Cuban-Americans stun Republicans - FT.com More Cuban-Americans, once a reliable conservative bulwark in Florida, voted for Barack Obama in Tuesday's election than Mitt Romney, underscoring the breadth of the demographic wave that engulfed the Republican party. Mr Obama is leading Mr Romney by 50,000 votes out of 8.3m ballots cast in final counting in Florida, the only state yet to be decided, and is expected to be declared the winner within days. Exit polls in Florida by Fox News and the Pew Research Centre both recorded Mr Obama beating Mr Romney with Cuban-Americans by 49 per cent to 47 per cent. Other exit polls, including one by the Miami Herald, showed the vote to be more even or with Mr Romney slightly ahead with Cuban-Americans. But even parity is a triumph for the Obama campaign given the longstanding loyalty of anti-communist Cubans to the Republicans. "This marks a dramatic realignment of politics in that state," said Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager. Republicans will be worried that a community they had long been able to rely on was turning away from the party in Florida, the largest of the swing states and always a prize in the presidential poll. Exit polls outside Florida show that more than 70 per cent of Hispanic, and also Asian-American, voters backed Mr Obama. Blacks supported the president in even larger numbers. In Ohio, considered the most important swing state going into the election, the Obama campaign machine managed to chalk up an increase over the numbers of African-Americans voting in 2008, when their numbers were swelled by pride in supporting the first black president. Blacks represent 12 per cent of the population in Ohio but they made up 15 per cent of the voters on Tuesday, according to exit polls, cancelling out gains Mr Romney had made in the state with other voters. The strong support for Mr Obama from minority voters was the key to his win, putting him across the line in states as varied as Virginia and Nevada, and offsetting a decline in support for the president among whites. In Florida, there were several local factors in play with the Hispanic vote, which has a larger Cuban and Puerto Rican component than other states. Paul Ryan, Mr Romney's vice-presidential running mate, had voted a number of times to end the longstanding US embargo on communist Cuba, which had been in place for decades since Fidel Castro came to power. "That did their ticket a lot of harm with Cubans and allowed us to at least get a hearing with them about many other economic issues," said an Obama campaign official in Florida. Furthermore, longer-term trends point to a more fundamental problem for Republicans. Unlike older members of the community, who fled Cuba and have direct memories of communist rule, most second-generation Cubans do not vote according to memories of their parents" homeland. "They are much more similar in voting patterns to Hispanics in the rest of the country," said the Obama official. The Obama campaign registered, or re-registered, 360,000 Hispanics in Florida since 2008, many of them young voters who overwhelmingly backed Mr Obama. Florida's leading Republicans, such as senator Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban émigrés, and Jeb Bush, the former governor, have long taken a more ­liberal line on immigration than their party does nationally. Mr Rubio and Mr Bush will now have a stronger hand in internal party debates about the need for immigration reform, ­something that Mr Obama is bound to push in the early years of his second term. Many business groups will support them, because they have long pushed for reform of a system that has left the US with no way to deal with more than 10m illegal immigrants living in the country, other than deportation, which is not a practical option.