Democrats: What happened in theValley?
To appeal more broadly to Latino voters, candidates can start by showing up.
The signs, of course, were there to anybody who was paying attention.
Sylvia Cervantes, 74, told Texas Public Radio back in October that she loved President Donald Trump and hated the Affordable Care Act.
“You have to have insurance? No, we don't. Especially if you live here in the south, you go across the river, you get all the meds and you get seen by physicians a lot cheaper,” the Webb County resident said.
El Pasoan Mario Falcón told the Los Angeles Times on Election Day that even though he grew up in Ciudad Juárez and his wife was in the country illegally, as the only member in his family who could vote, his support was for Trump.
“I know some people find him kind of racist,” Falcón said. “But he hasn’t done anything that affects my economy. I understand that he might be a little bit against Hispanics, but he hasn’t done anything against me.”
That kind of logic is baffling. Right from his 2015 campaign announcement, Trump has demonized Latinos in word and targeted immigrants like Falcón’s family members
in policy. Yes, we had record low unemployment before the pandemic — built, by the way, on the steady growth during the Obama years — but Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic has left many communities of color ravaged by COVID-19 cases, death and economic fallout.
The Latino community is not a monolith, but, man.
As the Texas results started rolling in on election night and it became clear the president was performing better than he had four years ago in border counties, I started disliking my own people so much that I wondered if it was too late to donate to the Trump campaign.
Votes on the table
There has always been a steady bloc of support for Republicans among Latinos, with about a third of the Hispanic electorate breaking for the GOP since the 1960s. Now there’s a party that has for decades blown opportunities to appeal to a segment of Latino voters very much aligned with touted conservative values of family, faith and entrepreneurship.
Promising inroads made 20 years ago by George W. Bush were squandered. The GOP’s famous post-2012 election “autopsy” report laid out the need to attract minority voters, with an appeal to Latinos leading the way. The Growth and Opportunity Report, commissioned after Barack Obama’s re- election, stressed the importance of diversifying the party and growing organically through outreach efforts in Latino communities.
The surprise this election doesn’t come from Latinos supporting the Republican Party, it comes from Latinos supporting Donald Trump.
Particularly stunning was the
increase in support in the Rio Grande Valley, where counties moved decisively toward the president. Joe Biden managed to hold on and win in most, but the difference between Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance and Biden’s was dramatic: In Cameron County, home to Brownsville, there was a 20-point shift to Trump. In rural Starr County, Biden underperformed Clinton by 55 points.
That is not the kind of swing that Democrats were hoping for.
B efore we move on, let me stop here and note that, no matter what the New York
Times says, Latinos did not deliver a Texas win for Trump. We’ll let white people take the credit on that one.
As Antonio Arellano, head of Texas progressive Latino group Jolt, wrote on Twitter, outside of the Valley, participation in Latino majority precincts was on par or better than for Clinton and Beto O’Rourke. About half a million new Latino voters cast their ballots during early voting and even if Biden had overperformed in the RGV, it would not have been enough to flip Texas.
A blue wave would have gone through the Valley, but it could never crest there. The president already scapegoats Latinos, no need for disappointed Democrats to do the same.
So what happened?
A valley runs through it
The answer invariably goes back to that monolith. No group is neatly homogenous. There are similarities and patterns, of course, and with Latinos it may be a common language, ancestry, religious beliefs or similar cultural practices, but just look at the outcomes in the different states and the different “Latinos” involved. If you’re in Florida, you’re talking about Cubans and Colombians making up the largest groups (they definitely delivered the Sunshine State); if you’re in New York, it’s Puerto Ricans and Dominicans; if you’re thinking California, Arizona and Texas, it’s Mexicans.
Drill down even further and you’ll find that Mexican Americans by themselves are just as complex and hard to pin down as everybody else. Our divisions can be as stark as they are petty. If I’m in Arizona having breakfast and someone asks if I
want white menudo or red, I’ll stare them down until they realize there is no such thing as white menudo. Don’t even get me started on pozole.
Even among Texas counties, look at the disparate decisions among brown folks who check the Hispanic box. While the Valley turned toward Trump, El Pasoans gave Biden almost 70 percent of the vote, and Laredo showed about a 60-40 split.
What moved the Valley was a combination of factors that Democrats should pay attention to. In a broader sense this erosion of support points to the error that the Democratic Party makes in its appeal to minorities. If lumping all Latinos into one group is a mistake, throwing in all non-white ethnic, racial and non-Christian religious groups into a big bin labeled “OTHER” is probably not effective, either.
It’s vital that Democrats address social justice and structural racism (and explain what that even means), but it’s just as important they realize that we don’t all care about the same things. In fact, some of us don’t care at all. At least not for what others assume is supposed to matter.
Take immigration. Post- election, I’ve seen many angry white liberals ask a variation of, “how could Latinos endorse immigrant families being torn
apart?” I’d say for the same reason that a majority of white voters seems to have endorsed it: they don’t care because it doesn’t directly affect them.
What’s more, Latinos who aren’t immigrants, don’t speak Spanish and don’t have relatives they visit in Mexico over Christmas may not take Trump’s insults personally because they don’t see themselves in the caricature he’s vilifying. He may be a bully, but they don’t feel he’s bullying them.
Visiting my hometown of El Paso during the height of the migrant caravan hysteria in
2018 — which, unlike COVID, did go away after the election — members of my own family discussed how Central American migrants were flooding the border, how entitled and demanding they seemed, and feared they would bring crime. Family separation was wrong, they said, before asking the same question surely uttered over non-Hispanic dinner tables across America: “but why are they endangering their children in the first place?”
And just as Latinos aren’t immune to debt, divorce, excess sugar consumption or any other ills in our society, we’re not immune to the unmistakable taint of racism and classism. The divides and hierarchies that are alive and well throughout Latin America hardly
go away when a rich Venezuelan finds herself in Florida or a well- off Mexican in McAllen struggles to identify with a Guatemalan sharecropper asking for asylum in Tijuana.
Immigration also plays a different role in the Valley, where because of an increased focus on border security — over Republican and Democratic administrations — there is an alphabet soup of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that are major and coveted sources of jobs, customers and clientele. It’s easy to walk away from a party that is cast, even erroneously, as trying to “abolish ICE” or “defund the police,” and for every woke, young Latinx vote you gain, there may be a Border Patrol family you alienate.
No ‘sleeping giant’
Then there’s the urban-rural divide. The president improved his performance in rural communities by 400,000 votes across the Lone Star State, according to Ed Espinoza, executive director of Progress Texas. You would assume that a community racked by the coronavirus, as much of the Valley was earlier this year, would hold the administration at least partly responsible, but rural communities seem to be more in line with Trump’s efforts to buck restrictions and reopen the economy as quickly as possible.
If Democrats ever want to win Texas, they’ll need every vote they can get. If they’re waiting on the “sleeping giant” of the Latino electorate to awaken, they are in for more decades of disappointment. The giant number of Latino eligible voters in the state — 5.6 million and counting — is not one mythical organism but a complex community whose members will have to be reached one by one.
Texas has traditionally been a low-turnout state, and while this election broke records, response by Valley voters was still underwhelming. Democrats there have gotten used to winning office by appealing to a core group that turns out, but they have made little effort to growing that group.
If Democrats want to appeal more broadly to Latino voters, they can start by showing up. And not just the week before the election .
Talking with voters, interacting with them on a personal level, goes a long way toward dispelling misconceptions and inspiring loyalty. Democrats’ interpretation of social distancing during the pandemic put them at a disadvantage with voters who prefer a closer connection than any Zoom call can offer. You also can’t just lay a cumbia track under a political ad, give lip service to “immigration reform,” and call it a day. Latinos want to hear about the same issues as other Texans: jobs, health care and a better future for their kids.
This is Politics 101, but it seems as if Texas Democrats still need some remedial work.
Democrats also need to groom young Latinos to hold public office. Getting to Lina Hidalgo running Harris County didn’t happen overnight, and while it’s wrong to pin your hopes on there being a “Latino Barrack Obama” out there — a Great Brown Hope who will energize the Latino electorate and beyond — representation matters. Bill Clinton may have been called the first Black president, but we’ve come too far for a O’Rourke to be the first “Latino” in the White House.
The lesson from the Valley is that the Texas Latino vote for Democrats isn’t a given, and assuming it is is the best way to lose it.