The University of Washington has quietly debuted a new political blog written by UW professors and researchers. It's worth bookmarking.

Here's an example:

Matt Barreto on the conventional wisdom that Black/Latino tension is why Hillary Clinton seems to doing better than Barack Obama among Latinos:

...we find that the Clinton advantage is driven primarily by her eight years as first lady and seven years as Senator from New York.

...This name-recognition advantage for Clinton has been enhanced by a strong and aggressive advertising and outreach effort by her campaign and a string of high-profile endorsements. She has hired an independent Latino pollster and aired significantly more Spanish language radio and television ads.

In contrast, the Obama campaign’s outreach to Hispanics has been anemic and particularly ineffective...In short, there are many reasons why Hillary Clinton enjoys a large advantage among Latino voters, none of which has anything to do with racism. The claim, then, that her support is somehow evidence of Latino unwillingness to support African-American candidates is wrong on its face...

and Barreto sums it up like this:

The election of 2008 looks to be a good year for Democrats among Latinos. The failure of immigration reform and the nativist grandstanding of the GOP and its primary candidates, including the once-moderate John McCain, seem certain to drive the Democratic share of the Latino vote back towards 70%. The wealth of empirical research, not speculation, suggests this will be true whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

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