That's low compared with whites, who cast ballots at a rate of 64 percent in 2012.

In the last election, fewer than half-48 percent-went to the polls. Latinos made up 8.4 percent of the electorate in 2012, but only 11.2 of the 23.3 million eligible to vote cast ballots.Д«ut there's a problem with the 'awakening giant' story: Most Latinos who are eligible to vote still don't. That's triple their numbers in 1988 and approximately 1.5 million more than in 2008, accounting for 8.4 percent of the electorate. In a year characterized by the rhetoric of Republicans like Congressman Steve King of Iowa-who told Newsmax that for every child of an undocumented immigrant who became a valedictorian, there were 'another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and have got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert'-11.2 million Latino voters responded by flocking to the polls and going heavily for Democrats, awarding President Barack Obama 71 percent of their support. By supporting 'self-deportation'-basically, making life for the nearly 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country so miserable they choose to leave-Mitt Romney had embraced the anti-immigrant wing of his party. 'The sleeping Latino giant is wide awake, cranky, and it's taking names,' Eliseo Medina, then the secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said in November 2012 shortly after election results rolled in. Perhaps annoyed by all the interruptions, by 2008 he was 'in a foul mood.' Then, it seems, he lost his temper. to lead this nation.' He 'flexed muscles at the polls' in 2004. By 2000, not only was the beast 'fully awake' but he was 'making a pot of coffee,' then 'tying shoes, getting ready to play, preparing. In 1992, he 'lapsed into a coma.' Anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 was said to have revived him, though it was unclear whether he 'got up on the same side of the bed' as Republicans or Democrats. To judge by media accounts, the sleeping giant has had quite a time since then. 'The symbolism,' the Times wrote, 'has not been lost on members of the long-neglected but fast-growing Latino population, who feel they have finally come of age politically.' That year, 3.7 million Latinos gave Dukakis, the Democrat, 69 percent of their votes. 'The giant is awake,' Harry Pachon, then-head of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, told The Miami Herald in 1988, the same year The New York Times made much ado about the fact that both Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Every election season, like a spectator staring through binoculars on safari, someone jumps to exclaim that the beast is rousing, prompting others to claim that, yes, they spotted it, too. Ever since a wave of mass migration from Latin America began to transform the country's demographic landscape in the 1970s, political analysts have spoken about the 'sleeping giant' of the Latino vote.

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