Zogby International, the respected public opinion firm, has just released data on how Latinos/Hispanics voted in the recent 2006 midterm elections. The results show that in contrast to the 2004 elections when 40% of Latino voters cast their ballots for President Bush, these days, less than one-quarter of Latino voters feel that the Republican party understands their needs best:

Even among Hispanics who said they were themselves Republicans, just 76% said they thought the GOP understood them best. Another 8% said the Libertarian Party best understood them, 7% thought Democrats knew them better, while 10% of Republicans said that either another party better understood them, or that they were unsure. Among Democratic Hispanics, 83% said their own party better understood them, while 4% said Republicans understood them best.

Asked which political party is best equipped to manage a handful of important issues, Hispanics who said they had voted in the recent congressional midterm elections favored Democrats on each by wide margins, including immigration, where 49% said Democrats were better equipped to manage the issue, compared to 26% who favored the Republicans.

The longer the respondent’s family had been in America, the more likely they were to support Democrats over Republicans on the issue, the survey showed. While 43% of those not born in the U.S. said Democrats were better equipped, 56% of those who were fourth–generation Americans or greater favored Democrats, suggesting that the more familiar Hispanic voters were with Republican policies, the less they liked them.

That last finding is particularly telling -- the longer they or their families have lived in the U.S., the less Republican Latinos tend to be. It seems a little ironic that those Latinos who support the Republicans the most are recent immigrants -- the group that Republicans are likely to be the most suspicious of.

At any rate, the bottom line is that these trends do not bode well for Republicans, considering (1) Latinos are turning against them, particularly more “assimilated” ones and (2) as illegal immigration is likely to decline, both the proportion and total number of all Latinos who are U.S.-born are only likely to continue increasing.