Cruz, Rubio spark hopes of increased Latino voting - but might not win the demographic

For the first time ever, Hispanics this year will have the chance to vote for not one but two Latino candidates with a real shot at the Republican presidential nomination.

Just one month before Texas' Super Tuesday primary on Mar. 1, how significantly that could boost the state's historically low Latino voter turnout remains up in the air, however.

And the two candidates, Cuban-Americans speaking harshly about immigration and favoring increased border enforcement, have not exactly elicited roars of excitement from the mainstream Latino voting bloc that Republicans would like to attract.

Bemoaning the lack of attention on Fox News this week, Reince Priebus, chairma n of the Republican National Committee, said, "Ted Cruz, first Hispanic out of Iowa from a major political party; Marco Rubio - two out of our top three, Hispanic. You know, where is the media on this, right? This is a big deal."

Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant in Austin, agreed.

"I wish it were more of an issue than it is. ... There's very little attention paid to the fact that two of the top Republican candidates are Latino," Mackowiak said. "There's ideological racism because they don't fit the East Coast establishment idea of what a Latino should be."

Others, however, say the cold shoulder from some Latino groups is because Cruz and Rubio actively play down their ethnicity to appeal to their more conservative bases.

Neither derives much of his support from Hispanics or claims to speak for them. And both, to varying degrees, have opposed a path to legalization for immigrants, which most Hispanic politicians support.

"There's no big bounce out there, like, 'Yeah, we got Rubio or Cruz,'" said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velásquez Institute, a national Latino public policy research group in San Antonio. "Neither of them have campaigned with any ethnic symbolism, so it diminishes the response they get from the Latino community."

It all raises the complicated issues of who and what constitutes being Latino and having ethnic authenticity, as well as how ethnic groups vote, questions that on a smaller scale are playing out in former Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia's congressional bid against veteran Democratic Congressman Gene Green.

Garcia, who is Mexican-American, is trying to unseat Green, who supporters say has years of experience fighting successfully for Hispanic issues.

"Just because someone is a Latino doesn't guarantee Latinos will vote for him," said Roberto Suro, professor of public policy and journalism at the University of Southern California. "And just because Latinos don't vote for a politician doesn't mean that politician is not Latino."

Latinos, of course, are not monolithic, and the cultural experiences of Cubans arguably are vastly different from the nation's 34.6 million residents of Mexican descent, who make up nearly two-thirds of the Latino community.

By law, Cubans who reach American shores are treated as refugees and given an expedited path to citizenship. For Mexicans, it is much harder to immigrate legally, and tens of thousands more are deported each year than any other nationality.

Threaded into the complicated issue of identity, therefore, is that of immigration, which in the Republican primaries has emerged as the be-all and end-all.

Cruz is using strong anti-immigrant language, evoking former California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican who famously warned, "They keep coming."

Rubio is walking a finer line, trying to emphasize the need for border security while leaving open an option for some sort of legal pathway to eventual citizenship.

"It's clear Rubio is looking at the central moderate part of the Republican electorate, and Cruz is very anxious to get the angry tea party vote and evangelicals," Suro said. "That's more important than what their ethnic identity is right now."

Add in a third factor: Donald Trump. More Latinos voted than ever before in Iowa's presidential caucuses this week - as many as 13,000, according to an analysis of exit polls by the League of United Latin American Citizens.

By comparison, only 2,500 voted in the 2008 caucuses. LULAC launched a voter registration drive there last summer in response to the billionaire businessman's controversial remarks about Mexicans.

How that will all play out in Texas, where Latinos lag behind in voter turnout, below even the dismal national level, remains to be seen.

In 2012, Mitt Romney captured only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. And though no exit polls were conducted that year in Texas, it is estimated only about 20 percent of voters who turned out were Latino.

Still, groups like the Velásquez Institute predict Latinos in Texas will register more than 3 million voters and cast more than 2 million votes, both of which would be records.

Part of it is simply a matter of population growth. The state has gained 600,000 eligible Hispanic voters since the 2012 presidential elections, growing to 4.8 million - second only to California, according to the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. The Latino share of eligible Texas voters increased 2 percent in that period, to 28 percent.

At the same time, Hispanic voter turnout increases each year there is an open presidential election, especially when there is a "perceived villain," such as Trump, said Gonzalez. He pointed to Arizona, which boasts the fastest-growing Latino voter base after its state leaders passed strict anti-immigrant laws several years ago.

Republicans also see hope, saying they can attract the majority of Hispanics who are eligible to vote but have not. They note that Cruz won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in his 2012 race for the U.S. Senate, and that Gov. Greg Abbott received 44 percent in 2014. They say they have invested heavily in Latino outreach since Romney's dismal showing in 2012.

"The Hispanic demographic votes under-average, so even if they just vote average that's very significant," said Steve Munisteri, a former chairman of the Texas Republican Party who advised Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul until he dropped out of the GOP race this week.

Munisteri said his party polled Texas Hispanics during the last election and found they were more conservative than elsewhere, tending to oppose abortion and a guaranteed path to citizenship but favoring a guest-worker program. A call to deport all 11 million immigrants here illegally, as Trump has proposed, however, "without exception was off-the-charts unfavorable," he said.

Jim Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, sees no reason for the primary or general election to be much different from any in the past, whether a Latino is on the Republican ballot or not.

In polling the group did last November, one-third of registered Latino voters had a "very unfavorable" attitude toward Cruz, he said. On the whole, 50 percent view the GOP unfavorably compared to 31 percent for Democrats.

"There's not a lot of reason to expect that Ted Cruz, or by extension, Marco Rubio, is going to inspire a significant amount of interest among Texas Latinos," he said.

The timing of Texas' primaries, however, keeps it in play, said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic Research at the Pew Research Center.

"It's very possible the Democratic nomination is not decided by then and the Republican side still has more than two candidates," he said. "If this is still a competitive race, we might see outreach to the Latino community in a way we haven't seen in some time in Texas."