Obama Seeks Hispanic Votes

Politico reports

President Barack Obama embarks this week on a pilgrimage familiar to generations of New York politicians, making a rare presidential trip to Puerto Rico that accentuates his campaign’s emerging focus on Hispanics as central to his reelection bid.

Obama’s attention to this subset of the country’s burgeoning Latino population is part of a broader strategy to boost historically low Hispanic registration and turnout in at least a half-dozen crucial swing states, including Florida and North Carolina — two states the president will visit Monday before arriving in Puerto Rico on Tuesday.

No president since John F. Kennedy has made an official visit to the island territory. Obama’s trip ends a drought that could win him some goodwill with mainland Puerto Ricans, whose numbers just happen to be expanding in the swing areas of battleground states. Think of the Philadelphia region and the Interstate 4 corridor towns of Orlando and Tampa in Central Florida.

The microtargeting underscores the Obama campaign team’s effort to build some security into the president’s reelection bid at a time when the economy remains wildly unpredictable. In addition to boosting Hispanic turnout in quadrennial battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Florida, the campaign wants to expand Obama’s reach into areas with much smaller, yet fast-growing Hispanic populations, like North Carolina and Virginia, both critical components of the president’s 2012 map.

“Hispanics could very well decide this election,” said one Obama adviser involved in his reelection effort.

The president’s itinerary this week appears to be a natural extension of this strategy.

He will first host a meeting of his jobs council in North Carolina, where the Hispanic population grew by 111 percent since 2000. Obama stops in Miami for three fundraisers before traveling Tuesday to Puerto Rico, where he will commemorate Kennedy’s visit in 1961, meet with Republican Gov. Luis Fortuño and hold a fundraiser.