For three years, Steve Sailer has been pointing out that the much-ballyhooed Hispanic vote isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For a long time, he was pretty much the only one making this argument. Now, as he points out on VDARE’s new blog, a demographer at the Brookings Institution agrees with him. According to the Washington Times:

While President Bush and Sen. John Kerry have set up aggressive campaigns to draw Hispanic voters, the nation’s largest minority bloc is unlikely to play a decisive role in the 2004 presidential election, based on their past voting records and their populations in battleground states.

Although election analysts predict more than 7 million of the nation’s 40 million Hispanics will vote on Election Day, the bloc represents 7 percent or higher in just five battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida.”

This race will be determined primarily by white voters,” said Bill Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution think tank, who has analyzed Hispanic voting data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.

It is worth bearing in mind that of the five battleground states mentioned, Arizona is not even close (Bush is way ahead), and many of Florida’s Hispanics are Cuban-American. The concerns of Cuban-Americans tend to differ from those of Mexican-Americans and others most often targeted by Hispandering politicians. For example, I doubt most Cuban-Americans support amnesty for illegal aliens.

More on this topic here and here.

In another VDARE blog entry, my friend Peter Brimelow observes that some people apparently think linking to VDARE is tantamount to a hate crime.