Whit Ayres’s comments on Latino voters in the 2012 election:

In addition to the support gap, Republicans face challenges in their messaging to Hispanic voters. At a breakfast meeting with reporters last month, veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayers said the tone of the immigration debate has hurt the party and cautioned that eventual nominee will have to do a better job of embracing the concerns of this group. That nominee is likely to be Mitt Romney, who has espoused self-deportation as an immigration policy and has pledged to veto the DREAM Act (which would provide citizenship to children of illegal immigrants if they serve in the military or go to college) in its current form. Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a young Cuban-American often discussed as a possible vice presidential candidate, has crafted his own version.

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Whit Ayres’s comments on Latino voters,

Whit Ayres, the founder and President of North Star Opinion Research, a national public opinion research firm, is a Republican consultant who counts many of the party’s leaders as clients. He agrees that doing better among Latino voters is one of the great challenges for Republicans, but he thinks the party can do far better than the poll suggests.

“In his re-election campaign in 2004, President Bush received 44 percent of the Latino vote nationwide,” Ayres says. “So we know that a candidate who reaches out and aggressively courts Latino voters can bring them into the Republican fold.”

Ayres says the state of economy and jobs is the most important issue in the Latino community today, and he believes focusing on those issues can draw in Latino voters.

“To present a picture of the Republican nominee as better for economic growth will mean that Republicans will do better in Latino communities,” he says.

Ayres says Latino voters are on track to become the No. 1 swing voter group in the country, and the seriousness of winning that vote for the GOP cannot be understated. What are the consequences for not taking it seriously?

“We’ll lose,” he says.

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Whit Ayres’s comments on Latino voters and the Republican Party:

GOP strategist Whit Ayers responded yesterday to a new Fox News poll illustrating the Democratic Party’s significantly higher popularity among Latino voters, calling the process of winning over the demographic “the great challenge of the Republican Party going forward.”

“We will do better, in part because we are not stupid. We can count,” Ayres told reporters Thursday, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The Fox poll showed that 60 percent of those Latinos contacted favored Democratic politicians, while only 10 percent identified as fans of Republican candidates.

“It is pretty obvious that we can’t continue to lose Latinos two to one as we did in 2008 and remain competitive as a national party,” he explained. “If we don’t do better among Latinos, we are not going to be talking about how to get back Florida in the presidential race, we are going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”

Ayres is currently president of Texas’ North Star Opinion Research, which “provides research and strategic advice to companies and Republican candidates,” CSM says.

“The immigration debate and the tone of some people in discussing it hurt the Republican Party,” Ayres said. “I don’t think there is any way you can deny that. On the other hand there are clear sources of opportunity and there are clear examples of doing better.”

“An awful lot of the discussion about immigration involves tone,” he added. “You cannot come across as someone who doesn’t care about the concerns of Latinos. There is no unanimity in the Hispanic community about what exactly should be done about immigration. But there is certainly unanimity that they don’t want someone who acts like they don’t care about the votes and support of Latinos.”

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Whit Ayres’s comments on Latino voters:

The first rule for winning the Latino vote is to realize it’s a voter bloc in name only. There is a common ancestral language that binds nationalities, family histories and geographic allegiances. But that’s about it. A recently naturalized Mexican in Los Angeles is more likely to vote Democratic than a fourth-generation immigrant in New Mexico, who is more likely to be liberal than a 65-year-old Miami Cuban, whose 23-year-old daughter is more likely than her father to have voted for Obama in 2008. Last year, when Democrats ran Spanish-language TV ads pushing the President’s jobs plan, they hired two actors: a South American to read the script for Florida and a Mexican for Nevada and Colorado.

Local differences matter, but so do those things that distinguish Latinos from other ethnic groups. Latinos tend to be younger–their median age is just 27–and more socially conservative on issues like marriage and abortion, and they are less politically active than non-Latino whites and blacks. They have also been hit harder by the recession, with median household net worth dropping 66% from 2005 to 2009, according to the Pew Research Center. When it comes to voting, one issue obscures all the others: respect. “Once any group senses that you really don’t like them and you really don’t want their support,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres says of Latinos, “it really doesn’t matter what you say after that.”

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