Democrats have a problem. They’re about to enter shaky ground with some of their key voter blocs. Yes, they gained mucho with white college-educated liberals. The flip side is that the base has become so left-wing that even black and Hispanic voters are fleeing the party. It’s not just in one state. Hispanics from California to Florida fled the Democrats in 2020. Black voters too. It wasn’t enough to prevent Trump from losing the election, but if white liberals continue to control more of the agenda—it could become an issue. White liberals are increasingly more left-wing than black and Hispanic constituencies. The ‘defund the police’ antics accelerated the diaspora.
Both latter communities want more police around. White liberals and these nonwhite voter blocs are not on the same page on immigration, racial resentment, and other issues that you see the ‘woke’ whine about. David Shor, a former 2012 Obama veteran, noted that the influx of white liberals into the party ranks did one thing regarding black and Hispanic voters—it made them vote more like white conservatives. With Hispanic voters, not only was Trump’s 2020 support underestimated, but Latinas fueled the surge in support (via NYT):
Conducted by the Democratically aligned research firm Equis Labs, the report found that certain demographics within the Latino electorate had proved increasingly willing to embrace Mr. Trump as the 2020 campaign went on, including conservative Latinas and those with a relatively low level of political engagement.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump outperformed his 2016 showing among Latino voters, earning the support of about one in three nationwide, even as Joseph R. Biden Jr. won those voters by a roughly two-to-one margin over all, according to exit polls.
[…]
In focus groups, Equis Labs’ interviewers noticed that Mr. Trump’s history as a businessman was seen as a positive attribute by many Latino voters, who viewed him as well positioned to guide the economy through the pandemic-driven recession. Partly as a result, the analysis found, many conservative Latino voters who had been hanging back at the start of the campaign came around to supporting him.
Driving up turnout among low-propensity voters — something that Senator Bernie Sanders had sought to do during his campaign for the Democratic nomination — did not necessarily translate into gains for Democrats in the general election, the study found. People who were likely to vote generally grew more negative on Mr. Trump’s job performance over the course of 2020, but among those who reported being less likely to participate in the election, his job approval rose.
This finding is likely to fuel hand-wringing among Democratic strategists who worried that Mr. Biden had not done enough to court skeptical Latino voters ahead of November.
The movement toward Mr. Trump appeared mostly “to be among those with the lowest partisan formation,” the analysts wrote. “We know enough to say these look like true swing voters. Neither party should assume that a Hispanic voter who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 is locked in as a Republican going forward. Nor can we assume this shift was exclusive to Trump and will revert back on its own.”
Hispanic voters are not gung-ho about a pathway to citizenship. It’s not unpopular per se, but it barely breaks 50 percent support. This narrative that ALL Hispanic voters are pro-amnesty is a byproduct of ultra-left-wing white liberals assigning a voter narrative to a voter constituency where the data is appallingly absent. Also, despite all the liberal media’s highlighting of Trump’s immigration policy and how it was supposedly racist, Hispanic voters didn’t see it as such. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum has a different take, where he noted that age-old assumption that the GOP is primed to win large swaths of the Hispanic vote if they just moderated their message. In fact, the opposite happened. The Antifa/Woke sects infected the Democratic base, radicalized them, and sent Latinos running for the hills before a Marxist nightmare engulfed them (via Jabberwocking):
Roughly speaking, I think Trump suckered Democrats into becoming extremists on border policy. It's fine for Democrats to oppose the wall—most Hispanics oppose it too—but progressives, goaded by Trump, have staked out a position that's often only a finger's width away from not having any border security at all. And that's something that most Hispanics don't support.
To put it simply, Hispanics are like the rest of us: They care about other people, but they care about themselves more. When it comes to immigrants who are already in the country, legally or not, they're in favor of giving them a road to citizenship. But they're not especially keen on allowing lots of new immigrants in who will compete with them for jobs and housing. Trump may be a buffoon, but at least some Hispanics have decided that they can put up with that if the alternative is risking a big increase in the rate of illegal immigration.
Added to that, of course, is the well-known fact that many Hispanics are fundamentally conservative to begin with: Family oriented, religious, against abortion, in favor of low taxes, opposed to defunding the police, etc. It's been common knowledge forever that Republicans could win a big share of the Hispanic vote if they'd just moderate their base, but it turns out there's another way: Get the Democrats to radicalize their base instead. It seems to have worked.
I disagreed with the “suckered” part, but you can see the many avenues where Democrats can take and crash into the wall come Election Day. When you’re putting a voter bloc where you get close to 70 percent of the vote at risk, bad things happen. Very bad things—and right now, there is a border crisis, illegals are pouring in, and the ‘defund the police’ chant is shrieking through the skyline of Minneapolis.
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