Immigration, the poll suggested, is 'the elephant in the GOP living room.' Poll: California Latinos spurn GOP

A new poll out of California found little hope for Republicans among the nation’s fastest-growing electoral demographic.

Latino voters across the state hold widely negative views of the Republican Party, according to the survey, which was conducted by a GOP pollster and consultant and conceived as a tool to help the party make inroads with Hispanic voters. Many respondents said they see the GOP as too conservative and don’t trust it on the issue of immigration reform.


And while California won’t likely be in play in the 2012 presidential election, the poll has implications for more competitive Western states where Hispanics’ political voice is growing: Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona.

Republican consultant Marty Wilson, who worked with pollster Bob Moore on the poll, tried hard to find reasons for GOP optimism in the numbers, but acknowledged: “The short answer is, it ain’t going to be easy.”

Moore and Wilson, who managed former HP CEO Carly Fiorina’s unsuccessful Senate bid last year, teamed up on the poll in an attempt to help their party engage an electoral bloc that no California candidate of either party can afford to write off.

Just 26 percent of those polled had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, compared with 62 percent who viewed Democrats favorably.

Asked how the GOP could win them over, 32 percent said they would never vote for a Republican, while 30 percent suggested moving to the center and nominating less conservative candidates. Just 22 percent said sticking with conservative values was the way to go.

As the pollster put it in his own presentation of the findings, “The GOP candidate is not going to win many Latino voters by emphasizing Conservatism.”

Immigration, the poll found, is “the elephant in the GOP living room”: 67 percent of Latinos favored a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, including 51 percent of Latino Republicans.

Asked which party they trusted to reform immigration, 57 percent of those polled said Democrats, versus just 21 percent who trusted Republicans.

According to exit polls, Latinos made up 22 percent of the 2010 electorate in California. With 300,000 more Hispanic voters casting ballots in 2010 than in the presidential year of 2008, it’s clear, Wilson said, that “the long-predicted slumbering giant has awakened. And for Republicans to be competitive on a statewide basis, that is a voter segment that we’ve got to understand better and more aggressively compete for their votes.”

But winning over California’s Hispanics will be an uphill battle, according to the poll of 400 Latino voters conducted last weekend. The poll, which carries a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, was conducted in both English and Spanish on both cell phones and land lines.

“Latinos in California are heavily Democratic in terms of their partisan viewpoint, and we’re not going to change that mindset overnight,” Wilson said. “It’s highly unlikely that a Republican candidate for statewide office is going to get a majority of Latino voters. But we have to get a greater percentage of them.”

Both Fiorina and Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman got about 30 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2010, according to exit polls.

“That’s obviously not enough,” Wilson said. “My guess is we’ve got to get upwards of 40 percent in California to be competitive, and I think that’s doable.”

The way to do it, he said, is for Republicans to engage with Hispanics on a sustained, consistent basis — “You can’t just decide to run a Spanish-language TV ad in the last month” — and to avoid divisive stances on immigration.

Another obstacle for California Republicans, according to the poll: Republicans in the rest of the country. Just 23 percent of the Latinos polled viewed California Republicans as different from Republicans elsewhere.

That’s a problem, Wilson said. “The challenge that Republicans have in California, whether you’re talking about Latino voters or voters in general, is that the Republicans that California voters see on their television screens every night don’t necessarily play very well out here,” he said.

Wilson said he hopes the poll will send a message to his own party.

“We need to educate Republicans that our act isn’t playing so well with Latino audiences,” he said.