The Lone Star State isn’t up for grabs this cycle, but President Obama told a crowd in San Antonio Tuesday that Texas’s booming Hispanic population will help paint it purple sometime soon.
Especially if the GOP sticks with Mitt Romney’s style of Hispanic outreach.
As Romney tried to pummel Obama with a debunked, out-of-context assertion that the president doesn’t believe business owners deserve credit for their success, Obama needled Romney over immigration before a crowd of supporters at a fundraiser.
“We’re not going backwards when it comes to immigration,” Obama said.
“My opponent says the Arizona law could be a model for the nation,” he said, drawing boos at Romney’s position from the crowd. “I believe we are a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.”
Romney has continued to take a hard line on immigration, a fact that Hispanic advocates say contributes to his terrible poll numbers among the Hispanic electorate. Obama has also started to excite Hispanic voters by using his executive powers to enact parts of the DREAM Act.
“That was the right thing to do,” Obama said, before repeating, “We’re not going backwards, we’re going forward.”
Later Obama suggested the growing Hispanic population in Texas — and the seeming inability of the modern GOP to reach out to them — could put the state on the swing state map in a future election.
“You’re not considered one of the battleground states,” Obama said, “although that’s going to be changing soon.”
The Obama campaign told reporters after the San Antonio speech that the president sees a purple future in the state’s growing Hispanic population.
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