Hispanic voters saved the Democratic Party Tuesday — buoying Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, keeping California blue, playing an outsize role in preserving the party’s Senate majority and demonstrating a partisan loyalty Democrats didn’t exactly earn in two years of inaction on immigration policy.

But that support is anything but certain for 2012, and both parties face difficult and immediate choices when it comes to the Latino vote as they position themselves for the presidential election. Democrats face open demands from Hispanic leaders for a reward for their votes. President Barack Obama could erect a Western bulwark for his reelection campaign by — as Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) suggested to POLITICO — pressing for broad immigration reform in the lame-duck session. But immigration could also prove, like health care, a polarizing, impolitic detour from the economic issues preoccupying voters.

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Republicans, meanwhile, were carried to power by a conservative base that is, if anything, even less open to compromise on immigration — or anything else — than was the last Congress. And they head into the 2012 election cycle risking the same pattern that sunk Meg Whitman in California: a primary campaign that drags candidates to the right on immigration, only to find that they can’t plausibly return to ask for the support of Hispanics in November.

“If I was a Republican nationwide right now, I’d be thinking about that same kind of trap being set for 2012, where you can’t say one thing to the more conservative wing of your party and then say another thing to Latino voters,” said David Binder, a California-based Democratic pollster who works for the Democratic National Committee and advised the Service Employees International Union’s intensely successful campaign against Whitman among Hispanic voters.

“But it would be a mistake for Democrats to assume that the Latino vote is necessarily going to be strong on them for 2012,” Binder said. “If the Democrats expect Latino voters to come out in big numbers in 2012, they need to start moving on this issue.”

An election eve poll conducted by Latino Decisions, a Hispanic polling firm, found Hispanics weren’t nearly as motivated to vote Democratic as they were to show solidarity with the Latino community. Forty-seven percent of Latinos in eight key states told the pollsters they voted to “represent and support” Hispanics, 31 percent to support Democrats and 12 percent to back Republicans.

“I don’t think we can interpret this as Democratic enthusiasm among Latinos,” said Matt Barreto, a pollster with Latino Decisions.

But overall, the Democratic loyalty shown by Hispanics in the West, a region that will be critical to both Obama and his Republican challenger in 2012, was the only bright spot for the party — and daunting for the GOP.