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Growing signs indicate that Latino voters, who traditionally vote Democrat, are shifting to the right. The Republican Party hopes to use the momentum from several summer primary victories to boost the number of GOP Latino members in the House. Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette says Mexican and Mexican-Americans’ political loyalties are being tested by too many mistakes by the Democratic Party. He says Latino voters are becoming more comfortable voting for Republicans because they’re sick and tired of being taken for granted.
Why is all this happening? How did we get here? Well, I’ll tell you something. It’s not about what Republicans are doing right with Latino voters. Who are we kidding? These days, they don’t do anything right. About 90% of this rightward drift by Latinos is because Democrats are doing something wrong. They neglect us. They take us for granted. They lump us together with Black voters, with whom we have little in common. And they pursue policies that run contrary to our interests. Democrats stopped asking for our support, and so we took it elsewhere.
You see, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are swing voters and swing voters gonna swing. If Republicans make the same mistake and stop asking for our votes or listening to us, or weighing our concerns, we’ll leave them too. Swing voters can swing back to where they were before and perhaps where they felt most comfortable. Or they can go to a third party altogether.
For those who ask, well, where are you gonna go? I’ll tell ya. We can go fishing. We can go to the market. We can go to the park. We can go anywhere we want. It doesn’t have to be a polling station. We don’t have to vote at all. How is voting for the wrong person any better? Both parties need to do right by these Latino voters. And step one is treating them with the one thing that we value most, after family and hard work. And that’s respect, or as we call it, “respeto.” Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are sick and tired of voting for the lesser evil, which as we can see from Democrats’ immigration policies, is still evil.
