Whether President Obama wins re-election tomorrow, some electoral post-scripts will be engaged immediately. We will know if the HispanicLatino vote was important as expected, especially in the swing states. One of the two campaigns clearly will not have done enough to win – while hundreds of thousands of HispanicLatinos who did not vote could have made the difference. In either case, the HispanicLatino vote becomes ever more important. On the very day after the election, they will add more potential voters for 2016 proportionately than any other group.
If Obama wins with the HispanicLatino vote having proven decisive, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio will shoot to the head of the pack in his party, and his political action committees will begin to attract immediate money. Just as important, he will draw additional, competent political advisors with national experience to make sure the young legislator does not misstep and try to turn his party away from its harsh anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric. For those reasons, Rubio and sophisticated political analysts – not necessarily the ones on television every morning – will look closely at the results from three distinct congressional races across the country to read tea leaves about the future and to consider other possibilities.