BOTH PARTIES MUST DO BETTER TO GET THE LATINO VOTE
Democrats and Republicans can’t relegate Latinos and still expect their vote to magically appear on Election Day.
In a year when every vote counts, Joe Biden and Donald Trump need Latinos to win the White House, but apparently nobody has bothered to contact most of them – not yet anyway.
Most Latinos polled earlier this month by Latino Decisions said they haven’t heard from anyone about voting on Nov. 3.
That’s stunning considering the high stakes of this year’s election and the fact that Latinos make up 13% of the country’s eligible voters, according to the Pew Research Center.
That might change after this week’s virtual Democratic National Convention that has featured a diverse lineup but has also drawn sharp criticism for having few Latino headliners in the cov
eted prime-time televised schedule.
Inexcusably, the DNC snubbed Julián Castro, the only Latino candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary and relegated superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a mere 60-second spot to nominate Sen. Bernie Sanders for president.
The progressive leanings of these young Democrats might explain the slight, but political parties don’t get to choose voters. But it comes to Latinos, both Democrats and Republicans have forgotten that it is the other way around – voters choose the leaders.
Castro, the former housing secretary, and Ocasio-Cortez are lining up like good soldiers to help elect Democrat Biden and his vice presidential pick Sen. Kamala Harris.
“Let’s keep it real, right? We need to win in November. November, in my opinion, is about stopping fascism in the United States. That’s what Donald Trump represents,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram video on Tuesday after her convention participation.
“It’s important that we elect Joe Biden,” she said. “It’s also very important that the moment Joe Biden is elected that we continue the fight for guaranteed health care, we continue the fight for living wages and tuition for public colleges and justice for immigrants.”
What the likes of Ocasio-Cortez do and say matters. Latinos are watching how the Democratic Party and its leaders treat this young generation of Americans – regardless of their progressive agenda or precisely because of it.
More important is the work on the ground to reach out directly to Latino voters. In the Latino Decisions poll conducted Aug. 7-15, 64% said nobody had contacted them by email, text, phone, or in-person about voting this November.
Twenty-four percent said they were contacted by Democrats while 14% were contacted by Republicans and 6% by a non-partisan group.
In Arizona, where Latinos make up about 17% of registered voters, the Hispanic outreach is less than stellar, with 53% saying they weren’t contacted by anyone while 25% and 23% were contacted by Democrats and Republicans respectively, according to the same poll. A mere 10% said they were contacted by a non-partisan civic group.
Biden, Trump and their allies are spending a fortune to win over voters this November. But, evidently, they aren’t spending much money and energy on Latinos.
That’s a huge mistake. Democrats and Republicans can’t relegate Latinos to mere plaudits and still expect their vote to magically appear on Election Day.
Want the Latino vote? Then the candidates and their surrogates must devote serious resources to register and get them to the polls.
Latinos have the numbers to help propel Biden to the presidency or keep the Republican Trump in the White House. But just like other voters, they need to hear about the candidates and how they’ll address issues important to them.
Roughly 32 million Hispanics are eligible to vote this year, according to the Pew Research Center. Most of them are in California, Florida, New York, Texas and battleground states like Arizona.
Arizona has 2.2 million Latinos or 31% of state’s population. The potential voting bloc is 1.2 million, according to Mi Familia Vota. The group has launched a $10 million #BastaTrump campaign in Arizona and other states to defeat the president. Other national and local groups are aggressively registering Latinos in key states and encouraging them to vote. But it isn’t enough.