Feb. 26, Feature - In Texas' March 4th primary and caucus, Latino voters will play an important role. Barack Obama is having to play a lot of catch up to Hillary Clinton. Clinton has won every Southwestern state: Nevada, California, Arizona and New Mexico. But Barack Obama has managed to make a dent in the Latino community, garnering 53 percent of the vote in Connecticut's February 5th primary. Obama relied on local Latino organizers there to run a well-organized grassroots campaign.

In consultation with the national Obama campaign, Latino leaders from around the state adapted, and in some cases, translated into Spanish, some standard campaign material.

Kica Matos, a top city official in New Haven, Connecticut says:

"The story wasn't some national piece of mailing that you got that came from the campaign. It really was dialogue and communications from people who live in this community about why it was we supported Barack. We talked to people, we went in the neighborhoods."

The goal of Latinos for Obama, which included many of the state's best-known government officials and leaders of non-governmental organizations, was to counteract the presumed Latino support for Clinton, which was based in large part on endorsements from well-known Latinos at the national level and Bill and Hillary Clinton's long time ties to the Latino community, another goal was to show that Latinos would, in fact, support a black candidate.

From the Obama campaign's Hartford office, Ed Vargas coordinated the state's Latinos for Obama, which he called a mostly home-grown affair, "One of the complaints by the Spanish media was that Hillary had been advertising for weeks, and the Obama campaign was putting nothing in Spanish.

Connecticut Latino activists responded. They went door to door with a localized flyer that focused on the themes of health care and immigration. New Haven alderman Joe Rodriguez said they also distributed a flyer about Obama's Christian faith. "We went out on Sundays and tried to flood as many churches as possible, from putting flyers on the windshields of cars to actually speaking to individuals walking out of church, to let them know where we stand as Hispanic leaders, and where we stand as far as endorsing a presidential candidate."

Donald Green, a political scientist at Yale University in New Haven, says that precisely this kind of outreach could be most effective in mobilizing the Latino vote.

"Often times, Latino voters are left out of voter mobilization drives because they are considered low propensity voters, and campaigns want to talk to high propensity voters, they want to persuade people who are very likely to vote. But what differentiates low propensity voters from high propensity voters is sometimes the attention that is paid to them over a series of elections."

Ultimately, Obama won 53 percent of the Latino vote in Rodriguez's ward, and in Connecticut overall, meanwhile, in a neighboring ward that was also heavily Latino but where no outreach was done for Obama, Clinton won by an even bigger margin.