I don't understand this. They say that the most important issue for them is Create more jobs/Fix the economy 54%. Yet, they still support Obama who is never going to create a single job/fix the economy.
Maybe the most telling is the answer to the question: Who is to blame?
The majority says Bush 64%. It seems they are very disappointed in Bush having voted him two times in office. He really failed them miserably.
They say then that fighting in Congress is most to blame for economy not improving more quickly 64%. Yet they still want to reelect Obama and continue the fighting in Congress.
They get the basics wrong on many other vital topics, but here is the absolute gem:
Thinking about the future of our economy, which party do you trust more to make the right decisions and improve our economic conditions? Obama and Democrats 73%
My take:
1. It used to be understood that Latinos were far poorer than the US average. But there is now a large Latino middle class heavily urban and well-educated, effectively an intelligentsia. It remains able to connect with not-so-rich Latinos, much unlike middle-class white intelligentsia who can't relate effectively to poor whites. (Non-white and non-Christian intelligentsia also contrast in their political influence toward the poor of their own ethnicity and religion to white people). Such makes a huge difference in political realities between white Christians and about every other economic group in voting.
2. Latinos remain majority-Catholic. To be sure the Religious Right has made some headway into the Latino population, but not enough to break the Catholic culture. The Catholic Church is quite rational -- much more than is so for Protestant Fundamentalists -- on science and history. Poor Catholic Latinos, unlike Protestant Fundamentalists of similar economic achievement, more respect formal education. The difference in valuation of education between Latinos and Anglo whites in the lower strata of economic achievement makes a huge difference in political attitudes. Latinos see formal education and the government necessary for it vital to their dreams; Anglo whites, to the extent that they are Protestant Fundamentalists, see formal education as a threat to their culture as well as part of the 'problem' of Big Government spending.
Poor white Protestant Fundamentalists, who at times have been exemplars of populist tendencies that go far to the Left, are now about as Right-leaning as the Master Class of tycoons, executives, and big landowners who can reach out to such people as they cannot reach out to the middle class.
4. Although President Obama is clearly non-Hispanic, he is capable of playing to non-white, non-Christian, and non-Anglo populations very well. He has assimilated into the black middle class, but its values are close to those of the Latino middle class. Bingo!
