Midwest Hispanics key factor in election

CHICAGO (AP) - Conversations - most in Spanish - carry from an open doorway as dozens of people wait in lines and folding chairs for volunteers to help them fill out citizenship forms.

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When Hortencia Cartlidge pauses for a moment to survey the auditorium in the Teamsters union hall just west of downtown Chicago, she doesn't just see future Americans. She sees voters.

''One day, it's not going to be the White House. It's going to be the 'Brown House,''' says Cartlidge, a native of Mexico who spends a few Saturdays a year volunteering for Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat who estimates he has helped more than 20,000 immigrants - most of them Hispanic - gain their citizenship since the early 1990s.

While it may be a few years before a Hispanic makes that sort of run for office, efforts to turn Latinos into big voting blocs throughout the country are not going unnoticed.

For months, presidential rivals George W. Bush and Al Gore have been courting the Latino vote with a fervor that political analysts say previously was reserved for blacks. And they're not just hitting the most obvious targets - California, Texas, Florida and New York.

They're working in the Midwest, even in states like Iowa, where just 2% of the population is Hispanic.

''In 1996, I had no calls whatsoever from any candidates,'' says Hector Avalos, director of the U.S. Latino Studies Program at Iowa State University. ''Last year, we were contacted by almost every candidate.''

Texas Gov. Bush even ran Spanish-language ads in Iowa before January's Republican caucuses.

While hardly a foregone conclusion, recent polls have shown California and New York favoring Vice President Gore, while Bush is doing well in Texas and in Florida - a stronghold of Republican Cuban-Americans where brother Jeb Bush is governor.

If the candidates split those four big states, Hispanics in middle America could help tip a close November election - and Bush has promised to win over Hispanics generally known for voting Democratic.

In the Midwest, where Hispanic voters are largely Democrats, some have shown they can't be taken for granted. In the 1998 governor's race in Illinois - where about one out of every 10 people is Hispanic - exit polls showed that 26% of Hispanics voted for Republican Gov. George Ryan.

The story was similar for Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson. In Minnesota, Hispanics helped elect Gov. Jesse Ventura, a member of the Reform Party at the time.

In fact, recent polls have found Democrat Gore on somewhat shaky ground in Wisconsin and Minnesota - states he was supposed to be able to count on. Polls also show him in trouble in Oregon and Washington, where Hispanics make up about 6% of the population.

In the last presidential election, exit polls indicated that about 5% of voters were Hispanic. Those numbers are likely to grow. In the 20 years before the 1996 election, the number of votes cast by Hispanics jumped 135%, compared with 21% for the rest of voters.

One analyst said the real wild cards in November's election will be Hispanic immigrants who have become citizens in the past decade.

''Many of them will be new voters, too, which means they are voters who can be recruited by either party,'' said Pastora San Juan Cafferty, a University of Chicago professor who co-edited the new book ''Hispanics in the United States: An Agenda for the 21st Century.''

But Cafferty said the candidates will have to go beyond attempts at speaking Spanish to present specific platforms on issues important to Hispanics, such as education and health care.

Iowa State's Avalos said the candidates also must remember that Hispanics are not a homogenous group. He says Bush, for example, has sometimes mistakenly assumed that most Hispanics are conservative Catholics.

And, like members of other groups, not all Hispanics - even those seeking citizenship - are interested in the political process.

But Cartlidge, who also volunteers as an election judge, recalled the Illinois primary in March when she signed in a woman whose citizenship paperwork she had filled out a few years earlier.

''I was so happy and I think she was, too,'' Cartlidge said. ''It's a feeling that no one can take away from you - a feeling that we count.''

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