Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tells how the party is courting minority voters.
"It's now 80-20 in the Hispanic community in favor of the Democrats, instead of 60-40, as it was two years ago."
Tavis: In the last Presidential election, John Kerry got fewer votes from Hispanics than Al Gore did four years prior. President Bush made inroads with the Hispanic community. I think one can argue, unless one is completely stuck on stupid, one has to argue now that given the Republican politics of the last year or two, where Hispanic voters are concerned, that the Republican Party has got to be in some trouble.
I was just reading this morning a new study that finds that there will be, there are, seven percent more Hispanics eligible to vote this time around than there were in the election two years ago. How do you see those Hispanic, those Latino votes going this time around?
Howard Dean: We know how they're gonna go, because we met with a great many leaders in the Hispanic community, including Hispanic evangelicals who supported the President the last time who are not supporting the Republicans this time because of their very harsh view about immigration. Even today, in places like Oregon, they have candidates for governor, for example, asserting that illegal immigrants vote and using that as a witch hunt issue.
Well, illegal immigrants don't vote in Oregon. They just lie. This is typical Republican stuff, divide and conquer. The problem is they've taken on a very fast-growing group of voters. We know what Hispanics think of what the president has done. It's now 80-20 in the Hispanic community in favor of the Democrats, instead of 60-40, as it was two years ago.
And we're gonna work very hard with the leadership in the Hispanic community to get people registered to vote, and to get them to the polls. Because those are likely gonna be overwhelmingly Democratic votes.
Tavis: Ken Mehlman, on my radio program, now famously said earlier this year that 2006 would be the year of the Black Republican. Two thousand six, he declared, would be the year of the Black Republican. He made that quote to me on my radio program. I looked up the next day, and it was in every media outlet in the country. Here we are now on the eve of these midterm elections, and there are a few well-known African Americans who are running for major offices. How do you read whether or not the Republican Party is starting to siphon off, one, two, three percent at a time, the African American vote that the Democrats have held for so long?
Dean: Tavis, I actually think this is gonna be the year of the African American Democrat. I think you're gonna have Deval Patrick, the new generation, first governor elected outside the South who's of African American descent. Doug Wilder, of course, was the first ever.
You're gonna have Harold Ford, who's right now 10 points up on his challenger. The Republicans are throwing everything they can in Tennessee to stop Harold Ford. He's gonna be, I believe, the first African American Senator elected from the South ever by the popular vote, and since Reconstruction otherwise.
We have worked really hard in the African American community, and the religious community, in the political community, and particularly among young Black professionals, which I think frankly were the group that we were most likely to lose.
We're working really, really hard now to speak about opportunity, to talk about the new Democratic Party. Not just to focus on what we've done in the past, which is to open doors for the Black community with the civil rights support, and so forth, but what we're gonna do in the future in terms of education, job opportunities, small business opportunities.
We have a program, as we've talked about before, called From the Table to the Ticket. Not enough to talk about a seat at the table anymore. Now we want people like Harold Ford, Deval Patrick, Barack Obama, others, Thurbert Baker, attorney general in Georgia, other folks on national tickets and statewide tickets. And I think we're back where we need to be, but we got a lot more work to do, so we can get more diversity on our statewide tickets.
What impact will African American and Hispanic voters have on the election outcome?
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