GOP CAN COUNT BUT SHOULD REPUBLICANS TAKE STATE'S LATINOS FOR GRANTED?

Byline: EARL O. HUTCHINSON Local View

CALIFORNIA GOP strategists seem ready to uncork the champagne and celebrate the prospect of bagging a sizable number of Latino voters in the 2000 presidential election.

The courting of Latino voters is a huge about-face for them. During the reign of California Gov. Pete Wilson the state's Republicans were hell-bent on doing everything they could to alienate Latino voters. They hammered home the anti-immigrant, anti-affirmative action Propositions 187 and 209. Latino leaders roundly denounced both measures and turned out in droves to vote against them.

But California Republicans have reversed their political course for a good reason; like all politicians, they can count. There are now 2.3 million Latino voters in California, and if current population trends hold up, the number of Latino voters will soar to nearly 3 million in the next two years. They will then make up about 40 percent of the state's voters.

In Los Angeles County the percentages will be even higher. The estimate is that about one out of three voters will be Latino.

It would be the height of political stupidity for any politician to ignore these staggering numbers. Republicans say they will shell out $7 million in an ad campaign, leap over themselves to invite Latino community leaders to speak at their confabs, and lobby for more funds for health and education programs. All to attract more Latinos to the party's banner.

Republicans believe that in a dog fight between the presumptive presidential candidates, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, the Latino vote will make the difference. Republicans are banking that many Latino voters will stampede to the GOP, mostly because of Bush. He has done more than any other Republican politician in recent years to woo and win Latino voters in Texas.

California Republicans are hoping that the love affair many Latinos have with Bush will do much to wash away the horrid taste that the bruising battles over affirmative action and immigrant rights left in the mouths of the majority of Latino voters.

But it will take much more than Bush's appeal to his state's Latino voters to do that. In Texas the overwhelming majority of Latinos are Mexican-Americans. Many are well educated, prosperous professional and business persons, and they are more conservative politically. By contrast, many Latinos in California are younger, less educated, employed as unskilled, low wage workers, and almost exclusively Spanish-speaking. In many cases many are recent immigrants who fled war, poverty and political unrest in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Texas Republicans have also had the good fortune to have the DemocraticParty as their foil. For much of its history many Latinos have regardedthe Democratic Party in Texas as their enemy. It was once a conservative, states rights party that staunchly opposed civil rights, education andsocial programs, and labor and immigrant rights. Even though Texas Democrats in the past two decades have made their mea culpas and embraced civil and immigrant rights, the odor of the past still lingers.

Meanwhile in California, Latinos have long regarded Democrats as their friends because of their vigorous support of civil and labor rights, and expanded social programs. The politically powerful and influential Latino Caucus in the California Legislature will pull out all stops to remind Latino voters of the Democrat support of, and Republican hostility toward, the Latino agenda.

Republicans also must contend with a resurgent union movement in California. Union leaders, nearly all with deep ties to the Democrats, are making a colossal push to organize thousands of Latino workers in L.A. County in the garment trades, and service and retail industries. Union leaders will do everything they can to paint Bush to Latino rank-and-file workers as anti-labor, and exhort them to pull the lever en masse for any and every Democrat on the ballot.

The Democrats have reaped rich dividends off their friend-of-the-Latinoimage. In every election for the past three decades the Democrats have consistently racked up more than 70 to 80 percent of the Latino vote.

In the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, Clinton got about 75 percent of the Latino vote. In 1998, Gov. Gray Davis did even better, getting a resounding 84 percent of the Latino vote. The granite-like support among Latinos for the Democrats has almost certainly been a big reason why the GOP has not won a presidential election in California since 1988.

Right now, California Democrats hold most of the important political cards among Latinos. They are not likely to sit on their hands and watch the Republicans snatch them away. Democrats will remind Latino voters thatwhile Republicans badly mistreated them, they showered them with political goodies. The Democrats will also promise Latinos that even more benefits will come to them with Gore in the White House.

Some of the Democrats' pitch will be political fact, some political hyperbole. But given their favorable, and the Republicans unfavorable, track record toward minorities, Latinos are more likely to listen to them than the Republicans. And this is why Republicans should not start celebrating nabbing large numbers of Latino voters in California, at least not yet.