New citizens boost Miami Democrats

For those who look at Miami and see an impenetrable Republican mass with a Cuban-exile stranglehold, a closer look is due. Now the better heart of Miami is rising – and not neglecting the tug of Havana. The Democratic Party got a new county leader this spring, Joe Garcia, a Cuban-American. In the 2006 election Miami-Dade county voters helped add two Democrats to the State House of Representatives.

A spirit of optimism rides higher with the polls showing Democratic presidential candidates whuppin’ the Republicans. George Bush is a flailing lame duck. Jeb Bush is term-limited out and starting to reap the big industrial bucks he is owed for two terms as Florida’s governor. His successor, Charlie Crist, acts more like a Democrat than anyone expected, seeming to sense the wave of the future.

The next step is ’08, and local Democrats are conscious that the fate of the presidential election may hang on their performance. We are not alone. We are getting help and advice from the national level. And our ranks are growing from a perhaps unexpected source – new immigrants, many of them Hispanics.

In the past week, two big media reports featured new citizens naturalized at mass ceremonies in Miami Beach. The Los Angeles Times story was headlined “New mood from new citizens” and it cited interviews showing the new Americans shunning the Republicans for being against immigrants. The Miami Herald did a similar story, and, while not specifically saying the Republicans were losing out, it also showed the new citizens advocating an easier path to legalization than many Republicans want for undocumented immigrants.

Meanwhile, a throng of Democratic Party activists joined other groups in the non-partisan drive to register the new citizens to vote on the spot as they came out of the ceremony. The result of the 200 the Democrats signed up:

· 123 Democratic registrations, 61.5 percent

· 48 Republican registrations, 24 percent

· 29 No-party declared, 14 percent .

Democratic signups outnumbered Republicans two-and-a-half to one. And this was without overt persuasion. It may have helped that Joe Garcia was there working the sidewalks to get people to sign up, and the party leader is well-known on Spanish-language broadcasting as a Democratic spokesman in Miami.

The LA Times quoted one new citizen from Cuba, saying that though he might have been considered “a natural Republican voter” in the Miami context, his opinion was otherwise: “I don’t know whether Bush is a Democrat or a Republican, but whatever he is, I’m voting the other way.”

Helping new citizens register to vote is nothing new, of course, but the Democratic Party is trying to put out as many volunteers as possible for these periodic ceremonies – the more clipboards, the more signups, and it’s fun: the customers are happy.

Beyond that, this is part of a national strategy that Joe Garcia has helped develop from the Washington-based New Democratic Network, where he runs the Hispanic Strategy Center. The idea is to cut into the large Republican advantage among Cuban-Americans in Florida. Older Cubans have gone 80-90 percent GOP, and were the core base for Jeb Bush and for the rise of the modern GOP in Florida. If this community begins to move away from the GOP, Florida will quickly become a blue state, or at least a much more competitive state for the Democrats in 2008.

This strategy looks to what happened in California, where a wild swing against the GOP took a competitive state and made it blue and progressive. The Republicans there suffered from having an anti-immigrant outlook, and the way they are handling the immigration issue now may hand the Democrats the presidency in 2008. And in South Florida, the Bush administration alienated many Cuban-Americans by restricting family visits to Cuba.

Simon Rosenberg, founder and executive director of the New Democratic Network, was in Miami earlier this year and told Democratic activists his rundown of the electoral vote in ’08. Start with the Democrats’ core of 248 votes, add the Hispanic swing states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida. Throw in Ohio (D-swept in ’06), and Iowa and New Hampshire. The total is 345 (270 required to win).

Rosenberg calls that speech “Dawn of New Politics.”

Of course victory doesn’t come on a silver platter. That’s why Democrats in Miami are forming new clubs, signing up new citizens to vote, and learning how to operate voter activation software. There should be many of us on the ground ready to work next winter when the nominee is chosen in that blitz of early primaries.

eH