Castro’s run for US president banks on Latinos
With more than a dozen Democrats now vying for president, Julian Castro is charting a path unlike any of the others, as his visit to California made clear. The former San Antonio mayor and Housing secretary under president Barack Obama took questions from a Chicano studies class at UCLA. He did a television interview with Univision anchor Leon Krauze. In South LA, he led a roundtable of black and Latino neighbourhood activists.
Castro holds the distinction of being the only Latino in the race at a time when many Democrats are appalled by President Donald Trump’s fight to block immigrants from entering the US from Mexico. So Castro, whose grandmother emigrated from Mexico, has set his sights on scoring delegates in states with big Latino populations, among them California, Nevada and Texas.
But the first states to hold 2020 presidential contests — Iowa and New Hampshire — are overwhelmingly white. Candidates who fare poorly there are often eclipsed by front-runners and forced out of the race before voting starts in more diverse states.
The next contest, in Nevada, requires a mighty campaign operation that Castro, so far, has shown no sign of assembling. Even if he consolidates Latino support in states that vote later, Castro could fall well short of what he needs.
“It’s important from a historical perspective, but in the nuts and bolts of winning the nomination, a purely Latino candidacy is not going to make it,” said Roberto Suro, Director of the University of Southern California’s Tomas Rivera Policy Institute.
“To give him credit, I don’t think he’s basing his entire campaign only on the Latino vote. The challenge here is whether a Latino-oriented campaign can have broader appeal,” said Suro.
Castro, 44, emerged on the national stage in 2012, when Obama picked him as keynote speaker for the Democratic National Convention. Hillary Clinton vetted Castro to be her running mate in 2016, but ultimately passed on him.
Castro has long emphasised the emotional pull of his immigrant family’s rise out of poverty in San Antonio. He and his identical twin brother, Texas Representative Joaquin Castro, each earned Bachelor’s degrees at Stanford University and law degrees at Harvard University. Castro has vowed to campaign in all 50 states to show that “everybody counts.” His overarching goal, though, has been to build support among Latinos and younger voters.
His first campaign stop was Puerto Rico, an alluring source of delegates. Last week, he spoke in Salt Lake City to MECHA, the Chicano student group, and met in North Las Vegas with “Dreamer” immigrants brought to the US illegally when they were children.
On a recent trip to Iowa, Castro stuck to rural Republican counties with pockets of Latino and Asian immigrants drawn largely by jobs in dairies and meatpacking plants. The small crowds that turned out - just five people at Cronk’s Restaurant and Lounge in Denison — were nearly all white. “Do you find that people are hesitant to get involved and step forward?” Castro asked Beth Ann Vogt, the Crawford County Democratic leader. “Absolutely,” she told him. Castro hopes to engage enough Latinos to expand the pool of voters in the Iowa caucuses. He describes himself as the “antithesis of Donald Trump.” “I try to bring people together instead of tearing them apart,” he told about 75 Democrats at a house party in Sioux City.
Like most of his rivals, Castro calls for rejoining the Paris agreement to fight climate change, offering Medicare to all Americans, rooting out racial bias in the criminal justice system and raising taxes on the rich. He supports a surge in foreign aid to Mexico and Central America modelled on the Marshall Plan, the US programme to rebuild the economies of European allies after World War II.
Carlos Valle, a student at Iowa State University in Ames, was one of the few Iowans who pledged during Castro’s recent trip to support him in the caucuses.