Republican candidate Sen. John McCain will launch his effort to win the crucial Hispanic vote with his first Spanish-language ads this week. But given his party’s rabid anti-immigration stand, it will be an uphill battle.

The conventional wisdom is that the Republican candidate will need about 40 percent of the estimated nine million Hispanic voters to win the November elections, pretty much the same percentage that President Bush obtained in the 2004 elections.

But while McCain is better liked among Latinos than his former rivals for the Republican nomination — he was a leading sponsor of a 2006 immigration reform package that included an earned path to citizenship for millions of undocumented workers — Democrats cite several reasons why McCain is unlikely to get a sizable part of the Latino vote.

First, the Republican Party has alienated many Hispanics over the past three years by embracing draconian anti-immigration measures. During the Republican primaries, former presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Tom Tancredo called for the massive deportation of undocumented workers, without offering an earned path to citizenship for law-abiding workers without immigration papers.

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