In the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 election loss, the GOP’s post-election autopsy called for—put that coffee down if you’re anywhere near a keyboard—supporting “comprehensive immigration reform.”
So in June 2015, when Donald Trump infamously—and, of course, falsely—claimed Mexico was sending its rapists over the border to commit heinous crimes in the U.S., it initially seemed like a death knell for his fledgling campaign.
Later, as Trump surged to one improbable primary victory after another, it appeared that the Republican brand would remain toxic to Latinos for the foreseeable future, despite a concerted effort among party leaders to reach out to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women voters. And sure enough, roughly 10 billion racist slurs and dog whistles later, the Republican Party has now defaulted to its usual lies and garish gaslighting to attract Latino voters—with some success, particularly in Florida.
RELATED STORY: How can Democrats persuade the voters they need?
But there appears to be a limit to how aggressively you can sell MAGA to racial minorities. And now, as noted in a recent report from The Messenger, the Republican National Committee is shuttering its recently opened Hispanic Outreach Centers like so many raw vegan bistros in Green Bay.
The community centers were pitched as a dream intersection of fun, civic life, candidate recruitment, and GOTV muscle, with the party touting Thanksgiving potlucks, toy drives, religious services, crypto workshops, and even an ugly sweater Christmas party with Folklorico dancing in San Antonio. Community centers continued to pop up in Hispanic communities and positive headlines continued to flow.
But four months after the grand opening of the Phoenix center, it was closed, along with most of the other centers, the RNC confirmed after The Messenger reached out. While the RNC touted opening 20 Hispanic community centers during the 2022 cycle, it said there are only five centers currently open, two of which were opened in 2023.
Gee willikers, what happened? Latinos don’t like Republican fun? ICE Raid Fridays and DREAMer-shaped piñatas weren’t nearly as popular as they’d hoped?
Of course, the closings appear to be partly the result of an RNC cash squeeze—because Trump is repellent to nearly everyone outside the MAGA burbuja (yes, that’s “bubble” in Spanish), not just Latinos.
Republican sources pointed to the party’s troubled finances due to a big drop in funding and donations arguing it was a reason many of the “expensive centers” needed to be closed, which may help explain why many of the centers weren’t quickly reopened when chair Ronna McDaniel won re-election last January.
Of course, while gallons of ink have been spilled to bolster the narrative that Democrats’ Latino support is being steadily eaten away, allowing Republicans to breach their opponents’ once-sturdy blue wall, there are at least some reasons to believe Democrats can continue to appeal strongly to the voting bloc.
While Latino voters are certainly not a monolith—as disparate results from Cuban/Venezuelan-heavy areas of Florida and Latino-dominant redoubts in Arizona clearly demonstrate—there’s plenty of reason to believe Democrats’ status with Latino voters isn’t nearly as hopeless as much of the media would have you to believe.
As Gabriel R. Sanchez, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, noted in a July 2023 essay, “[T]he hard data on Latino voting behavior and policy preferences strongly suggests it is likely that President Biden will garner a similar share of Latino voters as Democratic candidates in 2022, thus helping the President win another term in office.”
Is that wishful thinking? Sure, it’s possible, but Sanchez brings receipts:
Let’s start with a brief breakdown of Latino policy preferences. As we have discussed in prior analysis, Latinos overall, and particularly Latino voters under 30, are highly supportive of the progressive policy agenda that the Biden administration will embrace in 2024. In fact, Republicans did not have any policy proposals that garnered more than 30% support among Latinos in either 2020 or 2022. On issues of tax policy, health care, abortion rights, gun safety, climate change, and immigration, a very clear majority of Latino voters support Democratic proposals.
One of the best academic analyses of Latino voting behavior in 2020 by political scientists Angela Ocampo, Angie Gutierrez, and Sergio Garcia-Rios found that Latino concern over the economy and Trump’s promise to immediately re-open the economy did, in fact, help him gain support among enough Latinos to generate the improvement from 2016 that has been widely discussed by pundits and the media. Former President Trump was able to use his business background to convince about 10% more Latinos than usual to vote Republican due to the economic uncertainty the country faced during the pandemic. As the economy continues to return to normal after the pandemic, the fear and uncertainty that led to gains for the Trump campaign among Latinos may no longer help Republicans.
So Democrats have a voting record and set of policies that strongly appeal to Latinos, while Trump continues to rely on empty boasts about his business acumen and histrionic shrieks about commies. We’ll see how that shakes out.
That said, the fact that Democrats’ electoral performance among Latinos isn’t stronger is a great argument for the importance of effective messaging. And despite their failure to keep their Hispanic outreach centers open, Republicans know that lying and misrepresenting themselves still goes a long way in this media-muddled nation.
Meanwhile, Sanchez also sees reason to be encouraged by the results of the 2022 midterms, during which Latino voters helped stave off a media-predicted red wave. He noted that “[a]cross several specific races in 2022, Latino voters were key to Democratic victories, often in districts and states poised for Republicans to win.”
That sentiment was echoed by Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who appeared on NPR in the immediate aftermath of the midterms. ”Well, the one thing I can tell you immediately is that this trope about Latinos all running to the Republican Party is just false,” Rocha told “All Things Considered” host Elissa Nadworny:
“And the headline on every paper on Wednesday morning should have said Latino voters saved the Democratic Party, especially in the U.S. Senate, where you saw Latinos who played a huge part in Arizona and Nevada, which is not called yet, but really going in our direction. Pennsylvania, which is surprising to lots of folks, there are over 300,000 Puerto Ricans who’ve moved to the eastern part of that state. And they voted at over 70% for John Fetterman. The Democrats will probably be in control of our U.S. Senate, and it will be because of the Latino vote.”
Meanwhile, some progressive Latinos are hardly surprised that the GOP’s outreach centers are poised to become Spirit Halloween stores come September. “It does not surprise me to hear that the RNC overpromised and underdelivered to our community,” Hector Sanchez Barba, the president and CEO of the progressive grassroots group Mi Familia Vota, told The Messenger. “We are in the community fighting for the Latino policy agenda and we have never seen nor heard about these centers. They are as irrelevant as MAGA is toxic to Latinos.”
And like in 2012, when the GOP was attempting, without success, to smear lipstick on a pig, Republicans really have nothing substantive to offer Latino voters other than fear. And if you have nothing to offer, at the very least you need to put in the work.
“This is the first I hear about them, or hear the RNC talk about having any Latino plan in place,” Cecia Alvarado, a longtime Las Vegas activist, told The Messenger. “I have not heard of a single event by the RNC specifically trying to reach Latinos. [The conservative] LIBRE [Initiative] is out there, they organize year-round, they’re pretty active, but I have not seen the RNC organizing around the Latino vote.”
RELATED STORY: Latina Senate candidate seeks to flip the script on Republicans in Florida
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link.
Campaign Action
