Fox News’s Republican mouthpiece Sean Hannity says he has “evolved” on the issue of immigration reform, and now supports a “pathway to citizenship” for some immigrants who are in the US illegally– which is what Democrats and some Republicans have been advocating for years.
It seems other Republicans are evolving too.
There’s nothing like the reelection of a Democratic president with 70 percent of the Hispanic vote to speed up the process of Republican evolution.
Speaking of which, the one reliably pro-Republican segment of Hispanics– namely Cuban-Americans in Florida– took a dramatic turn to the left in Tuesday’s election.
The Wall Street Journal notes that Cuban-born voters living in Florida voted for Mitt Romney, 55% to 45%.
However, American-born Cubans voted overwhelmingly for President Obama, 60% to 40%.
Huffington Post reports:
According to those figures, released Thursday by Miami’s Bendixen & Amandi International, 48 percent of Florida’s Cuban-Americans backed Obama, while challenger Romney got the rest.
That’s a Democratic gain of 13 points among Cuban-Americans over 2008, according to pollster Fernand Amandi, and represents what he called “a sea change.”
“The dam has finally burst in the long-awaited Cuban shift,” Amandi said. “This is a remarkable change.”
On Election Day, Cuban-American voters gave the president 53 percent of their votes, compared with 47 percent who chose Romney. Yet Romney still won the overall Cuban-American vote thanks to voters who had cast absentee and early in-person ballots, according to the survey of 4,866 voters conducted by Bendixen & Amandi.
The shifting tide among Cuban-American voters is being propelled by two factors: youth and immigration, said Amandi. Young Cuban-Americans born and raised here are not sure-bet Republican voters as their staunchly anti-Castro elders were, he said.
And Cubans who arrived in the U.S. in the past few years also tend to be less Republican.
