Former President Trump’s election to a second non-consecutive time period immediately rewrote the playbook for pursuing the Hispanic voters, burying immigration and identification politics as gateway points for the Latino vote.
Tuesday’s election drew a line underneath the thought of a non-monolithic Hispanic neighborhood, making evident that geographic, financial, gender, age, nationwide origin and ideological gaps that outweighed any concerns of Latino identification.
In different phrases, Hispanic voters largely behaved like others within the basic voters and had been swayed in both path by marketing campaign pitches on main points, particularly economics.
“There were a lot of Latinos who didn’t know, or, frankly, not just didn’t know [but] who couldn’t tell you who was with them and who was against them on economics. So I think that not only does the Democratic Party need to be much more clear about who we’re for. I think for Latinos, they wanted to also know who we’re against. So that when the rubber hits the road, that we’re willing to stand up for working people, Latinos included, when we have to stand up to special interests, or we have to stand up against corruption, or we have to stand up against the very rich and powerful,” mentioned Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), a progressive who gained reelection on Tuesday by a large margin.
Cultural identification points, however, proved to not be as galvanizing as some anticipated.
The ultimate week of the marketing campaign kicked off with a squabble over a slight towards Puerto Rico at former President Trump’s Madison Sq. Backyard (MSG) rally. Group leaders, pundits, the press and marketing campaign officers all learn the incident as a galvanizing second for Puerto Rican voters to emerge as the important thing bloc to nudge Pennsylvania towards Vice President Harris.
That second didn’t come.
“Part of what it shows us is that a lot of the people who have had very loud microphones and have tried to speak out on behalf of the people of Puerto Rico as a whole, or Puerto Ricans stateside as a whole, maybe aren’t tuned into the reality in their community as much as they thought,” mentioned George Legal guidelines García, director of the Puerto Rico Statehood Council.
Harris gained Pennsylvania’s Lehigh County — host to Allentown, a key hub for the state’s Puerto Rican neighborhood — however she trailed President Biden’s 2020 efficiency there by about 4,000 votes.
She misplaced Florida’s Osceola County, that state’s Puerto Rican capital, underperforming Biden by greater than 13,000 votes.
But the vice chairman, doubtlessly buoyed by the aftermath of the MSG incident, did win overwhelmingly in Puerto Rico’s presidential poll, a non-binding train that enables these on the island to point out their help for a candidate on Election Day.
In that train, Harris acquired 73 % of the vote, greater than Governor-elect Jenniffer González-Colón (R) and greater than the statehood choice within the island’s standing plebiscite.
“They’re swing voters. They’re going to speak to the candidates that they believe have most spoken to them, and on the island, the candidate that spoke most to them was Jenniffer González, and nationally, Puerto Rican voters on the island felt more connected to the message that they saw coming out of the Harris campaign,” mentioned Legal guidelines.
Harris’s platform didn’t join with sufficient voters at a nationwide stage, one thing observers all through the political spectrum attribute to her financial message.
“People are going to vote with their wallets, like it happened with Reagan, like it happened with Clinton,” mentioned Iván García-Hidalgo, a Republican strategist.
“And the wallets are screwed right now for a lot of people. And the problem is she didn’t address it. And they gave her a ton of opportunities, ‘What would you do different?’ and ‘What would you correct?’ and she didn’t do anything.”
It’s nonetheless unclear whether or not Hispanic would-be Democratic voters principally stayed dwelling or transformed to the GOP, however the shift is staggering.
In keeping with exit polls, Trump’s share of the voters grew by 25 factors, rivaling former President George W. Bush’s 2004 record-setting tally.
The Latino political institution largely remained quiet on Wednesday, with a coalition of main civil rights and advocacy teams suspending a scheduled occasion the place that they had been anticipated to ship their evaluation of the Latino vote.
Democrats equivalent to Casar had been shocked on the dimension of the shift, however not shocked that the celebration was unable to interrupt via Trump’s portrayals of the left.
“Trump would lie and say your housing is more expensive, or health care is worse, your wages are worse because of immigrants. Right? He would lie and blame immigrants for people’s economic stresses and Democrats weren’t able to clearly enough say, ‘Housing is more expensive because of Wall Street, not because of immigrants. Your health care is worse because of Big Pharma, not because of immigrants. Wages are stagnating, not because of immigrants, but because of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos,” mentioned Casar.
“And without Democrats clearly having a message that pointed the finger at the real villains … all that was left was Trump’s lie. And we Democrats can, fairly or unfairly, cannot survive being mischaracterized as a party that’s out of touch for with working people’s economic interests.”
