In the Right

In fact, one has to go all the way back to 1924 to find the last time the GOP won the presidency without winning Florida.

As anyone with even a passing interest in Florida politics knows, the state's Cuban-Americans have leaned heavily to the Republican Party since, oh, about the middle of April, 1961, when it became clear that President John F. Kennedy was not going to invade Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro after all.

Cuban-American votes have been crucial to GOP efforts to carry Florida ever since -- and in eight of the 12 elections held since the failure at the Bay of Pigs, Florida found itself safely in the Republican column.

(In the three elections in which Florida cast its votes for the Democratic nominee prior to 2008 -- 1964, 1976, and 1996 -- the Democratic nominee, not coincidentally, was a Southerner.)

Barack Obama became the first non-Southern Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to carry Florida's 27 electoral votes, winning the state by 236,450 votes in 2008.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, there were 1,355,270 voters of Hispanic descent living in Florida in 2008, of which 34 percent -- 460,000 -- were of Cuban extraction.

According to exit surveys, Obama won 47 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida in 2008.

47 percent of 460,000 is approximately 216,000 votes.

In other words, Obama's extraordinary reach into the Cuban-American community provided him a crucial part of the votes he needed to carry Florida.

Had he carried a lesser percentage of the Cuban-American vote -- say, 40 percent -- he would not have carried the state.

Given the apparent popularity of recent Obama Administration policy moves with regard to remittances and travel to Cuba, it appears at least possible, if not likely, that Obama can hold and possibly even expand his reach into the Cuban-American community during his expected reelection campaign in 2012.

That's good news for Obama, and nominating Sotomayor is bound further to help Obama with Hispanics -- even Cuban-Americans.

But even if it doesn't, there's another element at work in the Sotomayor play: Florida's growing population of Puerto Ricans.

For while everyone knows of Florida's huge Cuban-American population, how many outside of Florida know of the massive influx of Puerto Ricans that has taken place over the last decade and a half?

According to the 1990 census, Florida was home to 241,000 Puerto Ricans. A decade later, that number had swelled to 482,000. And by 2007, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund estimated that 650,000 of them lived in Florida -- most of them in central Florida, along the I-4 Corridor that is the political fault line in statewide contests.

According to that same Pew Hispanic Center study, 393,000 of them were registered to vote.

The ongoing Puerto Rican migration to Florida is so huge that it may well be the case that by the time of the next presidential election in 2012, Puerto Ricans make up the largest Hispanic voting segment in Florida.

Why, it turns out that even Sonia Sotomayor's mother was part of the influx of Puerto Ricans moving from New York to Florida.

In 2001, she moved into Margate, a suburb north of Miami , and -- according to the White House-issued biography of Judge Sotomayor -- she still talks to her daughter "every day."

Genius, I tell you. Pure genius.