Latinos feeling taken for granted by @DavidOAtkins

Latinos feeling taken for granted

by David Atkins

I’ve written before about the silliness of the Republican belief that they can demonize minorities while it’s advantageous to them, and then turn around quickly and win them back by installing a minority figurehead as their standard-bearer. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked with African-Americans, and it won’t work with Latinos, either.

But that doesn’t mean Democrats can sit on their heels and take minority groups for granted. As a new Ipsos/Telemundo poll shows, President Obama’s support among Latinos, while still in positive territory, is dropping precipitously:

Although President Obama still enjoys higher job approval ratings from Hispanics than he does from the public at large, a new Ipsos-Telemundo poll shows the president’s support among Hispanics continues to decline.

A majority – 56% — said in late November and early December that they approve of how the president is handling his job. By comparison, 86% of Hispanics approved of Obama in April 2009, and 62% approved in June.

According to an Ipsos analysis of the poll, the results “suggest that while President Obama’s approval has been dropping since he took office, the disillusion among Hispanics is more pronounced than among the general public.”

The six-percentage-point drop since June is double the drop among the public at large, according to the poll.

That’s hardly surprising, given the Obama’s Administration’s record number of deportations, as well as the failure to even attempt to do something significant about immigration reform, one of his key election planks in 2008.

They’re not going to switch to the GOP, but if their issues are ignored, they may very well leave the Democratic Party and stay home as “independent voters.”

At which point, of course, a bunch of caterwauling “post-partisan” blithering idiots and corporate tools will claim that Democrats need to move more to the center and avoid “divisive issues” in order to please “independent voters.”

It’s the autocatalytic cycle of “independent” politics, Latino Democrat edition.