2012 Election Results: Latinos' Role on Election Day Driven by Immigration Reform; Will Washington Reform Policies After Record Turnout?

A record-breaking margin of Latino voters turned out at the polls nationwide Tuesday to help President Barack Obama seal his second-term bid for President of the United States.

Now the question remains: With Hispanics voting in record numbers, will this push lawmakers on Capitol Hill to make long-awaited reforms to immigration policy?

In his Wednesday morning post-election speech in Chicago, Obama listed fixing the immigration system as one of the challenges he would meet in his second term.

"You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours," he said at the loud victory rally at Obama campaign headquarters. "And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together. Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do."

That pledge is something that Latino leaders will be holding him to, noting that Obama had not delivered on his first-term pledge to reform the immigration system.

"No more excuses, no more obstructions, we want action," Eliseo Medina, the secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union and a prominent strategist among Latino political leaders, told the Los Angeles Times in an interview.

With the threat of a fiscal cliff facing the country without bipartisan efforts in Washington, it appears that Obama and the Democrats will have to reach across the aisle to Republicans in order to make progress on several fronts, CBS News reports. One of those fronts will likely be immigration reform.

The GOP got hammered in the polls Tuesday by the Hispanic vote, with Obama capturing an estimated record number of Latino voters-75 percent of the Hispanic voters, according to polling group Latino Decisions. That in mind, Republicans could be considering changing their stances on immigration, especially in light of several Republican political analysts criticizing the party for alienating what became a crucial part of the electorate-particularly in places like Colorado and Florida.

As noted by ABC News/Univision, the role of the Latino vote in Tuesday's election drew across-the-board media coverage.

Either way, Latinos are sure to demand that their rapidly growing, and politically powerful, voices be heard in Washington D.C. on the matter.

"Latinos and immigrants are determined to make sure politicians take a common sense approach to immigration that keeps families together and puts 11 million new Americans on the road to citizenship,"  Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Campaign for Community Change, a pro-immigrant rights' group, told Tallahassee.com.