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Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Doesn't Look Like It Helped

In the last two weeks, president Obama has taken steps that were supposed to win him the votes of Hispanics and guarantee that he carried Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Arizona in the election. First, Obama announced that the federal government would no longer enforce the immigration laws against folks under 30 who were brought here illegally as children and who met certain other criteria. Second, after the Supreme Court ruled on the Arizona immigration enforcement law, Obama spokesman announced that the federal government would no longer cooperate with the Arizona police on matters regarding immigration; the state police could find illegals and turn them over to the feds, but the feds were going to ignore that information. If the thinking of the campaign was correct, Obama should have opened a big lead in the states listed above as Hispanic voters flocked to his side.

Today, we got the first real look to see the reaction in these states. Rasmussen is out with a poll of Romney vs. Obama in Arizona. The numbers are Romney 54% and Obama 41% among likely voters. This is a bigger lead for Romney than he had in the last poll by the same organization and it shows a substantial majority of voters in Romney's corner.

There is also a Quinipiac poll of Florida registered voters that came out today, but much of the poll predates the decision by the Supreme Court and the Obama reaction. Even so, the results show the same margin as the previous Quinipiac poll taken a week earlier. So there is no sign in Florida of a shift towards Obama among Hispanics.

The actual effect of the latest Obama moves on the election will likely get swallowed up by the impact of the decision tomorrow on Obamacare, so we may never know for sure just what changes these moves had. Nevertheless, it does seem so far that they have no helped and they may well have hurt.

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