McAuliffe: Obama has Latino "problem"

Ken Vogel reports that the Clinton campaign is using the results to openly argue that Barack Obama has a problem with Hispanic voters — an idea Clinton backers have previously mentioned only behind the scenes.

“It was a 100 percent Hispanic primary and it shows that he has a problem with the Latino community,” Terry McAuliffe, campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton, told a handful of reporters after polls closed Sunday. “He cannot close in this key core constituency,” McAuliffe added.

Voters in Puerto Rico are in some ways different from Hispanics living stateside, both because there’s a long tradition of racial mixing and because elections here tend to center around the debate over whether the island should remain a commonwealth or become a state or an independent nation. They also don't vote in November.

Clinton has fared better than Obama with Hispanic voters in previous primaries. And her campaign has argued to superdelegates that she’d do better than Obama against presumptive GOP nominee in key states with large Hispanic populations.

CNN exit polls in Puerto Rico found a surprisingly high 31 percent of voters admitted the race of the candidates was important in their decision. Of those, 63 percent voted for Clinton and 37 percent for Obama.

“It helps make the case that we would not have to expend resources to win a natural Democratic constituency,” said Puerto Rico Senate president Kenneth D. McClintock, a Clinton co-chair and superdelegate. If Obama is the nominee, McClintock asserted that in order to win the Hispanic vote, Democrats “would have to divert resources that we would otherwise spend on other campaigns.”

But McAuliffe’s assertion Sunday that Obama has a Hispanic “problem” was more direct than any the campaign has made publicly to date.

In a conference call with Clinton campaign donors last month, the campaign’s liaison to superdelegates, Harold Ickes, asserted McCain has “very favorable standing with Hispanics because of his position on the immigration bill.”

Ickes said “So if Obama is against McCain in states where Hispanics are important, I’ll just tell you: he’s not going to be able to cut the mustard on that, and Hillary will. And she’s shown that in Texas and other states,” said Ickes. That will be key, Ickes said, “if we need to bring in some of the Southwestern states or even Florida, where there is a growing population of Puerto Ricans in addition to the Cubans in South Florida as well as older people.”

UPDATE: Obama does somewhat worse than Clinton among Hispanics in matchups against McCain, but he still leads McCain among Hispanic voters by a wide margin in, for example, this recent Gallup survey. In that survey, he does a bit better among that group than Kerry (53% of Hispanics) did against Bush. Clinton, though not Obama, does better than Gore (62%) did against Bush.

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