Latinos Are Abandoning the Democratic Party
– By Howard Sierer –
The Democratic Party’s identity politics strategy is fraying at the edges: growing numbers of Latinos are finding a political home with Republicans.
Three leftist organizations, Third Way, The Collective, and Latino Victory, reported in their combined 2020 Post-Election Analysis that Latino voter turnout grew “dramatically” but not as they had hoped. Democrats experienced a “significant dip in support in places with high concentrations of Latino and Hispanic voters.”
The analysis acknowledges that in 2020 the Democratic Party was seen as the party of economic shutdowns, defunding the police, keeping schools closed, and socialism. “Republican attempts to brand Democrats as ‘radical’ worked,” it says. Latinos along with many in the center do indeed see many of today’s Democratic Party positions as radical left departures from American values.
The 2020 election brought this clearly into focus in the overwhelmingly Hispanic Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Hillary Clinton carried Hidalgo County by 41 points in 2016; Joe Biden carried it by only 17 points in 2020. Zapata County, called the “bluest of the blue counties along the river” by the Washington Post, voted for Trump in 2020, the first Republican to carry the county since Warren G. Harding in 1920.
Last month, Republican Javier Villalobos was elected mayor of border town McAllen, the county seat of Hidalgo County with its 85% Latino population. Identity politics critic Mike Gonzalez explains that “Villalobos’ election should surprise absolutely no one who followed how counties in the Rio Grande Valley swung heavily toward Trump in the last election.”
Gonzalez goes on: “Critical race theory insists that Americans who are not WASPs [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants] must see themselves as aggrieved victims who want to transform America. But people don’t fit into these neat categories cooked up in the faculty lounges. It’s turning off Americans of Latin background.”
Chuck Rocha, an adviser to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, offered an additional reason for Republican gains among Latinos:
“At the Republican National Convention, the [Republican] party had one Latino speaker after another telling their immigration story and how they lived the American dream. And if you just sit back and watch that or read the coverage, you might think, ‘Hey, these Republicans are all right. They like immigrants. They want to build entrepreneurship. They want us to all be rich like Donald Trump.’”
With leading Democratic Party figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advocating what they call “democratic socialism,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee commissioned a survey in April 2021 that offered a bigger picture of the rationale for Republican inroads with Latino voters. The survey asked Latinos to choose between two statements.
The first: “Some people say free-market capitalism is the best form of government because it gives people the freedom to work and achieve.” The second: “Other people say that socialism is the best form of government because it is more fair and equitable to working-class people.” Reflecting the fact that many Latinos came to the U.S. to escape socialist governments, 63% chose free-market capitalism while only 17% chose socialism.
Latinos, many of whom place high priorities on family, work, and faith, reflected overwhelming support for a broad range of Republican positions:
- 67% agree that too many Americans “are losing our traditional values centered on faith, family, and freedom.”
- 67% are “very concerned” their kids “won’t have the same opportunities I and my family came here to find.”
- 72% agree “we should do what is necessary to control our southern border.”
- 58% said too many people in America are happy not to work and “just live off government assistance.”
- 65% oppose the Democratic Party’s “bill that would make voter ID illegal.”
- 80% agree that “public schools are failing.”
- 57% “oppose Democratic Party efforts to pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges.”
- 50% agree that “many of the policies that Democrats say help all minorities actually end up hurting Hispanic families.”
The committee concluded that contrary to the Democratic Party’s vision, California doesn’t represent the country’s political future. Instead, Florida does, noting that the state is far less white than it was 20 years ago yet it is significantly more Republican.
For the progressive wing in firm control of today’s Democratic Party, all this bad news.
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Howard. Would you please comment on the Hufcor manufacturing plant economic shutdown in Jamesville Wi by the private equity firm ,Open Gate Capital which has purchased the company and will shut it down to move 122 -150 American jobs to Mexico because of the cheap labor savings to the investors?
I think we keep confusing democrats and republicans with wealth movement and personal interest.
Your request for my comment on the Hufcor plant closing is off the topic of this column but I will gladly offer my opinion. I am a longtime supporter of increased international trade. Four years ago I penned a column praising Obama’s support the then-pending Trans-Pacific Partnership opposed by Trump. https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2017/06/01/right-on-obama-was-right-trump-is-wrong-on-international-trade/
To the extent that U.S. companies can foster jobs in Mexico, both countries benefit: Mexican jobs that pay well by their standards and lower prices on goods for U.S. consumers.
Having said that, I agree with many observers that private equity firms like Open Gate Capital are not builders but destroyers of jobs and in the longer term, destroyers of capital as well. They purchase a company and promptly cut costs ruthlessly, underinvesting in plant, R&D, and in their employees. This process produces short term improvements in the bottom line but mortgages the future. Then they either take what remains public or find a corporation willing to buy the restructured firm.
The previous owners of Hufcor were either extremely naïve or saw an opportunity for a big payday regardless of the consequences for their employees. Anger at Open Gate should be balanced with anger at those previous owners, who of course will claim they were promised otherwise.
hispanic leftist 2nd gen from florida turned republican when i learned history. Im proud to be american and these white liberals who hate their own country are doing it to themselves!
Any racism in America against blacks comes from the Democrat parties past and present, because every single bill or law passed against blacks came from the Democrats… even the Civil War was started by Democrats because they refused to end slavery. They even now sarcastically accuse the republicans of creating a new “Jim Crowe 2.0” in reference to the Republican voting bills while they were the ones who created the first actual Jim Crowe laws and voted them into action. They were also the ones who passed the segregation laws and prevented black people from voting. They even created welfare in order to suppress blacks so that they would be dependent on the Democrat party instead of self-sufficient and also to tear apart their family system and create fatherless children with a higher likelihood of crime & drug use to prevent their population from growing and their new answer for boosting this now is putting abortion clinics in poor neighborhoods. Even Joe Biden was against the segregating the buses because he didn’t want his children living in a racial jungle there is simply not enough space here to put everything I just don’t understand why black people continue to vote for the party that has oppressed them… And every time the Democrats get calls on something they make up a lie especially when you bring up their history the latest lie being a made a party switch that never happened, all you have to do is look up the actual politicians in the past and the timeframe of their careers to know that there was no party switch.