Cliff Owen / AP

Gustavo Torres, director of Casa in Action, center, and others chant during a rally of immigration rights organizations, in front of the White House on Thursday. They called on President Barack Obama to fulfill his promise of passing comprehensive immigration reform.

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. 

With the election behind them, Hispanics now want Obama and Congress to work on issues identified in surveys as their priorities – more jobs, affordable health care, access to higher education and immigration reform.

GOP faces immigration fight after election

The latter issue has been more important for Hispanics than for other U.S. voters, said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization.

Hispanic support for Obama was high even before he announced in June that the government will stop deporting, and begin granting work permits to, some undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as children.

“However, when it comes to asking Hispanics which party is more concerned for the Hispanic community, after the deferred action program was announced the (Democratic) share went from 45 to 61 percent – the highest we’ve measured in Pew Hispanic surveys in 10 years,”  Lopez said.

“In his acceptance speech, Obama mentioned that comprehensive immigration reform was something that needed to be addressed, and we’re going to hold him to that,” Collazo told NBC News.

The day after the election, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised to introduce an immigration reform package next year. He said if Republicans block the legislation, they would do so "at their peril."

Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union and former chairman of the Republican Party in Florida, agreed that the immigration debate has been detrimental for the GOP.

“Across the board generationally and demographically, the immigration issue has become a wedge issue … because it’s become a litmus test of respect and caring in that community,” Cardenas said. “My advice for conservatives and the party as a whole is to get bipartisan immigration reform done in next 100 to 200 days.”

A survey of Hispanic voters by the firm Latino Decisions found that Hispanics pushed Obama over the top in Colorado, Florida and Nevada, swing states where they turned out in unusually high numbers.

Cardenas said the GOP can’t pay short shrift to minority groups if it wants to put a Republican in the White House.

NBC Latino: We voted – now let’s get to work, say Latinos after historic vote for Obama

“The so-called mainstream vote is no longer sufficient,” he said. “The coalition of all of these minority votes is a priority in these elections today. The Hispanic vote is the most numerically significant of all of these groups. We need to develop a precise, aggressive, winning political game plan to address that community.”

The Hispanic community is a diverse one, according to the Pew Center's Lopez:

• Country of origin: Among eligible Hispanic voters, 58 percent are Mexican Americans, 14 percent are Puerto Ricans, and 6 percent are Cubans. (The remainder are from Central and South America). Historically, Cubans have supported Republican candidates more than other Hispanic groups; in Florida this year, 49 percent of Cubans went for Obama and 47 percent for Romney.
• Youth: People ages 18-29 make up about a third of all eligible Hispanic voters, but just 20 percent of all general voters.
• Naturalized U.S. citizens: Among Hispanic eligible voters, 25 percent are immigrants who are naturalized. But among whites, only 3 percent are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Callazo said that despite this diversity, Hispanics displayed a rather consistent, Democratic-leaning voting pattern across many states.

“The numbers of how Latinos voted in Arizona compared to Ohio and Colorado were fairly close,” Callazo said.

“Yes, there are differences and nuances … but if you look at the polling and all the anecdotal work and the outreach we’ve done over the years, the core issues are very, very similar," he added.  "At end of day, Latino voters are voting for the candidate they feel will best reflect their values."

NBC Latino contributed to this story.

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News coverage of the presidential campaign has been consistently negative, media researchers reported Friday, but it's been significantly friendlier to Republican nominee Mitt Romney since he was widely declared to have won his first debate with President Barack Obama in early October.

M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for NBC News. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

The report, by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, noted a clear turning point in mainstream news coverage beginning Oct. 4, after Obama appeared subdued and distracted during the previous night's debate in Denver.

Before the debate, 44 percent of news stories about Romney were "negative," as defined by the researchers, compared with 11 percent that were "positive" (the rest were considered neutral). Afterward, only 30 percent of his coverage was negative, while 20 percent was positive.

Coverage of Obama swung the other way in lockstep. Twenty-seven percent of his pre-debate coverage was negative and 22 percent was positive; post-debate, the split was 36 percent negative to only 13 percent positive.

Pew examined and classified major campaign news stories on 11 newspapers' front pages, the 12 largest news websites (including msnbc.com/NBCNews.com), the three broadcast networks, the three cable news networks, and three radio networks, including NPR. "Favorable" and "unfavorable" didn't necessarily mean an individual story made any value judgment about either candidate, Pew said; instead, it could also be a measure of the news in the story, such as another politician's critical remarks.

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The survey covered Aug. 27 through Oct. 21. That includes both party nominating conventions but only the first two of the three presidential debates.

Full coverage of Decision 2012 on NBC Politics

For the entire period, coverage broke down this way:

That's a big difference from 2008. More of Obama's coverage was favorable that year than unfavorable, by 36 percent to 29 percent. Republican nominee John McCain's coverage, by contrast, was even more unfavorable than Romney's has been, at 57 percent negative to 14 percent positive.

Pew theorized that the difference could partly be attributed to the economy, which Obama has overseen for four years as president after having been able to run against it in 2008.

A striking conclusion of the survey is that, contrary to popular perception that campaign coverage is dominated by inside baseball (who's up or down in the polls, tactics and the like), there has actually been much less "horse race" coverage this year.

Such coverage — a perennial target of media scholars and pundits — has made up only 38 percent of news reports this year, down by 15 percentage points from 2008, when it was a clear majority of all coverage at 53 percent. Pew offered no theories on why.

The study also tried to quantify the ideological divide among the cable networks. According to Pew's analysis, Fox News leaned heavily pro-Romney, while MSNBC leaned even more toward Obama:

(CNN came in somewhat more even-handed. Coverage of Obama was about even, but unfavorable coverage of Romney outweighed favorable coverage by a 3-to-1 ratio.

Two important caveats should be noted:

Pew reports that it reviewed the cable networks for only 4½ hours of the day, mainly in the evening, when Fox (Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity) and MSNBC (Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz) schedule programs that are open in their partisanship. The study looked at the networks' dayside programming — when both networks say they strive for impartiality — only from 2 to 2:30 p.m. ET.

Nor does it break down how much of the coverage comes from news agencies like The Associated Press and Reuters — identical versions of which could appear dozens of times across multiple platforms, potentially overweighting their influence.

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Ted S. Warren / AP

Mitt Romney, right, bows his head in prayer as he stands on stage with local elected officials during a campaign rally on Feb. 3 in Elko, Nev. Nearly six in 10 Republican and Republican-leaning voters who favor Romney for the GOP presidential nomination say churches should keep out of political matters.

In an election campaign season in which issues such as birth control and gay marriage have made headlines, a growing number of Americans think political leaders are talking too much religion, according to a new national survey.

The survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds signs of uneasiness over the mixing of religion and politics.

Nearly four in 10 Americans (38 percent) say there has been too much expression of religious faith and prayer from political leaders -- an all-time high since the Pew Research Center began asking the question more than a decade ago. Thirty percent say there has been too little.

Most Americans (54 percent) continue to say that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of politics. It’s the third consecutive poll conducted over the past four years in which more people have said churches and other houses of worship should keep out of politics than said they should express their views on social and political topics, according to Pew. That's also an about-face from 2006, when 51 percent of Americans believed churches should speak out and 46 percent said they should keep quiet.

The view that there is too much expression of religious faith by politicians remains far more widespread among Democrats than Republicans, and there are also divisions within the GOP primary electorate.

Fifty-seven percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters who favor Mitt Romney (a Mormon) for the presidential nomination say churches should keep out of political matters. By contrast, 60 percent of GOP voters who support Rick Santorum (a devout Catholic) say that churches and other houses of worship should express their views on social and political questions.

And while more than half (55 percent) of Santorum’s supporters say there is too little expression of religious faith and prayer by political leaders, just one in four (24 percent) of Romney’s backers agree.

Santorum has worked hard on the campaign trail to court conservative Christian voters, and the former Pennsylvania senator has talked openly about the journey of his faith in visits to evangelical churches.

Kimberly Conger, a political science instructor at Colorado State University who has studied the intersection of religion and politics, says the latest Pew findings are not surprising.

“Religious people's opinions on the relationship between religion and politics seem to be driven by their political identity more than their religious one.  These results bear that out,” she said by email to msnbc.com.

“Republicans are less likely to think there is too much religious talk by political leaders, and Republicans are hearing more such talk than Democrats.  It is also unsurprising that there has been a slight uptick in the overall number of people uncomfortable with religious talk since the Republican primary has had some significant religious overtones.”

As to whether politicians should steer clear of religion on the campaign trail, Conger says it depends.

“It's clear from the breakdown of religious and political groups that Rick Santorum ought to keep talking about religion as long as he's fighting for the Republican nomination. But if he were to win the nomination, he'd have to start appealing to independents, a key voting group that's uncomfortable with candidates' religious talk,” she says.

“They key challenge in the general election will be for Republicans to broaden their appeal by toning down religious talk. But the data suggest that Democrats face a similar if less intense challenge in broadening their appeal by appearing more welcoming to religious beliefs. Both sides will have a fine line to walk.”

The Pew telephone survey was conducted March 7-11 among 1,503 adults. You can read the full results here.

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