Few tourists lingered at the Exotic Cactus Ranch, and the remaining stores had all but given up looking for business in what must be the only town named after a 1950s game show.
The office of the county clerk, however, thrummed with early voters. Pollsters like to call this “sleeping giant” country. Like other southwestern states in play in this election, New Mexico has suffered from an historically low turnout of Hispanic voters that has so far failed to reflect the raw demographic power of the fastest-growing minority in the US.
This time there were signs that 2008 would be the year with the biggest Latino turnout. Since George W. Bush came to office Hispanics have accounted for half of the country’s entire population growth. About ten million are expected to vote this year, compared with 7.5 million in 2004. For the first time Hispanic voters will play a prominent and possibly decisive role in the election.
“Before, people would tell me, ‘La vota no cuenta’ — the vote doesn’t count — but now they’re seeing it differently,” Bobby Rodríguez said as he delivered absentee voting forms. “This time it counts.”
A month ago New Mexico was considered a toss-up. But massive voter-registration drives and a grassroots “Sí, se puede” campaign have tilted the race towards Barack Obama.
Mr Rodríguez, 69, a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has been on the road every day since the primaries, canvassing.
“This election is different. Those who left the party feeling disillusioned and disenfranchised are coming back.” Only last week, he added, they handed out 150 forms on the Thursday. “They were filled out by Friday”.
He drove past pecan orchards and cotton fields to the home of María Chacón, a 39-year-old mother of six, in Mesquite. She said that she, her husband and her mother registered to vote for the first time despite having lived there for more than 30 years. They will be voting Democrat.
Why now? “I have a 21-year-old daughter in the military, about to return to Iraq. I want her out,” she said. “That’s what made me change.”
The next stop was a farm belonging to Ben Bolanos, on the edge of the Chihuahua desert. “I’m ready”, said the former rodeo rider who fought in Vietnam with his three brothers. As an Hispanic veteran he represents one of John McCain’s target groups.
He said: “McCain, I respect the man very much. He was the same place I was, but somehow the Bush Administration just got hold of him. I know who I want, and that’s Obama.”
President Bush carried New Mexico by 6,000 votes in 2004. However, latest polls show that Mr Obama leads his Republican rival by 51 per cent to 44 per cent in New Mexico. The margin widens among Hispanics, suggesting that Mr Obama is winning over supporters of Hillary Clinton.
Pablo Martinez, the state director of LULAC, said that many Hispanic voters felt betrayed by Mr McCain, a former champion of immigration reform, after conservatives derailed the comprehensive immigration Bill he put before Congress in 2006. “It will be a long time before Hispanics can trust Republicans again,” he said.
Mr Martinez put the blame for Mr McCain’s failure to connect with this huge, disparate group, which includes Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans, on the ugly undertone of “otherness” in the speeches of his running-mate.
“McCain has also been a friend of Latinos but as soon as Sarah Palin started saying, ‘He’s not one of us’, it brought back a lot of memories . . . If she feels this way about an African-American, is she going to say the same about us too?” he asked.
Mr Obama’s lead in New Mexico, where 42 per cent of the population is Hispanic, is being credited to a brilliant grassroots campaign. Four years ago John Kerry opened six field offices in the state. Mr Obama has 39.
At the local Democratic Party headquarters in Las Cruces, impossibly cheerful college students man the telephones, tallying up the numbers of “houses knocked on” and “calls made”. Voter registration has been a priority, with the party claiming to have surpassed its target of registering more than 30,000 new voters during a 30-day push. “We’re hoping that is what is going to win it for us,” one volunteer beams. continues here
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