Dear HD37 Dems:
This is why we need to work NOW to build our grassroots support in advance of the 2012 elections! This is a quote from last week's NEWSWEEK magazine, in which Arapahoe County is once again being identified as a KEY swing county in next year's presidential election.
"In Arapahoe County, outside Denver, Democrats only recently came to outnumber Republicans in voter enrollment. But the trend lines are clear: whereas Bush beat Kerry 51–47 in 2004, Obama romped McCain by 56–43 in 2008, when turnout was about 15 percent higher than four years earlier.
In the last decade, the Latino population of Arapahoe County has more than doubled, to 105,249. If the Democratic Party can register and mobilize this key Obama constituency—Latinos gave him 67 percent of their votes nationally last time—the president would likely carry Arapahoe by a far larger margin than he did in '08. But Olivia Mendoza, executive director of the nonpartisan Colorado Latino Forum, says the community's temperature about Obama is awfully lukewarm. "This is very anecdotal," Mendoza ventures, "but overall, in my experience? General dissatisfaction."
Todd Mata, the county Democratic chairman, acknowledges that "a lot of people are a little disillusioned, rightly or wrongly," with Obama, but he says that on the ground, the party structure is working much more closely than last time with Organizing for America (OFA), the Obama get-out-the-vote vehicle. Obama might benefit here from a local GOP that "doesn't have it together," according to Scott Adler, political-science professor at the University of Colorado. When I spoke with Joy Hoffman, the county Republican chairwoman, she did acknowledge she's herding cats, between the more traditional Republicans and no fewer than "15 or 16 distinct Tea Party groupings in the county." But, she insisted, the state GOP is picking up the pieces from its 2010 debacle, when its gubernatorial candidate got just 11 percent of the vote."
To read the entire article, go here:
Please email or call me if you want to help NOW! No amount of time you can offer is too little. We have MANY vacancies in precincts for Precinct Committee Persons - if we all do a little, we can do a lot!
Laurie Ritchie
HD37 Chair
303-596-4243
