That giant? It’s awake
After years of kicking around Latino voters, it’s payback time for the GOP
It’s payback time. For years, the Republican Party has dreamed that it could win over Latino voters. Well, the dream is over in an election year in which most Latino voters will shun the Republican Party. And there isn’t a thing that Ted Cruz or Donald Trump can do to awaken from what they and their party have created: an electoral nightmare.
This Republican reckoning has been in the works for a long time. When the party turned against the Civil Rights Act in the ’60s, concocting its southern strategy to win disaffected white Democrats, it signed a deal with the devil known as racism. Each passing election brought the party of Lincoln closer and closer to official bigotry.
Only briefly, under George H.W. Bush, did the party glimpse the future: the Latino vote. Taking a significant share would have given Republicans a powerful competitive advantage when added to a largely Anglo majority. But when Bush was forced into a premature retirement in 1992, the party he left steadily lurched rightward — and away from a Latino population that constituted about 12 percent of Americans.
Now that population has swelled to 55 million — and counting. In the intervening years, Republicans at the federal and state level have, frankly, covered themselves in the shame of bigotry when it comes to Latinos — and not just when it comes to undocumented immigrants. Don’t forget Arizona’s racial profiling law, which allowed police to stop anyone who looked like they might be Mexican. (What does a Mexican look like, anyway?) The law was mostly struck down by the Supreme Court.
How about Republican politicians and operatives in Texas trying to jimmy the political system to dampen the influence of Latino voters? Blocked by the Supreme Court. Voter ID laws that effectively disenfranchise up to 800,000 African-Americans, Latinos, elderly and young people? Struck down by a federal appeals court.
All along, too many Republican politicians have only feigned an interest in the fate of the Latino American. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ran for governor partly on the fact that he is married to a Mexi- can-American woman; this is the same man who defended disenfranchising MexicanAmericans while admitting in court that cases of voter fraud could be counted on both hands. Yes, Abbott won his free government housing in Austin by winning 44 percent of the Latino vote, according to the Pew Research center. But just 39 percent of Latino voters bothered to go to the polls.
Trump predicted he would actually win the Latino vote outright — but 80 percent of Latino voters hold a negative view of him, according to a Washington Post-Univision poll. The senator from Canada, Cruz, has not only admitted he doesn’t speak much Spanish — that’s unimportant, actually — but 44 percent of Latinos dislike the guy. Sounds a lot like the U.S. Senate, come to think of it.
This need not have happened. The Republican Party had a come-to-Jesus moment when Mitt Romney was crushed by overwhelming Latino votes for President Barack Obama. But since then the party has been further hijacked — if that’s possible. And no amount of sweetnothing promises whispered in the dark will undo a mounting record of outright bigotry and, yes, even hatred toward Spanish-speaking people. There, I said it.
In contrast to border walls, mass deportation, cracking down on Muslims and jailing women, poll after poll shows that Latino voters are interested in opportunity, namely jobs and education. The Republican Party hasn’t said — let alone delivered — boo on either front.
So, why exactly would a Latino voter be swayed? Only a politician could have such a myopic view as to believe that any voter might accept, at face value, that a Catholic culture translates into a simpleton’s political sympathy.
That belief is predicated on another prejudice: that Latinos are a monolithic population. Fifty-five million people are never monolithic. It’s not just different places of origin: Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America. It’s generational, too. Hispanic millennials constitute 20 percent of millennials, according to FPO, a multicultural marketing firm in San Antonio. That’s 25 million people, a figure American businesses are catching on to while the Republican Party — ostensibly the party of business — paints itself into a blind corner.
Let’s not let Democrats off the hook, either.
Democrats come around like a stray yellow dog at supper time looking for a free handout. Then they vanish until the next election. Democratic politicians seem to think that staking out a position opposite the Republicans on immigration will suffice. It will not. And that is one reason Wendy Davis lost to Abbott in 2014. She won a majority of Latino voters but failed to mobilize more to actually vote.
But two years later, Trump, Cruz and the GOP have really roused the sleeping giant in American politics. Come this fall, they will all pay, and dearly.
Democratic politicians seem to think that staking out a position opposite the Republicans on immigration will suffice. It will not.