Marshall and Barrow should say ‘gracias’
November 15, 2006 at 2:30 pm by Alejandro A. Leal in NewsAt last week’s Political Party talk show, state Sen. Sam Zamarripa, one of the General Assembly’s few Hispanic members, reiterated one of the many nuggets of conventional wisdom that emerged during this election year: Immigration was used as a wedge issue.
But the issue sort of fizzled in the home stretch of this year’s midterm elections.
Now, congressional Democrats are expected to pass their own version of comprehensive immigration reform during the first half of 2007. And even though Republicans won most of Georgia’s statewide races, Democratic incumbent congressmen won two key downstate contests in which Republicans tried to pin them with the soft-on-immigration label.
Even more significantly, the Hispanic vote may have provided the edge in those two races. In both Georgia’s 8th and 12th congressional districts, the margins between the incumbents and their Republican challengers were far smaller than are the numbers of registered Hispanic voters in those districts.
There are 9,505 registered Hispanic voters in District 8 and 6,426 in District 12. Rep. Jim Marshall beat Mac Collins in District 8 by 1,750 votes, and Rep. John Barrow beat Max Burns by 930 votes (the Barrow numbers may change in a recount, but he’s currently the presumed victor).
It couldn’t have hurt Marshall and Barrow that advocacy groups such as the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials led voter-registration drives within the Hispanic community and mobilized voters in cities such as Augusta, Savannah and Macon, which include parts of the two districts.
Do the two Democrats owe their re-elections — at least in part — to Hispanic voters? And was this an early sign of the emerging Latin vote in Georgia?
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