What are the faith-based influences on Hispanic voters, and how important are those influences?
The Latino community in this country is clearly a religious community. It’s traditionally been a community that identifies with strong religious values, with strong family values, and religion influences many issues, day-to-day life issues as well as broader public life issues, and some of the research that has been done on Latino public life suggests that religion has a way of influencing the way people think, their attitudes, their behaviors, and how they align themselves politically in this country. Q: How have Latinos aligned themselves politically, and how has religion affected that? A: Traditionally Latinos, like other minorities in this country, have aligned themselves politically, the majority, with the Democratic Party over the last 20 years or so. However, that trend has been changing over the last ten years, I would say, and in large part due to its shifting, both demographics as well as shifting political values, and the realignment is drawn between the Catholic and non-Cat
