Immigration issues give candidate a fighting chance

TOPPENISH, Yakima County — Logic says Tomás Villanueva doesn't stand a chance of unseating Republican state Sen. Jim Honeyford in this rural agricultural area, known for its fruit orchards and wine.

After all, Villanueva is challenging a well-financed incumbent deep in GOP territory.

"Not only is Tomás running as a Democrat, he's also a Hispanic and a farmworker advocate who is very well known," said Ricardo Garcia, who runs the Spanish-language public-radio station KDNA in Yakima.

Those aren't typically big selling points among Eastern Washington voters. And yet, Garcia and others think Villanueva has a shot at an upset in District 15, which covers Yakima, Skamania and Klickitat counties.

Their reasoning has a lot to do with the growing Hispanic population in Honeyford's district. But recent hard-line positions taken by Republicans on illegal immigration have outraged members of the Latino community, and raised Democrats' hopes of attracting Latinos who nationally register to vote at lower rates than the rest of the population.

"It's really pushing the buttons to get people more riled up against the Republican Party," said Villanueva, 64, a slight, genteel-looking man who was born in Mexico and became a U.S. citizen in 1964.

The Washington State Republican Party recently adopted a party platform that says babies born to illegal immigrants in the United States should not be allowed to become citizens. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution recognizes citizenship for all people born in the United States.

"It's the most absurd policy platform the Republican Party could have adopted," said Matt Barreto, an assistant political-science professor at the University of Washington who does research on minority political participation.

Hispanics in Washington already were mobilizing because of legislation being considered in Congress that deals with immigration. The U.S. Senate recently passed a measure that would let some illegal immigrants remain here and eventually become American citizens.

Many see the proposal as a compromise to a U.S. House bill that had no provision for earning citizenship and also made their illegal presence in the country a felony.

If the party platform adopted by the state GOP becomes widely known, "when you set up a voter-registration booth, you're going to get thousands of new Latinos registering to vote," Barreto said.

16% of adult population

About 500,000 Latinos live in Washington state, and about 80 percent are of Mexican heritage, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2004 estimate. Barreto estimates, based on the 2000 census, that about 24,000 Latinos eligible to vote live in District 15. That's roughly 16 percent of the adult population.

Raul Diaz, chairman of the Washington State Republican National Hispanic Assembly, said the state party's stance has damaged his efforts to reach out to Latino voters.

"It creates an opportunity for Democrats," he said. "You're going to have the Democrats coming out and using this against us."

Yakima is often seen as the center of the state's Latino population "but there are a lot of Hispanic voters in Skagit County, Snohomish County, King County," said Dwight Pelz, chairman of the state Democratic Party.

"We're going to reach out to the leadership in these communities and to the unregistered Hispanic citizens and get them to register to vote and we're going to raise money for a media campaign aimed at Hispanic voters," Pelz said.

Sen. Honeyford, elected to the House in 1994 and the Senate in 1998, said he takes Villanueva's campaign seriously even though the district leans Republican. He was unopposed in the 2002 election and got 19,443 votes.

"You never take a challenger lightly," said Honeyford, a Sunnyside farmer. "I'll be doing everything I do in a normal campaign."

That mostly means raising money and doing direct-mail and newspaper advertising, he said. State records show he's raised more than $50,000, including contributions from the biotech firm Amgen, Anheuser-Busch and Aventis Pharmaceuticals.

Honeyford didn't seem worried about his party's platform. When asked how he felt about its stance on citizenship for the babies of illegal immigrants, Honeyford said, "I don't know. I haven't thought about it."

New voters sought

It's likely to be on the minds of Latinos in his area, however. The state Democratic Party and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the state's largest labor union, plan to do voter-registration drives in District 15.

"Given the debate nationally and locally against immigrants and immigrant workers, I think there's an opportunity to register and mobilize thousands of new voters in a way that could make it a much closer race than Sen. Honeyford might expect," said Adam Glickman, a spokesman for SEIU.

Villanueva, so far, has raised only about $1,500 but appears confident that will quickly change. The state Democratic Party and SEIU said they plan to contribute money.

However, Villanueva, who spent years as head of the United Farm Workers of Washington State, expects his biggest asset to be Latinos in the local community plus labor activists registering voters and going door to door to talk about his campaign.

"If they [Honeyford's campaign] have more money, they can get more publicity, but I don't think they can get the number of people who can go house to house and make it a more personal campaign," Villanueva said.

Jim Flint, who runs several publications, including the Yakima Valley Business Journal and Viva, a local Spanish-language paper, doesn't think Villanueva's chances of winning are all that good.

Flint said he likes Villanueva and would vote for him but feels he's mainly known in the area for his work with farmworkers.

"I think he has a slim chance. His focus and interest has been pretty narrow. He's never gotten into the mainstream," Flint said.

His race could, however, set the stage for future races, Barreto said.

"What we saw in California was that it generally took a couple of election cycles to really solidify the Latino voter-registration base," he said.

Andrew Garber: 360-943-9882 or agarber@seattletimes.com