Equating the Cuban American vote with the "Hispanic" vote is analogous with equating the Jesse Jackson vote with the "English as a first language in 1865" vote.
Senator Martinez is from the Cuban American community that gave George W. Bush 78% of its vote in 2000.
Not even Texas can claim that degree of Republican loyalty.
If it were not for the Cuban American community's tradition of overwhelming support for the Republican Party, Al Gore would have carried Florida's Electoral votes in 2000 and Al Gore would have been President of the United States on 11 September 2000.
Think about the implications of that.
Show me any other group ethnic group that can deliver a 78% vote for a Republican candidate.
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Cuban American Vote Was Underestimated
Even before the world's attention turned to ballot recounts, hanging chads and courtroom dramas, Florida's 2000 presidential election campaign fell victim to a series of miscalls.
Five major television news networks relied on exit poll data from the Voter News Service, a respectable national polling organization used by news agencies for years, and mistakenly declared Al Gore the winner of the Sunshine State by early evening on Election Night.
Now, several political analysts have concluded that VNS underestimated Florida's Cuban Americans, who overwhelmingly voted Republican in response to the outcome of the Elián González case.
Sergio Bendixen, president of Hispanic Trends, our sister polling and consulting firm, said CNN relied on VNS figures and estimated that Cuban Americans make up 2 percent of Florida's Hispanic turnout. But other experts said Cubans actually make up a larger chunk of Florida's electorate.
"VNS got it wrong," Florida International University political scientist Darío Moreno said. "Cubans make up 8 percent of the Florida vote."
"Just by underestimating the Cuban American vote, the VNS poll was off by about 6 points," said Bendixen, who did analysis for CNN on Election Night.
"The minute we saw the Florida numbers we knew they were wrong." Bendixen points out that 2 percent of 6 million—the total number of voters in Florida—is only 120,000. "Yet there are easily 300,000 Cuban voters in Miami-Dade alone."
As a result of the miscalculation, VNS also reported that Bush won 49 percent of Florida's Hispanic vote to Gore's 48 percent, Moreno said.
Moreno's own analysis found that Bush won 61 percent of the state's Hispanic vote to Gore's 39 percent.
Both he and Bendixen agreed that the former Texas governor got about 78 percent of Florida's Cuban American vote.
Cubans make up the third largest Hispanic group in the United States, behind Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. But, unlike most other Hispanics, a majority of Cubans has traditionally voted Republican—due largely to the GOP's strong stance against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Some Cubans broke the tradition in 1996 when 40 percent re-elected President Clinton. VNS spokeswoman Lee C. Shapiro said the polling group stands by its estimates, although their margin of error may have been higher than usual.
"We're pretty comfortable with the estimate, even though it was probably on the low side because of the way the population is clustered," she said, adding that it was the first time VNS separated Cuban Americans from the state's overall Hispanic population, estimated at 11 percent.
I have to agree with you. It is the Cuban vote that is republican not the Mexican vote.