Hispanics to Obama: We helped you, now you help us [View all]

[Playinghardball]

Hispanic voters, who were instrumental in putting Barack Obama back in the White House, now hope the president will work diligently in his second term to cross some big to-dos off their legislative wish list: jobs, affordable education, health care access and immigration reform.

Hispanics voted for Obama over Mitt Romney by a resounding 71 percent to 27 percent and may have put him over the top in several key swing states. The total number of potential Hispanic voters this year reached a record 23.7 million – up about 80 percent since 2000 – and Hispanics now compose about 10 percent of the total electorate, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

“The Latino electorate arrived Tuesday, there’s no question about it,” said Rafael Collazo, director of political campaigns for the National Council of La Raza. The organization, which bills itself as the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, says it helped register more than 90,000 new Hispanic voters this year.

“States like Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania, even Ohio -- the Latino vote was a net gain for the preferred candidate and was the deciding factor or at least very, very close to being the decisive factor,” Collazo told NBC News.

"The Latino giant is wide awake, cranky and is taking names,” labor leader Eliseo Medina, of the Service Employees International Union, told NBC Latino.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/09/15029245-hispanics-to-obama-we-helped-you-now-you-help-us?lite