Democrats can't continue to neglect Latinos and expect their votes
Since the 1990s, as an election day approaches, pundits, party leaders and candidates for office seem to discover “Latino voters” anew. The discussions that emerge are so predictable that one could easily confuse the date of the commentary or press releases by two or four years.
These discussions revolve around two contradictory narratives: the first is that Latinos votes will not make a difference in an election. The second is that Latinos will be determinative in the result. Both are overly simplistic, and discussions of the expected role of the Latino vote in the November midterms are no different.
Since the 2016 presidential election, many Democratic political operatives have expected Latinos to become more politically active in reaction to Donald Trump’s negative campaign rhetoric and subsequent policy changes, such as the termination of the temporary protected status of some immigrants, the increased raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the separation of children from their parents at the border. The expectation in 2018 is that sufficiently fired-up Latino voters will help Democrats in competitive elections in their effort to win a majority in the US House, US Senate, or both.
At the same time, liberal pundits are fretting over whether the lack of political enthusiasm among Latinos will prevent a “blue wave” in November. Should Republicans maintain control of both chambers, many will look to blame Latinos’ lack of turnout or lack of enthusiasm for the Democrats. We will be expected to believe that Latino voters failed to fulfill their civic duty in the face of Trump’s verbal assaults on Latinos and anti-immigrant policies. Something similar happened in 2016, when the Democratic party and its defenders blamed black voters for low turnout and lack of support for Hillary Clinton.
What these narratives fail to acknowledge are the limits of electoral participation based on reaction to threat, especially in a context of increasing barriers to voting. It is time that the Democratic party move beyond expectations that outrage at Trump will mobilize Latino voters and take responsibility for its failure to expand the electorate.
It is true that restrictive immigration policies, such as California’s Proposition 187 in 1994 and HR 4437 in the US House in 2005, activated Latino political participation in the past. Changes in immigration policy in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s spurred an increase in naturalization by Latino legal permanent residents and the registration of new Latino voters.
Democrats have relied on such reactive mobilization not only to activate Latino voters, but to push more Latinos away from the Republican party. What they haven’t done enough of is actively recruit Latino voters throughout the country. As of mid-October, six in 10 Latino voters had not been contacted to vote by any party. This was nearly identical to the reported rate in mid-October 2016.
The failure of the Democratic party to actively recruit Latino voters is especially noteworthy in light of increasing structural barriers to voting. According to a recent report by political scientists at Northern Illinois University, ease of voting and registration varies significantly across states. Using their 2016 Cost Of Voting Index, along with 2016 registration and voting statistics from the Census, I have found that this variation leads to disadvantages for racial and ethnic minorities, including Latinos.
Twenty per cent of all Latino registered voters live in the five states with the greatest costs of voting in 2016: Mississippi, Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, Texas and Michigan. The same is true for African Americans. In contrast, only 14% of white registered voters live in those states.
One example of costly barriers to Latino participation is Kansas, where election officials appear bent on making it prohibitively difficult for some Americans to vote. For instance, in the majority-Latino Dodge City, where Latinos disproportionately rely on public transit, local officials moved the only polling location to outside city limits, more than a mile from the nearest bus stop.
This added to existing challenges to participation given that the polling location is expected to serve 13,000 registered voters; the average across Kansas’s other polling locations is only 1,200. Moreover, newly registered voters in Dodge City received information from the county directing them to the old polling location.
Democrats cannot continue to neglect Latino voters yet expect more Latino participation. They need to contact Latino voters during the election season (preferably in their language), and they also need to engage in consistent voter registration drives long before any election cycle begins.
The Democratic party’s strategy for garnering Latino enthusiasm and turnout cannot be to rely on Latino outrage at Trump’s unjust policies and racist rhetoric in the weeks before an election. The strategy must be to devote meaningful resources to Latino mobilization and to challenge at every turn barriers to their participation.