You all (Northern for "y'all") know that I'm trying to track the demographic truisms that are getting spanked with this election cycle:

• Republicans won't elect a moderate: See McCain who started off appealing to the moderates midstream and is not working on the conservatives.
• Black women won't commit, splitting their vote between Clinton and Obama
• Black men won't vote for Clinton
• White women won't vote for Obama
• White men, hell, won't vote for anyone long on melanin and short on dick

As you're aware, I'm having a great time as these truths become less than self-evident. Today, I read a nice send-up of the challenges in trying to peg the Hispanic vote on Juan Guillermo Tornoe's blog. Here's a snippet:

Hispanic Building Blocs

March 2, 2008
By RINKER BUCK

Anyone who doubts the flexing power of Connecticut's Hispanic vote — for that matter, the Hispanic vote throughout the United States — should spend five minutes with a young man in a hurry named Joseph Rodriguez.

Last fall, Rodriguez, 22, whose parents moved here from Puerto Rico, didn't stop at getting himself elected as a Democratic member of the New Haven Board of Aldermen. Excited about the possibility of changing politics in Washington and transfixed by what promised to be an epic primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Rodriguez threw himself at the job of organizing New Haven's Hispanic wards for Obama, an effort that eventually contributed to the Illinois senator's 4-percentage-point win over Clinton in Connecticut's Feb. 5 primary.

"There is no question that, by late last summer, Hillary Clinton was way ahead among the Hispanic community in New Haven," Rodriguez said last week. "The mainstream media kept saying that the Latino population would vote for Hillary because of favorable memories of the presidency of Bill Clinton."

"These so-called political commentators also said that Latinos were Democratic conservatives and would go for Hillary, or that Latinos wouldn't vote for an African American," Rodriguez said. "But I knew that the commentators really didn't understand Latinos."

While simultaneously running for alderman, Rodriguez set up a phone bank for Obama, dispatched teams of canvassers on door-to-door efforts in eight wards, and worked closely with a college group, Yale Students for Obama, educating New Haven residents about their candidate. Rodriguez and his Yalies even organized a "Faith Lit" effort every Sunday morning, canvassing Hispanics as they left church and placing Obama literature on the windshields of cars parked for services.

The result?

"On primary day, New Haven went 2-to-1 for Obama — 12,000 votes for Obama, 6,000 for Hillary — and we demonstrated what the Latino vote can do," Rodriguez said. "We've proven that all of these myths about our voting patterns [across the country] aren't true." [read the rest ... ]

Hat tip to Juan Guillermo! I guess the common taters haven't sorted out that white women, Black women and Hispanic women and men aren't  monolithic block that votes without thinking--unless one assumes that white men are, in fact, exactly that.

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