Although Hispanics are still largely Democrats that seems to be changing as the generations progress.

More Latinos are registering as Independents or even Republicans than before.

LOS ANGELES — Democrats hold an edge with Hispanics in national elections, but Latinos’ growing tendency to register as independents and split their vote between parties is buoying Republican prospects for 2008.

Younger and college-educated Hispanics in particular offer fertile ground for Republicans, new data shows. And while no one suggests Republicans have become the party of choice for the United States’ fastest-growing minority, Democrats have been gradually losing ground.

“The Democrats began in the 1980s to slowly lose Latino registration,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a San Antonio-based research group that studies Hispanic issues. “It’s drip, drip, drip.”

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Although Hispanics tend to vote Democratic, the percentage of Latinos who call themselves Democrats has declined in the last decade, even as the overall number of Hispanic voters climbed.

In California — home to the country’s largest Hispanic population and a key state for the 2008 presidential election — nearly two of three Hispanic voters were registered Democrats in the mid-1990s. By 2006, that figure dropped as low as 56 percent, according to polling and registration data.

Research last year by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Hispanics in California are about equally divided among those who describe themselves as conservative, liberal and moderate.

And many Hispanic voters are choosing no party at all.

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Democratic pollster Andre Pineda, who is advising New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign, conducted research after the November 2006 elections that identified a generational shift in Hispanic voter patterns.

Pineda said Hispanic immigrants who become citizens and register to vote become Democrats in nearly 70 percent of the cases, with Republican registration at 18 percent. In the next generation, Democratic registration drops to 56 percent and Republican registration increases to 25 percent. By the third U.S.-born generation, Democratic and Republican registration among Hispanics is nearly equal.

While newer arrivals to the United States feel more strongly about immigration issues, subsequent generations share the concerns of Main Street America — the war, taxes, education, crime, he said.

“We need to … make our case on those issues, otherwise we are going to lose them,” Pineda said.

Republican polling in the California governor’s race last year found that college-educated Hispanics who make more than $60,000 a year are more receptive to Republican ideas than are those with less education and income.

It seems this is one bloc of voters the parties will not be able to take for granted, and remember, they are the largest growing segment of our country right now.