Democrats don’t see the pass rush. They simply don’t see it, even when their own publications post stories about the rising GOP wave within the Latino community—they refused to believe it. You saw that with Joe Biden, who outright said he doesn’t believe the polls showing that he’s a miserable failure of a president with trash approval ratings. When something hurts their feeling, Democrats either pretend it doesn’t exist or throw a tantrum. When it comes to Hispanic voters, they see invisible people. Only the ones who vote Democratic are worth noting—and their numbers are dwindling.
The war for Hispanic voters has changed. In times past, the old line, which was noted by liberal blogger Kevin Drum formerly of Mother Jones, was that ‘if only the GOP moderated a tad, then they could be deadly with this demographic in national elections.’ It was something like that. Instead, the Democratic Party has become so extreme, so unhinged, that they’ve forced Hispanics, by default in some cases, to flee the liberalism. That’s the Trump dividend: inroads with Hispanic voters that are sustained. The swings are massive along the border counties. To the urban liberal elites, the 2020 exits were a sledgehammer to the face. How could this happen? To the people who lived here, it wasn’t a shock at all. In some counties, Trump quintupled his vote share from 2016.
The exodus is multi-layered. First, Tejanos do not consider themselves Hispanic, but white. Second, Hispanic voters here, overall, are worried about the border, and think Democrats are bashing police unfairly; they have many family members in law enforcement and border patrol. They also see the Democrats drifting from certain values, like family and the value of work. Politico had a good piece about how the GOP is winning the war for Hispanics in Texas, and it’s being led by women. Hispanic women chair the GOP committees of Texas’ four southernmost border counties (via Politico):
It’s some of the clearest evidence that Trump’s 2020 performance there may not have been an anomaly, but rather a sign of significant Republican inroads among Texas Hispanics — perhaps not enough to threaten the Democratic advantage among those voters, but enough to send ripples of fear through a party that is experiencing erosion among Hispanics across the country.
“For so long, people here just never had Republicans knocking on their doors and calling them the way we did in 2020. The majority of us are women that did it then and are doing it now because we feel it’s our responsibility to keep the American Dream alive,” said Mayra Flores, a leading candidate for the GOP nomination in a South Texas-based congressional seat.
For Flores, the road to becoming a Republican was similar to the path traveled by many Hispanic women in South Texas. She grew up seeing most of her immigrant family vote Democrat and felt that it was standard for Hispanics to only vote for Democrats. Then, she says, came an inflection point where she began to question her loyalty to the party.
A family member asked if she knew what both parties stood for, and after looking into it, Flores felt that her religious, anti-abortion and pro-border security views were more conservative than she’d ever thought and more in line with the GOP. Five years ago, she got involved in her local GOP and now a majority of her family votes Republican, too.
She wasn’t surprised at all to see Republicans gain ground in 2020 along the Texas-Mexico border, even as Democrats and Republicans outside the region expressed shock at results in places such as Zapata County — where Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee since 1920 to carry the county.
Neighboring Starr County saw the most dramatic shift of any county in the state when thousands more Republicans turned out to vote than in prior elections. While President Joe Biden ultimately won the county with 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 47 percent, that paled in comparison to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance, when she garnered 79 percent to Trump’s 19 percent.
Claudia Alcazar, chairwoman of the Starr County Republican Party, switched parties about two years ago after being a Democrat her entire adult life. She said it hasn’t been an easy transition in communities like hers that remain majority Democratic, pointing to the strain it has caused in her own family.
[…]
… Hispanic GOP women in the Rio Grande Valley don’t have one specific reason for why they ultimately switched parties, according to interviews with several Hispanic GOP women officials across South Texas and GOP operatives.
They want more border security or are staunchly against abortions. They feel their husbands, family members, neighbors and friends that are Border Patrol agents or are in law enforcement are being unfairly villainized by Democrats. They worry Democrats are hostile to the oil and gas industry, which provides many good-paying jobs in the state. They worry the left is forgetting family values and the value of work.
Hispanic women really got on the Trump train in 2020. Yet, it’s not like all these voters switched because they’re hardcore conservatives. Some undoubtedly are but the demographic is more moderate. They’re not far-left which is the race-based voter narrative white college-educated liberals from the cities have assigned to this group. David Shor, a liberal data scientist, has written extensively that support for amnesty among Hispanics isn’t a popular issue and never has been citing years of data to support this. That’s why he’s warning Democrats to not go all-in on immigration.
Free markets, law and order, border security, the value of work, strong families, lower taxes, and pride in being an American versus ‘all whites are racist,’ the Border Patrol is evil, let everyone in, tax everyone to death, regulate the economy to death, no jobs, abortions for everyone, and biological males should be treated as biological females. Oh, and if you disagree with any of the action items for the latter, you’re a Nazi.
Gee—I wonder why liberals are having messaging problems outside of their mentally ill bastions.
The past liberal narrative on Hispanic voters has been shredded again. Hispanic women are the point of the lance in this shift, and liberal America can’t see it because they’re inside deathly afraid of COVID still while wearing 456 masks.
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