people had been on the voting rolls in 2012 and voted along the same lines as other Hispanic voters did last fall, President Barack Obama’s relatively narrow victory last fall would have been considerably wider, a POLITICO analysis showed.

Key swing states that Obama fought tooth and nail to win — like Florida, Colorado and Nevada — would have been comfortably in his column. And the president would have come very close to winning Arizona.

Republican Mitt Romney, by contrast, would have lost the national popular vote by 7 percentage points, 53 percent to 46 percent, instead of the 4-point margin he lost by in 2012, and would have struggled even to stay competitive in GOP strongholds like Texas, which he won with 57 percent of the vote.

The analysis issaid GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, a top adviser to John McCain in 2008.

If one adds 11 million new Hispanic voters after immigration reform but applies 2004 percentages, the damage to Republicans is real but much less severe: Romney would have still won border states Texas and Arizona, albeit by smaller margins, while Obama would have held other Latino-heavy swing states like Nevada and Florida by slightly larger margins than the ones he did win by.