By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 26, 2004; Page A04

In the days before the presidential election, some opinion surveys said Democrats would get as much as 65 percent of the Hispanic vote.

But on the morning after the voting, some exit polls held that Democratic nominee John F. Kerry had received about 56 percent of Hispanics' votes and that President Bush had gotten 44 percent.

Now some public opinion researchers are trying to determine the reasons for the discrepancies between the pre- and post-election numbers.

Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based public opinion researcher who helped survey Hispanics for the New Democrat Network in the District, said the answer lies in the diversity among Hispanics, the largest ethnic group in the United States.

The Spanish speakers come, or descend from those, from different nations -- Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Colombia and Cuba, to name a few -- and identify racially as white, black, some other race and Asian. Their numbers include newly arrived immigrants and families whose descendants lived in the United States before the Civil War. As a group, they favor federal spending but adhere to conservative values on issues such as abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage.

In recent years, Hispanics overtook African Americans as the nation's largest ethnic group, making them a tantalizing political demographic. About 9 million Hispanics voted in this month's election, a 40 percent increase from the number who voted four years ago, pollster John J. Zogby said.

Bendixen, president of Bendixen and Associates, which specializes in the Hispanic market, said early polls did not engage Hispanics correctly.

Bendixen cited Zogby International, which he said conducted 13 percent of its interviews with Hispanics in Spanish on its way to predicting that Kerry would win 61 percent of the community's vote. It was a mistake, Bendixen said, to poll less than 40 percent of the Hispanic community in its native language.

"You have to have the right ratio," Bendixen said, or the poll will be thrown off.

Zogby, president of Zogby International, stood by his numbers. He said he has "great respect" for Bendixen but "no one with any understanding of Hispanics has duplicated the 44 percent" for Republicans in post-election surveys.

Zogby believes the correct percentage for Hispanic Bush supporters is 33 to 38. That view is supported by an exit poll conducted by the William C. Velasquez Institute of San Antonio.

In that exit poll, Hispanics favored Kerry over Bush by 65 percent to 34 percent. Fernando J. Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said hundreds of researchers have posted comments that support the institute's survey.

"There's nothing special that Bush did to get a higher turnout," Guerra said, doubting that the president won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. "What would explain this tremendous amount of Latino support for Bush?"

Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-Colo.) said Republicans gained more Hispanic voters by appealing to their conservative values. "They stood up for traditional values, whether it was life or against gay marriage," he said.

Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, said Bush's appeal to Hispanics is clear: As a former governor of Texas, the president has a better grasp than his opponent of immigrant issues. Bush's brother Jeb, governor of Florida, speaks Spanish like a native Cuban and appealed directly to Latino voters on the president's behalf. The president's nephew George P. Bush is a rising star in the Republican Party.

"The relationship of the Bush family to Hispanics is something like Bill Clinton's relationship with African Americans," Rosenberg said.

In addition, the president made high-level Hispanic appointments, including that of Alberto R. Gonzales, first as White House counsel and recently as his nominee for attorney general. Bush's first trip abroad after the election was to Chile and Colombia.

"Would any Democratic president have ever thought of that?" Rosenberg asked. "Democrats have a legacy with Hispanics. But Republicans have a modern strategy. Their strategy is changing the rules, and Democrats have to adapt. It is a sea change."

There is one thing about which most pollsters agree. Kerry ran poorly among Hispanics who did not live in campaign battleground states where he worked hard for their votes.

In Florida, where the Kerry-John Edwards campaign joined union volunteers, activist groups and others in turning out the vote, Kerry won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to exit polling done by the New Democrat Network. That is 10 percentage points more than Democratic nominee Al Gore won among that group in 2000.

In non-battleground states, the 54 percent of the Hispanic vote Kerry got was 12 percentage points less than what Gore received four years earlier, according to the NDN poll. It was a wake-up call for Democrats, who are accustomed to 90 percent of the black vote and 75 percent of the Hispanic vote, Zogby said.

"A lot of the Democratic leadership grew up in the civil rights era," Rosenberg said. "They were in this black and white fight that took place in the '60s. That's how they grew up in the political world.

"Now what we're facing is a new conversation, and we have a lot of people who are invested in the old conversation. We have to court both. It cannot be framed as a choice."

Rosenberg said Democrats must roll back what Republicans gained, "or we can become the minority party for the rest of my life."