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Gingrich has spent months appealing to Latino voters. But in Florida, Romney leads him among Latinos by a wide margin. (Photo: Jordan Fabian)

By JORDAN FABIAN
Channel: Politics

ORLANDO, Fla. — Many political observers expected Newt Gingrich compete for victory in Tuesday’s Florida Republican primary with the help of state’s sizable Latino voting population. But that scenario has not panned out.

Instead, the former Speaker has slid in the polls in the past few days and his chief rival Mitt Romney is trouncing him with Latino voters in the Sunshine State. According to a Univision News/ABC News poll, Romney’s holds a 32-point lead among Florida Latino Republican likely voters.

Emblematic of that was Gingrich’s Latino town hall here in Orlando on Saturday. Only 50-60 people trickled into a cavernous worship hall inside an evangelical church. The former Speaker cut his stump speech down to around five minutes and spent the rest of the event shaking hands with individual attendees.

“We’re not looking for the masses. The people in there were church leaders, civic leaders,” explained Peter Vivaldi, Florida representative for the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, which helped organize the event.

Even if that’s the case, the scene was striking nonetheless.

The sparsely-attended Gingrich Latino town hall. (Photo: Jordan Fabian)

For months, Gingrich has held Latino outreach events when the other candidates have not. He visited Latino-owned businesses in Iowa and held a Latino town hall in New Hampshire. Both are early primary states with miniscule amounts of Latino Republicans.

His immigration position is the most moderate in the GOP field. He’s long said he wants a “Cuban spring” to topple the Castro regime and said on Saturday that he would give aid to Puerto Rican statehood if voters on the island support it in a ballot referendum.

So what gives in Florida?

First of all, his positions on Cuba and Puerto Rico are no different than Romney’s.And National Journal’s Ron Brownstein wrote Saturday that Gingrich’s moderate tropes on immigration, which were supposed to win the hearts of Latino voters, have not clearly resonated with the bulk of Florida Latino voters, who are either of Cuban and Puerto Rican. For those groups, immigration is not as large an issue since Cubans are automatically given amnesty if they reach U.S. shores and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

Only 37 percent of Florida Latino voters say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who pledged to veto the DREAM Act as opposed to 54 percent of Latino voters nationally, according to a Univision News/ABC News poll released last week.

At the Gingrich town hall, that mindset was evident even among some outside those subgroups. Jonathan Sanchez, a first-time voter who immigrated from Venezuela to Orlando, said he was undecided. Sanchez, a Republican, said that he is undecided and that he understands both sides of the immigration issue.

“I want to believe that Gingrich [has the best position , but I’m still torn in between,” he said. “I still understand why undocumented immigration is important to target and the economic burden that brings to taxpayers.”

That’s not to say immigration isn’t an important issue for Latinos in central and south Florida. Vivaldi said that immigration is one of the main pillars of his organization, which has thousands of members in Florida.

“[The rhetoric] sounds not just demeaning, it almost sounds inhuman. It sounds like we are pandering to a group. Even sounds racist to a point,” said Vivaldi. “We need to stop this, we need to find a happy medium.”

But it doesn’t appear to have the same emotional power for many than for, say, Mexican-American voters in the southwest who deal with the issue in their communities every day.

“I don’t think immigration is the highest topic, but it’s there and he is the only one who has shown some kind of understanding of the immigration problem,” said Bill Negron of Kissimmee, Fla., a town-hall attendee who will vote for Gingrich on Tuesday.

Others at the Orlando event reckoned that Gingrich’s lack of traction in Florida is because Romney has more money to run ads and has garnered establishment support, especially in the Cuban community.

Romney and his allies have outspent Gingrich and his allies four times over on advertising. Romney and Gingrich have waged a bitter war on Spanish-language radio, with Romney clobbering Gingrich for his suggestion four years ago that Spanish is the “language of the ghetto” and the latter hammering the former for being “anti-immigrant.”

“Romney’s money and false attacks are making the difference. Newt’s record in the Latino community is a thousand times better than Mitt’s non-record,” said longtime GOP operative Lionel Sosa, who is Gingrich’s Spanish-language ad man. “Newt is being outspent in Spanish media 50 to 1. That is the difference.”

The former Massachusetts governor long ago locked up the support of influential Cuban-American Republican officials who can tap into a large network of political support.

Rev. Jesus Martinez said that Gingrich “is the right option for the Hispanic community … and also for evangelicals.” But he added that “Mr. Romney has been campaigning for four years.”

“If you look at TV and the commercials, out of 10 commercials, nine are against him. That’s number one. Number two is the [party establishment seems to have gone with Romney] because they are looking at who has the Romney,” Negron said. 

“But I like the underdog,” he added.