Survey: Hispanic voters prefer Obama by nearly 3-to-1
 By a margin of nearly 3-to-1, Hispanic voters prefer Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama over his GOP rival John McCain, according to a new survey.
In the poll of 892 registered Hispanic voters, the Pew Hispanic Center found that 65 percent of Latino voters "identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party," whereas 26 percent favor Republicans.
A full 53 percent of those surveyed said that race made no difference to Latino voters, while another 32 percent believed that being black may help Obama; 11 percent thought it would harm his election bid.
Overall, Obama is preferred by 76 percent of Latino voters, versus McCain's 44 percent.
"Both candidates also have appeared before Hispanic groups to pledge support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants," said the Dallas Morning News. "But McCain has faced a steep climb: Critics have accused him of softening his support for his own immigration legislation during the GOP primaries, when his support for immigration reform threatened to derail his candidacy."
The poll's margin of error was 4.4 percent.
Excerpts from article:
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Also, more than three-quarters of Latinos who reported that they voted for Clinton in the primaries now say they are inclined to vote for Obama in the fall election, while just 8% say they are inclined to vote for McCain. That means that Obama is doing better among Hispanics who supported Clinton than he is among non-Hispanic white Clinton supporters, 70% of whom now say they have transferred their allegiance to Obama while 18% say they plan to vote for McCain, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
Latino registered voters rank education, the cost of living, jobs and health care as the most important issues in the fall campaign, with crime lagging a bit behind those four and the war in Iraq and immigration still farther behind. On each of these seven issues, Obama is strongly favored over McCain--by lopsided ratios ranging from about three-to-one on education, jobs, health care, the cost of living and immigration, to about two-to-one on Iraq and crime.
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