All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.
In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats won the Hispanic vote by 40 points nationally. Two years later, Democrats carried the vote by an estimated 33 points against Donald Trump himself, though in nationwide campaigns, the party’s margin against GOP candidates shrank to 27 points. With the midterm elections just around the corner, a recent Axios-Ipsos poll shows that nearly one in four Latinos still don’t know how they’re going to vote, making them the biggest block of swing voters in the 2022 election. As Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette explains, while candidates from both sides of the aisle are fiercely competing for their vote, no one is addressing the issue Latinos care about most.
Here’s the scoop. The Latino vote is complicated, nuanced and always in flux. It doesn’t come to the parties, not anymore. Now the parties have to go out and get it. You have to earn it, you have to work for it. It takes humility and takes a willingness to admit what they don’t know. The problem is, neither of these things come easily in politics.
One thing we’re going to see more of in the future are these 21st century matchups of Latino Republican versus Latino Democrat. The GOP finally wised up and started fighting fire with fire. Good on them. Good on them.
Still, the party has ruined this mano-a-mano matchup with a combination of ignorance and arrogance. Democrats need to stop sending know-it-all-white-run political consulting firms to run the campaigns of their Latino candidates. And Republicans need to actually put some money, muscle and manpower into the campaigns of their Latino candidates.
I’ve studied Latino voters since I got into journalism in 1989. But I’ve actually been a real life Latino voters since even before that. I’ll let you in on a little secret. We’re single issue voters. That issue, it’s not inflation, crime, jobs, the economy, education, health care or immigration. Although all those issues matter a great deal to us.
Our number one issue is respect. We call it “respeto,” along with family, community and hard work. It’s sacred to us. If you want our support, you need to show us the proper respect. You need to stop talking about us behind our backs and start listening to us so you can know what it takes to have our back.
Neither party does that right now. In fact, dating back to 1960 in the Kennedy election, when Latinos first landed on the nation’s political radar, the parties have never done that. And so neither party deserves our support. The Latino vote may be complicated, but that political reality is as simple as they come.
