Democrats are finding solace in Latino voters who aren’t drifting into the GOP camp. At least, that’s the conclusion they’re taking from strategy memos about the potentially disastrous night they could have in Nevada. Hispanic voters are staying home, which is an indirect benefit to Republicans and a massive red flag to Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the US Senate. It’s a trend giving Nevada Democrats fits—but it gets worse when you broaden the map.
Nate Hochman at National Review warned that the dam is about to break on Democrats with Hispanic voters who, contrary to lofty Democratic Party memos, are drifting into the GOP, especially in south Texas. The ceiling for Republicans in national elections is around 40-44 percent. He’s not saying this will be a cakewalk. Still, the opportunity to snatch this key voter bloc away from Democrats has become riper as Joe Biden continues to fail as president with an economy in recession further compounded by high inflation.
Like others, he added that Trump had double-digit gains in the predominately Latino border counties—quintupling his 2016 performances here. No one here is falling into the box white Democrats feel their nonwhite voter base should fall into when it comes to party loyalty. But the Democratic Party’s roots are still strong. However, a bit of canvassing and good messaging can create highway-sized inroads into this community—some are already telling family members how Democrats have changed on issues that fall way outside the mainstream (via NRO):
The most notable thing about Trump’s performance in 2020 is that his gains were heavily concentrated in certain regions of the country. Hispanics — unlike, say, black voters, who almost exclusively back Democrats by margins of 85 to 95 percent — are not anywhere close to a political monolith: The Latino vote in California sits well to the left of the Latino vote in states such as Florida and Texas. Florida’s largest county, the 68 percent Hispanic Miami-Dade, shifted toward Trump by 22 points from 2016 to 2020. (And in 2021, Miami reelected its Republican mayor, Francis Suarez — who first won the office in 2017 — to the tune of a landslide 78 percent.) In South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley’s 96.3 percent Hispanic Starr County shifted toward Trump by a jaw-dropping 55 points.
Historically, South Texas has been Democrat for 100 years or more,” Senator Ted Cruz told me at a Republican rally in Laredo last weekend. “That being said, if you look at the communities in South Texas — the communities here are overwhelmingly Hispanic, and the Hispanic community in Texas has always been conservative.” The challenge, for Republicans, is to break the traditional partisan loyalty to the Democratic Party in areas like these, which is often far more powerful than the relatively conservative ideological and religious tendencies that one sees in the polling data. “I think there’s a lot of cultural history of families that for generations had been Democrats,” Cruz said. Many of the congressional districts here have “not had a Republican in over 100 years. I do think those cultural connections and family history were strong.”
Osvaldo De Leon, a volunteer at the rally who became a U.S. citizen last month, echoes the fierce patriotism that I hear from Latinos across the region: “I’m no longer Mexican — I’m an American, and I don’t want to be labeled as a Mexican American,” he tells me. “When I was in front of the federal judge, pledging my allegiance to this country, it made me really happy.” He is the first member of his family to become an American. His father is a truck driver and “a big-time Trump supporter — he liked the fact that he was vocal about the issues.” His mother, who “also leans conservative Republican,” is a nurse. “Obviously they cannot vote” yet, he says, but when they become fully naturalized citizens, “obviously, they’re gonna be voting red. . . . We love Laredo; we love this country.”
But De Leon also seems exasperated by his community’s persistent Democratic loyalties. “The Democratic Party here is very, very strong, since the beginning of Webb County,” where Laredo is located. “It’s the same families, it’s the same people. And that’s why we don’t have a change — it’s very difficult.” The average voter doesn’t “pay attention — they don’t know, [or have a] lack of English.” Cindy Vazquez, a Hispanic woman at the rally who’s running for a local school-board seat, cites her conversations with her mother as an example. “She’s never been involved in politics.” On Trump, “she’s like, ‘he’s racist.’ And I’m like, ‘did you know that a girl can have a baby for the nine months, it’s born, and you can kill it?’ She’s like, ‘no, that’s murder.’ No, that’s New York.”
Biden’s approval ratings are atrocious among Hispanic voters. The Texas GOP has not wasted time on this matter, contacting these now persuadable voters with gusto ahead of the 2022 midterms. In Florida, Hispanic voters shifting to the GOP also saw a double-digit shift from 2016. There are a host of issues to explain the changing voting attitude among Hispanics, but for the Left to degrade the Spanish language because it's gendered and that might offend the weirdos in the Democratic Party base is peak wokeness. It’s killing the party, so please keep playing the pronoun and “Latinx” games, liberals.
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