If you were a campaign's field director and learned that 18,000 people eager to vote for the first time were gathering in one spot, you'd probably show up with at least a few clipboard-wielding volunteers to register them, right? Yet John McCain's supporters were nowhere to be found Friday morning as the first of three naturalization ceremonies got underway at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Maybe they decided to leave it to the county employees, who registered people as they sat and waited for their row to be dismissed after the ceremony. Or perhaps they asked themselves "why bother?" after reading the latest Rasmussen poll showing Barack Obama holds a more than comfortable 28 point lead in the state. Since more than half of the new citizens are Latino, and Obama has a 2-to-1 edge over McCain among Latinos, maybe it just wasn't worth their time. Or maybe McCain supporters, who swear California is in play, hit the snooze button at 9:00 a.m. but made it downtown for the 1:00p.m. and 4:30p.m. ceremonies.
But Obama's supporters, who really could have slept in given the California numbers, were out in force.
"It sends a message to people who are becoming citizens that we want them to be engaged in the political process and gets his name out there and attaches it to friendly people," said Bill Foote, an Obama volunteer and co-organizer of the 50-person team registering new citizens.
The Golden State leads the country in the number of people naturalized each year. More than 184,000 people became citizens in California in 2007, or 28 percent of all new naturalizations nationwide. Last year, 1.4 million people applied for citizenship in the United States, twice the number that applied in 2006. Factors contributing to the surge included a fee increase that went into effect last July, the ongoing debate over immigration policy, and the upcoming election.
Sure, new citizen voters might have little net effect on the top of the ticket in a non-swing state like California, but in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada -- swing states with significant Latino populations and a healthy number of new citizens -- any expansion of voter rolls could prove game-changing.
Lest one think newly naturalized citizens are too insignificant in number to matter, consider recent history. The Clinton/Gore White House may have denied claims it tried to make the naturalization process easier in 1996 expressly to boost Democratic voter rolls, but the record on the Citizenship USA program is at least somewhat gray. (see a DOJ report that details some of the questionable actions or a more critical take on the affair by former Chief Council of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee David Schippers)
And some have argued the current processing backlog resulting from last year's surge in applications has political underpinnings.
"The suspicion, at least in certain quarters, was that the administration did not respond as well to the surge because they were in no hurry to naturalize a large number of Latino voters," said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at NYU School of Law. "The fact that you didn't plan for [a surge in applications] means that you were not that keen to process as many applications just before the election."
But as new Americans who survived the citizen-making sausage factory poured out of the Convention Center hall, any grand political machinations couldn't be further from their minds as they registered to take part in that simplest of democratic institutions.
"Here people are happy to register to vote and you get some of their excitement," said Foote. "It's uplifting."