In 1992 Bill Clinton won the presidency by telling Democrats to highlight pocketbook issues in the campaign. “It’s the economy, stupid,” became a catchphrase that brought Clinton and the Democrats victory.
Today, Democrats might alter that catchphrase slightly when trying to attract Laino voters; “It’s the socialism, stupid” would explain to all but the most rabid leftist that there’s a good reason why Democrats are bleeding Latino support.
“They don’t like the socialists,” Hank Sheinkopf, veteran Democratic political consultant and president of Sheinkopf Communications, told Fox News Digital about the Latino community. “They don’t like the abortion argument being thrust at them on a constant basis. They don’t like the crime. They don’t like the chaos. And they’re responding.”
Indeed, even second and third-generation Latino voters who came from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or other benighted socialist countries or still have family in those hell-holes know which side Republicans are on and where Democratic Party sympathies lie.
According to polling from NBC News, Telemundo and the Wall Street Journal, 49% of self-described conservative Latinos preferred Democrats to control Congress in 2012, 9 points more than Republicans. In September 2022, 73% of conservative Latinos support Republicans in Congress as opposed to 17% who prefer Democrats, a 56-point GOP advantage.
And it’s not just far-left policies. Democrats treat Latinos as voters who are concerned about one issue: immigration.
Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth told Fox News Digital the poll is a “bit of an outlier” but acknowledged that Democrats should focus on issues besides immigration when speaking to the Latino community, especially in border counties where Republicans have made significant gains with Hispanic voters in recent years.
“I think that there’s been a lot of movement by the Hispanic community away from being single-issue voters. It’s not just about immigration. They’re a community of faith. There’s a lot of small businesses. It’s health care and housing prices. Ironically, it’s about a lot of issues that Democrats are very strong on. But if we singularly message to the Latino and Hispanic community about immigration, we’re doing ourselves a disservice in talking to those voters.”
I’ve got news for Ms. Holdsworth: Hispanics have never been single-issue-voters. It’s just that Democrats have treated them as “immigration voters” for so long that they’ve finally figured out they have a voice in other matters as well.
Democrats have lost significant ground to Republicans among Latino voters compared to previous election cycles, according to the recent polling from NBC News and Telemundo, which shows that while 51% of Latino voters approve of President Biden’s overall job performance, only 42% approve of his handling of the border and only 41% approve of his job on the economy.
Longtime Democrat and MSNBC host Al Sharpton warned earlier this week that Democrats are not “connecting” to Black and Latino voters.
“The Democratic Party and President Biden does have some things they could be using that they’ve done that has benefited clearly Black and Latinos, but it’s not connecting,” Sharpton said. “So you’re seeing this as the polls indicate, Latinos and Black men go the other way, because they’re not getting their message to the ground in the way they should.
Black and Latino men don’t like how Democrats and their radical feminist allies have all but emasculated men in the U.S. Nor do they see themselves as the purveyors of “toxic masculinity.” Beyond that, Latinos as a group aren’t quite as monolithic as Democrats have made them out to be, and the time is ripe for a major realignment that could alter electoral politics for a generation.
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