When will Spanish names become a ballot booster?

One of the so-called “rules” of electoral politics (street rules, not the civics book version) is that “Irish-sounding” names are a plus.

Supposedly, people in this country of all ethnicities like the so-called “simple” and “clean” sound of many of the names of people whose ethnic roots trace back to Ireland. When combined with the many third- and fourth-generation Irish people in this country who will vote for their own kind, it makes for a potent combination that can result in significant numbers of votes.

THIS FACTOR ALLEGEDLY is most important in the lower-level offices on a ballot, particularly when one gets to the point of voting for all those judges. An Irish-sounding name is considered a guarantee to get a “yes” vote for retention.

Yet as this country’s ethnic makeup is changing, I can’t help but wonder how much longer this “rule” will remain in effect before people start talking about how silly it was to begin with.

What makes me wonder is that growing Latino population, which is slowly but surely translating into significantly more Latino voters. Officials with the National Association of Latino Elected Officials estimate that about 11 million Latinos cast ballots across the United States, and comprised about 9 percent of all voters in the 2008 general election.

So how long until we reach numbers significant enough that people start talking about a “Spanish-name” factor, with all of the ethnicities with ties to Latin American countries providing a base of people who will be inclined to vote for “one of ours” instead of just another Irishman?

I WONDERED ABOUT this because I couldn’t help but notice as I went through my ballot last week in a Chicago-area congressional district that all of the Spanish-oriented names did appear to jump out at me.

Now I’m not saying I only voted for the Latinos. But after a short while, I started to look for them. And in the case of judges seeking retention who appeared to have ties to Latin America, they got my vote.

Of course, so did a lot of people of other ethnic origins. I can’t say I deliberately voted against anyone with an “Irish-sounding” (a “Mc” or an “O’something”) name. But I heard of a few people who did take such an attitude.

Take my father.

HE TOLD ME after casting his ballot on Tuesday that weeding through a list of about two dozen judges whom he knew nothing of, picking out the “Irish-sounding” names and voting “no” for their retention made as much sense as any other method for picking out which judges to keep and which to dump.

And looking for Latinos for public office certainly makes no more or less sense than those people who specifically single out female names – either to vote them all in, or all out. I’ve heard of people who follow both rules of thumb.

Perhaps it’s too bad that I personally have no interest in running for elective office during my lifetime. Because I can see the day when my name would be just as much an advantage as a drawback (resistance from people who mentally want this country to stay in the 19th Century).

I wonder if we’ll get the day that people who desire to hold an elective office will start desperately looking for any trace of a Latino in their family trees – thereby allowing them access to a name that they could use on the ballot to “sound Spanish.”

THE DRAWBACK, OF course, is that we will have to start engaging in debates over who is Latino enough to warrant calling themselves a Latino.

Don’t think I’m exaggerating about this point.

This past weekend, I attended (as a reporter writing for a newspaper) a conference intended to promote the social, economic and political interests of Latinas.

One of the speakers was an Illinois Senate member who managed to win re-election this year, yet remains bitter about the fight she had to put up against a candidate with an Irish-sounding surname with Mexican ethnicity on his mother’s side of the family.

AS THAT SENATOR, Iris Martinez, described her now-defeated opponent, “he’s sort of Mexicano, sort of blanco. He says he had an abuela Latina, but he never said so until this became a Latino” election. Sad to say, this the kind of political debate that we’re going to hear more and more of in coming years.

What I want to know is if we will someday get instances of people with both Irish and Mexican (or some other Latino ethnicity) backgrounds who try to emphasize both?

Will someone named “Joseph Fitzgerald-Sanchez” (“Jose” when campaigning in what remains of Latino neighborhoods, since we’re gradually going to live everywhere in this country) be seen as the “winning combination” for a ballot name of the mid-21st Century? Will people think of this as two successful backgrounds mixed into a superior political concoction?

Or is this going to come off as someone confused about who he is? That will be of the issues for political science people to ponder in coming years.

-30-