GUILLERMO MARTINEZ Herald Editorial Board

HIALEAH Mayor Raul Martinez talked much more off the air than he did as a guest analyst of the election on Channel 23 on Tuesday night.
One theme dominated the conversation: What can Democrats do to persuade Hispanic voters to consider both parties before blindly voting Republican? Martinez offered two suggestions.

Neither is completely satisfying, and both were based much more on hope than fact.

Martinez talked about a return of Cuban-American voters to Democratic ranks at the end of the Reagan era. Their love affair with the Republican Party will end when the President concludes his second term in January 1989, according to Martinez. And he talked about Florida's new junior senator, Bob Graham, leading the state Democratic Party into a more-enlightened policy toward Cuban Americans. He talked about patronage and about a process of educating Cuban-American voters.

The frustration of one of Dade's ablest and most loyal Cuban-American Democrats was evident in the tone of his voice. His was an opinion based more on hope than on concrete facts. The facts speak of the size of the task ahead.

Local Democrats can be content with Graham's victory and the party's success in regaining the U.S. Senate from the Republicans. They could not look at local results with anything but despair. The magnitude of the Hispanics' preference for Republican candidates was overwhelming.

Graham had to overcome an 85-15 margin for Paula Hawkins among Dade's Hispanic voters to wrest the Senate seat from her. Democratic gubernatorial nominee Steve Pajcic could not overcome an 86-14 avalanche of Cuban-American Republican votes.

The Democrats' debacle was deeper. They lost two Florida Senate seats in Dade County as the wife-and-husband team of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Dexter Lehtinen beat their rivals handily. Statewide, the Democrats may have lost five Senate seats and thus possible Senate control to a conservative coalition of Republicans and North Florida Democrats.

The Democrats lost in those races where arrogance got the best of the party thinkers. Witness what happened to Steve Zack, a well-qualified attorney who ran an extremely well-financed campaign to try to keep Senate District 34 away from Ros- Lehtinen. The Democrats hoped that they could parachute Zack into a district where he had no grass-roots support and sell the fact that his mother was Cuban and that as a child he had lived for a few years in Havana. It wasn't enough. Ros-Lehtinen defeated Zack by a 58-42 margin.

The Democrats lost in races where they misread voter- registration figures and thought that just maybe they could squeeze in another non-Cuban-born candidate until more-qualified Cuban Democratic candidates could be found. The example is the race between A.J. Daoud and GOP incumbent Al Gutman in Florida House District 105. Gutman defeated Daoud by a 64-36 margin.

And the Democrats also lost in races where they did the smart thing. In House District 109 they put up an attractive young Democrat, Al Fernandez -- who has close ties to Mayor Raul Martinez -- in hopes of ousting Rudy Garcia, one of the weakest links in Dade's Hispanic Republican ranks. The Democrats' reward: a resounding defeat for Fernandez, who lost to Garcia by more than a two-to-one margin.

For Democrats rejoicing over their national Senate victory, the results in Florida had to be disturbing. President Reagan's plea for a restructuring of party affiliation may have been lost in other states. But in Florida it certainly appears to be working.

And it appears to be gaining momentum at a time when the first moves are being made to prepare for redistricting congressional and legislative districts after the 1990 census. Those state senators elected on Tuesday will run as incumbents in 1990, as will Governor-elect Bob Martinez. Together they will make it harder for Democrats to gerrymander district lines as they did in 1981 when they put a large segment of Dade's Cuban- American voters in District 16, a Broward County-dominated congressional seat.

In the process, the Democrats inflicted heavy damage on their few elected Hispanic faithful. Raul Martinez and Dade School Board Chairman Paul Cejas campaigned in favor of Graham, but they stayed well away from supporting Pajcic, which they knew would be suicidal in the Cuban-American community. Only one Cuban-American elected official -- Miami City Commissioner Rosario Kennedy -- took that chance. She must hope that voters forget her close partisan ties by the time she seeks re-election three years hence in Miami's nonpartisan election.

No, Tuesday evening was not pleasant for Cuban-American Democrats in Dade. Most recognized before the election that they had serious problems. Now the depth of their plight must be sinking in. Mayor Martinez and other party faithful must attempt to regroup immediately and plan a new strategy. The strategy of recent years has not worked.