I wonder when the Democratic candidates will appear on Fox News or maybe an NRA meeting or the Southern Baptist Convention.

You must understand, though, that CNN and MSNBC aren’t the liberal equivalents of what you just mentioned. Maybe the Democrats will do what you are talking about when Republicans appear on a debate on national TV facilitated by moveon.org or Air America. That’s enough to the left to balance out Fox News.

It might be an improvement, actually.

The Cuban concentration in Hudson County also explains why Jersey Cubans are hard-core Democrats, while their cousins in Florida are hard-core Republicans.

Basically, they didn’t have a choice. Hudson County has one of the most powerful Democratic machines ever built, and if you don’t run as a Democrat or vote as a Democrat, you may as well be in Cuba.

extraordinarily multicultural

Even Bergenline Avenue is — Dominicans and Central Americans are established there along with the Cubans.

You can tell I’ve been there: on a busy day, you can see double- and even triple-parking in effect and huge amounts of traffic as well as pedestrians crossing the street everywhere (Mira las cubanas!), and those traffic signals are 50-100 feet apart!

Buena suerte in your pursuit of Cuban-American politics there en Democratierra.

What they said will fail to get a anymore of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote and they would have already received but they ended up looking weak on an issue that actually helps the Republicans.

It was what I predicted. They best the Republicans could hope for was not to make a major gaffe and they is what most of them accomplished.

I wonder when the Democratic candidates will appear on Fox News or maybe an NRA meeting or the Southern Baptist Convention. One of the long term effects of the U.S. becoming a single party state is that the one dominate party can just ignore those groups that are not friendly to them.

I am quite familiar with Union City and that swath of North Jersey in general, which is extraordinarily multicultural.

It is my view that most Hispanics in that ‘hood are Democrats owing to a fairly formidable county party machine that includes Hispanics, but I accept your challenge and will report back in due time.

2. Shaun, if you really are very sorry, here’s a challenge for you. Did you know there is a second Cuban-American community in this country other than Miami? The other is in Union City, NJ, in New York metro, centered along Bergenline Avenue; I refer to the community normally as “Bergenline.” (Mega Mix Music on Bergenline is where I have gone, while on road trips from Iowa to the East Coast and back, to get my Cuban CDs and a DVD.)

Why don’t you investigate if their voting patterns are strongly conservative and Republican like the better-known anti-Castro Miami community?

* * *

A number of Pew demographic reports discuss Hispanics.

The reports can be found here.

I yield the floor.

Huckabee’s first failure (in my eyes) was his reversal of his earlier desire to end the Cuban embargo. Even though it’s probably most practical given the situation for us to wait the few remaining months or years for Castro to be gone before doing anything, I believe the embargo is a valid issue and could be phrased in a “yellow-light” rather than “red-light” manner: “After Castro is gone, would you be in favor of ending the embargo against Cuba?”

This isn’t a boost-Hispanic-nation-wide-vote-total effort by the GOP candidates, but a strategy aimed at improving the chances of winning Florida and its many electoral votes next November.