Poll: Obama's lead with Latinos jumping to historic high

By Cameron Joseph/The Hill

President Obama holds a 73-21 percent lead over Mitt Romney among Latino voters, a new high-water mark for the president. 

The new 52-point margin represents a high watermark for Obama in the weekly tracking poll from Latino Decisions, and is a significant jump from the 65-26 percent advantage he held six weeks ago. 

Romney has failed to make inroads despite a push at the GOP convention to highlight Hispanic Republicans, while Latino voters who have tuned in during the period shortly before and since the conventions have mostly gravitated towards Obama.

Obama is polling a higher percentage in the poll than the 67 percent of the Latino vote he won four years ago, when GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won 31 percent, according to exit polls. 

Romney himself said at a private fundraiser earlier this year that his campaign was "doomed" if it couldn't make inroads with Hispanic voters, who make up a significant — and fast-growing — chunk of the population in key swing states including Florida, Nevada and Colorado.

A Romney campaign official told The Hill in August that the campaign's goal was to win 38 percent of the Hispanic vote, though a Romney surrogate later said that figure might be for the swing states, not nationally.

One thin silver lining for Romney: He trails Obama by a less daunting 61 to 33 percent in the swing states, according to a six-week average of the Latino Decisions polls. Those figures skew towards him because of his strong standing with Cuban-American voters in Florida, pollster Matt Barreto told The Hill.

"The swing state number is heavily influenced by Romney's standing among Cuban Americans," Barreto told The Hill. "He's definitely doing well among Cuban Americans — that's his only group amongst Latinos."

Etch A Sketch: Romney Camp Concedes Kobach Is Adviser; Kobach Concedes Romney Wants SB-1070 Nationwide

By Alex Seitz-Wald/Think Progress

As Mitt Romney pivots to the general election and tries to close his big deficit with Latino voters, his campaign spent this week apparently backtracking on two key aspects of its controversial immigration policy. But it now appears to have come back full circle to its original positions.

First, the campaign tried to distance itself from controversial immigration activist Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona and Alabama’s harsh anti-immigration laws. Romney had touted Kobach as an informal adviser, but this week said he was merely a “supporter” not an “adviser.” ThinkProgress and others spoke with Kobach, who disputed the claim and said he was still advising the campaign, but nonetheless Romney’s staffagain stood by their initial statement.

But today, a spokesperson agreed in an email to CNN that Kobach is indeed an “informal adviser.”

Secondly, the Romney campaign asserted that when the presumed presidential nominee said during a Republican primary debate that Arizona is “a model,” he was referring to the state’s E-Verify law, not its anti-immigration law, the Kobach-backed SB-1070.

But newly-confirmed immigration adviser Kobach disputed this as well. “He stated very publicly that Arizona’s law should be a model for how the federal government enforces its immigration laws. And he’s correct there too,” Kobach told CNN of SB-1070. Indeed, Romney’s “self-deportation” policy shares the same basic approach as Arizona’s law.

Kobach went on to say that he doesn’t expect Romney — who had the harshest immigration policy of any Republican presidential candidate — to moderate his stances at all when facing President Obama. “I think it would be unusual for a national presidential candidate to back away from statements he’s made in debates and he hasn’t shown any sign of doing so,” Kobach said.

Indeed, it will be very hard for Romney, whose PAC was one of the largest donors to Kobach’s campaign for Kansas Secretary of State, to distance himself from his immigration adviser or the law in Arizona.