Writing at the PPP website, Director Tom Jensen notes the way the President seems to be regaining strong support among demographics key to his big victory in 2008.

“One thing that really stands out in this poll is the extent to which Obama has claimed the middle. He’s up 68-27 on Romney with moderates. He also leads by 20 points with voters under 45, a group there’s been some concern about slippage with, and he has a 66-30 advantage with Hispanics.”

That’s big news in swing-state Colorado, where nearly a third of voters are independents, where the growing Latino population exerts increasing political influence and where youth voters turned out in record numbers to vote for Obama last election.

Jensen writes that the caustic Republican primary, which has seen the former Massachusetts Governor run way to the right of past positions on flashpoint issues such as abortion and immigration, has cost Romney deeply among independent voters.

“Over the last month Romney’s seen his negatives with independents rise from 46% to 54%, suggesting that the things he has to say and do to win the Republican nomination aren’t necessarily helping him for the general. Obama’s turned what was a 45-36 deficit with independents a month ago into a 51-41 advantage.”

PPP surveyed 700 American voters for the survey from January 13 to 16 and reports a margin of error of +/-3.7%. The firm reports that it is “a Democratic polling company” but that “polling expert Nate Silver of the New York Times found that [PPP] surveys in 2010 actually exhibited a slight bias toward Republican candidates.”

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Supporters of the bill say ethnic studies programs advocate separatism and racial preferences, that they go against the sentiments of men like Dr Martin Luther King, who asked that Americans be judged by the “content of their character, not the color of their skin.” The bill is making its way to the desk of Gov. Jan Brewer. It’s the next chapter in what many see as a war story pitting Arizona against its Latino residents.

Opponents are railing against the bill as another misguided overreach by lawmakers, who they say should not be involved in developing school curriculum. Educators have testified that ethnic studies programs are a powerful tool to teach history and culture.

Fox News:

The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

The bill stipulates that courses can continue to be taught for Native American pupils in compliance with federal law and does not prohibit English as a second language classes. It also does not prohibit the teaching of the Holocaust or other cases of genocide.

This latest bulletin from the Arizona legislature reaches Colorado as students are marching on the capitol in Denver to protest the Arizona immigration law, which mainly gives power to local authorities to arrest people suspected of being in the country illegally. Rights activists in Colorado see the Arizona law as an extension of a law passed in Colorado in 2006.

Colorado’s HB 1023 passed during the administration of Republican Gov. Bill Owens during a special session of the State Legislature, when U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff was Speaker of the House. The law requires people to prove their “lawful presence” in the United States before receiving government services here.

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“I am running for U.S. Senate,” he said. “I will not accept any other job offers.”

Romanoff said he was proud of the campaign he had waged so far, addressing widespread criticism in the press for the low-key, even half-hearted, nature of his campaign, including a piece by the national site Politico that suggested Romanoff’s star was fading.

He said that he was the “people’s candidate” and would continue to run a “people-powered campaign.” He repeated earlier assertions that he would take no special interest money. He said his contributions have come strictly from individual donors. He stressed the grassroots nature of his campaign.

It was a point brought home in Romanoff style when he answered in Spanish a question put to him by a member of the Latino media.

As the Colorado Independent reported in December, Romanoff announced then that he would not be taking Political Action Committee contributions.

“I plan on leading by example,” he told supporters at the Auroria campus in Denver. He said that the need to raise vast sums of campaign money leads politicians away from their constituents and into the hands of a “rogues gallery” of corporate representatives. “The way I’m going to get elected to the U.S. Senate, I hope, is by talking to my constituents in Colorado. That doesn’t happen very often anymore.”

Romanoff said that Colorado politicians are being led by advisers to increasingly seek contributions from people and groups across the country, on the East Coast and West Coast. He said campaign advertising time should be limited and given for free to dilute the power of special interests.

“Somebody said that the Senate is the place that good ideas go to die. There is a reason for that and in part it’s because a lot of the wealthiest interest groups, which stand to lose the most from the proposals we need [to pass], are subsidizing decisions.”

“One of the reasons we do not have single-payer [health care] plan on the table is because it doesn’t serve the needs of the health insurance companies who are subsidizing the health care committees in Congress making the rules.”

Romanoff told the Colorado Independent that he would try to be an exception to the rules of the game as they stand to demonstrate that they can be changed.

The Colorado Independent is continuing to report from today’s announcement. Updates to come.

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Census-taking is scheduled to begin in April, which means the Regional Bureau has six months to convince Colorado Latinos to stand up and be counted. How best to approach them? Thursday, the Bureau said it will try to serenade them, of course!

The Pueblo Chieftan:

Every effort will be made… to increase Hispanic participation in the undertaking, including a musical approach to Spanish speakers.

Veronica Arzate De Reyes, a media specialist with the Albuquerque Census Bureau office, played two Spanish-language corridos, songs that tell stories in the Mexican folkloric tradition, that encourage trust in the census.

“Corridos are an interactive song or ballad originating from Mexico and dating to the 1800s,” Reyes said. “These stories will really connect with Latinos.

“One was written by Arizona students and the other by an Albuquerque musician named John Hernandez.”

According to the Chieftan, officials emphasized that, under federal law, sharing census information is punishable by a $125,000 fine and five years in jail. They also noted that there are no questions about citizenship on the census form.

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According to the Denver Post, Penry talked about the fiscally irresponsible GOP and then said Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter was weak. We need a stronger leader and etc.

Then he gets to the reason he’s there.

“Latinos will play a pivotal role in picking everything from mayors to presidents and, yes, governors, too.”

But how does Penry try to address Latino wariness of the GOP? How does he explain and make the case for the workplace raids, for example, the Tancredo La Raza attacks on Sotomayor, the expanding ICE illegal immigrant detention facilities in Aurora (episode 13) that cost Coloradans $100 per detainee per day to run?

According to the Denver Post, he said, Republican concerns mirror Latino concerns: jobs, the economy and education reform.

On immigration reform, Penry was apparently as vague as can be:

“It should be more difficult to do the wrong thing than to do the right thing,” Penry said, noting that some find it easier to cross the border illegally than to immigrate legally to the U.S.

Does that mean he wants to reform the visa and citizenship application and review process? Does that mean he wants to build a wall on the border? Both? Neither? ¿Quién sabe?

On the topic of education, he decided for some reason to take the America-first tack and avoided mention of his vote this year against a bill allowing illegal immigrant-recent high school graduates to receive in-state tuition.

“If we don’t improve the quality of our public school systems to keep up with what’s happening in China and India and other parts of the world, America’s economy will not continue to grow,” he said. “We need to make sure that we have a workforce that is skilled and capable and ready to compete.”

These were Republican Latinos Penry was addressing. Will this kind of stump speech win over any of the great majority of non-Republican Latinos in Colorado?

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Since 2006, workplace raids by federal immigration authorities have dramatically increased in the United States, according to available government data and reports by The Colorado Independent:

Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials reported reported approximately 1,300 worksite arrests in 2005, but the number jumped to more than 4,380 worksite arrests in 2006, more than seven times greater than the total number of individuals arrested in worksite enforcement in 2002. In a continuation of the trend, workplace arrests increased to more than 4,900 in 2007.

The first hint of of the surge to mark Colorado occurred on Dec. 12, 2006, in the northern city of Greeley, when ICE agents raided the national headquarters of the Swift & Company meatpacking plant as part of a operation that netted more than 1,200 arrests from plants in six separate states. The raid came seven months after the May Day marches, and on Our Lady of Guadalupe day, one of the most holiest days in Mexican culture. In Greeley, 261 people were arrested by ICE while immigration attorneys in the area later denounced federal agents for failing to provide information about the location of arrestees and not letting attorneys meet with those who were detained.

Less than three months later, ICE struck again, raiding janitorial crews working at the ESPN Zone restaurant in downtown Denver, along with the two Dave and Busters restaurant locations in the metro area, arresting 12. The coordinated operation resulted in 193 total arrests that took part in early morning hours at 63 entertainment-eateries in 18 states.

In July ICE agents raided a concrete plant in northern Colorado near the city of Loveland, arresting 18 men.

Along with a surge in worksite raids and arrests is an increase in criminal prosecutions against immigrants. Right after the raid against the concrete workers, the Transactional Records Access Clearing house, an organization at Syracuse University that compiles government data, released numbers showing that immigration cases made up 58 percent of all federal criminal prosecutions in April alone, while prosecutions against immigrants increased by 72 percent in a year nationwide.

A privately run ICE prison in the Denver metropolitan area with 400 beds is also expected to nearly quadruple in size by an addition of 1,100 beds. Corrections firm the GEO Group [now indicted  for murder in Texas], a global company that manages the prison, is supporting the expansion with an estimated annual income of $30 million, although ICE has yet to indicate that it will use the space.

Ryan Rivera at the Huffington Post points to a new study conducted this month by the nonprofit William C. Velásquez Institute:

Although most state and national polls have declared for weeks now that these key western states are leaning toward Obama, the Velasquez report found that, minus Latino voters, Obama’s advantage would disappear or fall into the margin of error.

Colorado
without Latino voters: Obama 44.24 percent, McCain 42.41 percent
with Latino voters: Obama 51 percent, McCain 45 percent

Rivera has also posted a video reel at News21 project, where he reports on the political awakening of thousands of new and predominantly Latino citizens in the western states and Florida.

In Colorado, five counties — Denver, Douglas, Arapahoe, Garfield and Eagle — all had Latino populations increase by more than 41 percent since 2000, a statistic that indicates “fast growth,” according to a recent study by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.

Federal data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency also shows that the state is one of the top three locations in the country for newly legalized residents.

Although the full power of the Latino vote in the state will be determined by turnout figures and exit polling on Election day, the Velasquez study, if accurate, paints a remarkable picture of the future political landscape in Colorado.

But after seven years of Bush’s leadership, some leaders in the Latino community claim Hispanic people have suffered disproportionately under the Bush administration and many are now worse off in many respects than they were before he took office.

“When President Bush came into office there was a lot of hope. He came in saying he would be a friend to the Latino community,” said Vanessa Cardenas of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington D.C.  “He promised that he would broker an immigration accord, but he couldn’t bring his party together. And what’s worse, his administration in the past year has focused on enforcing a broken immigration system.”

In an article that appeared on the CAP website Monday, Cardenas compiled a list of statistics that collectively paint a bleak picture of the overall well-being of the Latino population in the United States. The State of Latinos in the Union includes no commentary. Cardenas says the figures on immigration, housing, education, health care and employment speak for themselves.

Here are a few highlights:

• Latinos make up 14.8 percent of the total U.S. population, but they represent about 21 percent of the subprime default burden. (source: President of the Center for Responsible Lending before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, March 2007
• Over 4,000 workers, most of them Hispanic, were arrested during worksite raids in 2007 and later deported. (U.S. Customs and Immigration Services)
• Twenty-four percent of Latino 16- to 24-year-olds dropped out of school in 2004, twice the rate of black students and three times the rate of white students. (U.S. Department of Education)
• Over one-third of the Hispanic population was uninsured in 2006, compared with 10.8 percent of whites and 20.5 percent of blacks. (U.S. Census)
• Over 20 percent of the Latino population lived in poverty in 2006, compared with 8.2 percent of the white population. (U.S. Census)
• As of December 2007, the unemployment rate among Latinos reached 6.3 percent, the highest in years. (U.S. Census)

Polly Baca, president of the nonprofit Latin American Research and Service Agency in Denver, said that although these numbers are national, the struggles of Latinos in Colorado over recent years are reflected in the data.

Twenty percent of Colorado’s population is Hispanic, but in 2005 they accounted for more than 40 percent of the state’s uninsured population. The median household income for Latinos in Colorado in 1999 was nearly $12,500 less than for the total population, according to Census figures.

“The whole country is suffering because of the economy. The poor are becoming poorer, and that’s obvious in the numbers,” Baca said. “But as Latinos, we are overrepresented among the economically disadvantaged, and part of that is a direct result of the Bush policies.”

Baca added that Latinos have also been negatively affected in recent years by the anti-illegal immigration movement, which sometimes employs harsh rhetoric that angers and frustrates many Latinos.

“When Bush became president he had a very positive approach to Latinos, reaching out to them and commending their work ethic, et cetera,” she said. “But today there is this great public onslaught against Latinos. They are being used as scapegoats for a lot of the difficulty in the economy.”

Travis Martinez, vice chair of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of Colorado, admitted that some of the rhetoric used by the GOP to talk about immigration has hurt the party’s standing among Latinos. But he says a distinction must be made between the president and some members of his party.

“The last time I checked, it was George W. Bush who was pushing for comprehensive immigration reform,” Martinez wrote in an e-mail. “But it was his own party that resoundingly rejected the Kennedy-McCain bill.”

Martinez disagreed that Latinos are worse off now than they were when Bush took office. He pointed to the growing number of Latino-owned businesses and a 2007 study from the Pew Hispanic Center that highlights significant progress made by Latino foreign-born workers in terms of moving up the wage scale.

Martinez also noted that the Bush administration has made an effort to include Latinos in the highest levels of government: Carlos M. Gutierrez is the Secretary of Commerce; Alberto Gonzales was the first Hispanic U.S. Attorney General; and Bush also nominated Linda Chavez for Secretary of Labor, but she later withdrew her nomination.

“Politically, Hispanics have gained significantly over the past seven years,” Martinez said. “If Hispanics look at the big picture, they will see that they are better off than they were, and they will continue to improve themselves over the next seven years.”