Checking the Party Numbers of Latino Officials
The major parties continue jockeying for electoral advantage. Illustration courtesy DonkeyHotey at flickr.com/donkeyhotey/Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
It’s become a routine each election year: Parties try to show they’re a better fit for the vast bloc of Latino voters.
This year in Texas, Democrats and Republicans are arguing the numbers to show they’re a better fit; one claim stated that elected Democrats of Latino heritage far outnumber their Republican counterparts. KUT’s Emily Donahue spoke with Gardner Selby of the Austin American-Statesman’s PolitiFact Texas about the claim that there are 668 Hispanic Democrats in elected office to 60 Republicans, numbers that come from a nonpartisan directory but don’t tell the whole story.
About 1,700 in that same directory either held nonpartisan offices — think city councils, city governments, school boards or something of the like; the bulk of them were listed as “no party stated.” We learned from the group that pulls all this together that if an official didn’t confirm a party by phone or fax, there was no effort to follow up; they don’t check up. They just don’t have the resources to do that.
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