Politico: The McCain-Latino disconnect

Politico newspaper/website columnist David Paul Kuhn has a stinging piece out today about McCain's difficulty in attracting Latino voter support. He argues that a new poll, building on the evidence from other recent national polls, demonstrates McCain is in deep trouble with Hispanic voters and in particular religious Hispanic voters. Here's his basic premise:

While he earned the support of about seven in ten Hispanics in his last Arizona Senate race, a Pew Hispanic Center poll released Thursday shows that just 23 percent of Latinos intend to vote for McCain in the presidential contest, barely half of the four in ten Latino voters who exit polls showed voted for President Bush in 2004.

Kuhn quotes me in this piece, giving me the "kicker quote" as it's commonly referred to:

“You begin with the anti-immigrant legislation that came out of the House and jump started a level of activism in the Latino community that we had not seen ever,” said Adam Segal, director of the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University “and you add to that the favorable political environment for Democrats in general,” and it’s hard, he said, to see McCain’s numbers among Hispanics improving.

“This cycle is extremely favorable to Obama and the Democrats,” Segal, who then paused before emphasizing “extremely.”