in the U.S.) … and they are not as heavily Republican as their parents,” political analyst Michael Barone said.
An even more result may be that in Florida, Romney lost Puerto-Rican voters in Central Florida’s famed I-4 corridor by a stunning margin, made more so because Puerto Ricans have backed Republican candidates in the past:
The exit polling in the Puerto-Rican community should concern Republicans even more. Bendixen & Amandi pegged Obama’s support at 83 percent, an astonishing number considering that Puerto Ricans have backed Republican candidates in the past. Most of the state’s 850,000 Puerto Ricans live in Orlando and Osceola counties, where former Gov. Jeb Bush won handily. Former President George W. Bush only narrowly lost Orange County and won Osceola County in 2004.