You may have missed it on the tele, but apparently Latinos are being counted on to play a huge role in determining who will be elected president in November.
To that end, the liberal Center for American Progress is singling out the top 10 states with the most unregistered eligible voters and non-citizens who are in the U.S. legally and could be naturalized
in time for the election.
Naturally, California tops the list with 2 million registered voters and about
2.4 million legal permanent residents.
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But while the Committee to Reelect Barack Obama (or COBRA for dyslexics) already has the Golden State in the win column, other states singled out by the center are considered presidential
battlegrounds, including Florida, Colorado and Virginia.
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A key passage from the center's recent assessment:
In some key battleground states, the number of eligible but unregistered Latino voters runs into the hundreds of thousands or even millions. On top of these millions of potential voters, the Department of Homeland Security estimates that there are 8.1 million legal permanent residents or green card holders, that are eligible to becomes citizens and vote in the fall election.
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Most of those folks will be presumed to go for Obama, which explains why Mitt Romney told donors at a Palm Beach, Fla., fundraiser in April, “We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party” or the GOP is “doomed.”
If Latinos doom Romney, you know that will go over well in Orange County, CA.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.