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GOP candidates will be put to the test to appeal to Latino voters in states like Florida and Nevada. (Photo: Buschap,Flickr)

By MATTHEW JAFFE
Channel: Politics

MANCHESTER, N.H. –- For months now, the Republican presidential candidates, save one, have for the most part ignored Latino voters. But that may all be about to change as the campaign now heads south and west.

With voting in Iowa and New Hampshire now in the rearview mirror, the focus of the political world shifts towards South Carolina, Florida, and, in early February, Nevada.

Since there are more Latinos in South Carolina – 235,000 – than in Iowa and New Hampshire combined – 151,000 and 36,000 respectively – the tenor of the Republican hopefuls towards Latinos may shift as well. From the Palmetto State, the campaign then moves on to two states with much larger Latino populations: Florida, where 22.5 percent of the state is Latino, and Nevada, where over a quarter of the state is Latino: 26.5 percent.

“Definitely, they have to pay attention to Hispanics because the subject of immigration has already come up. That’s a fact,” said Carlos Gonzalez, a New Hampshire state representative. “Once our candidate, Mitt Romney, started to talk about his Mexican heritage, his family, that’s an indication that there’s no turning around. The issue of immigration, along with the economy, will be one of the main issues in the upcoming election.”

“The candidates will have to include all segments of the population, but especially Hispanics. To date they have not been addressed head on, but that will change,” added Gonzalez, the state’s first Latino elected official.

With the Latino vote now becoming so crucial – not just in the GOP primary, but to a far greater extent in the general election – the Republican candidates could benefit from wooing the nation’s fastest-growing voting bloc. More than half the growth in the country’s total population between 2000 and 2010 was due to the massive increase in the Latino population.

Thus far, of the GOP candidates, only Newt Gingrich has made much of an effort to court the Latino vote. The former House Speaker has outlined the most moderate immigration stance of all the candidates, saying at a debate in Washington, D.C. in November that the government should not expel immigrants if they have laid down roots here over the course of decades. While Gingrich does not think those undocumented immigrants should be granted full citizenship, he does think they should get legal status.

In New Hampshire on Sunday Gingrich even held a town hall for Latinos at a Mexican restaurant in the state capital of Manchester.

“We have to end the period of having people in the shadows,” Gingrich urged. “It’s bad for the country, it’s bad for the people, it leads them to get excluded, it is dangerous. It means those that need help are afraid to show up and ask for it. So I want to find a path that gets us to a system where four or five years from now, 99.99 percent of everybody in the United States is here legally, and we’re comfortable with it.”

However, he warned, “We are not going to go into those churches and those neighborhoods and tear apart those families. The American people aren’t heartless.”

But Gingrich’s Republican rivals have voiced much tougher approaches to the controversial issue. Front runner Mitt Romney – who won Iowa and New Hampshire, and leads the polls in South Carolina and Florida – has said that, if elected, he would veto the DREAM Act, a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for some undocumented children of immigrants who attend college or serve in the military.

Romney last year said that one of the greatest weaknesses of his party was its inability to woo Latino voters, who lean strongly towards Democrats. In a general election battle against President Obama, Romney noted, the Latino vote could prove crucial. 

“I need to get 50.1 percent of Americans behind me and perhaps one of the best tests is to get people like Latino Americans and say how can I convince more Latino Americans to say support a Republican. If I can do that then I’ll be doing well pretty broadly,” Romney said this week in New Hampshire.

With many Latinos frustrated with President Obama’s inability to make any progress on the immigration front, there may be an opening for Republicans to convince left-leaning Latinos to consider a GOP candidate for the White House.

Selma Lopez, a New Hampshire resident set to vote for the first time in the general election later this year, said in an interview in Spanish that she believed Obama would do more than he has.

“What I see is that he has not had the type of leadership that we hoped for,” Lopez said. “I feel like he’s lacked a little bit of strength.”

Republicans are beginning to ramp up their appeals to Latinos. Romney released a Spanish-language ad on Wednesday, and the Republican National Committee planned to announce its own outreach plans later in the day.

But as an indication of how Republican candidates have yet to give disillusioned Latino voters, such as Lopez, a good enough alternative to Obama, Lopez’s husband Esteban – also set to vote for the first time this fall – voiced disappointment with Romney’s immigration stance.

“I work in education and I know first-hand how important the DREAM Act is for Latino youth, for kids who are in this country without having taken part in the decision to come here,” Esteban Lopez said. “The short answer is: I wouldn’t vote for Romney.”

In Iowa last week, Jose Zacarias, another Latino disillusioned with Obama’s work in Washington, said he would not even consider any of the GOP hopefuls due to their immigration stances.

“I don’t think any Hispanic in his right mind is going to vote for Rick Perry or Romney,” Zacarias said with a chuckle. “It might be a tough sell [for Obama], but I think the GOP is helping a lot by putting these guys forward. Romney, Rick Perry, Newt, for Christ’s sake, you know?”

Gingrich, though, has earned praise from numerous Latinos from Iowa to New Hampshire for his immigration policy.

“Newt is the only candidate who has had the courage to open the door to the issue of immigration like he did in the debates,” said German Ortiz, a Republican voter in Manchester.

Members of Gingrich’s campaign – such as his daughter Kathy Lubbers who lives in the Latino hotbed of Miami – believe that the fortunes of her father’s bid for the nomination could change with the primaries of South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada in the coming weeks.

“He has been working with and including the Hispanic community for seven, eight years,” Lubbers said in an interview after her father’s town hall in Manchester. “We have had a Hispanic person leading the charge for us for multiple years on a variety of topics even before we were involved with this presidential campaign. We have a lot of people in place, probably more than any other candidate. So I’m hopeful that it actually comes to fruition and we’ll just have to see if it plays the way we’re hoping it does.”

Matthew Jaffe is covering the 2012 campaign for ABC News and Univision.