Democrats have too long ignored both their own failings and the president’s strengths.
Democrats have too long ignored both their own failings and the president’s strengths.
T he day after the 2016 election, Democrats weren’t the only ones who thought Trump was, if not explicitly racist, at least xenophobic. I personally knew immigrants who felt as if their beloved adoptive country had just voted to unwelcome them, which was heartbreaking to see. Of course, the vast majority of Trump supporters were not anti-Hispanic. But many on both sides of the political divide thought Trump’s abrasive nationalism might be driving away more Hispanics than either he or the Republican Party could afford to lose.
And yet exit polls soon showed something remarkable. Trump had done quite well among Hispanics. He increased the GOP share of the Hispanic vote above Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012. In fact, Trump did as well in 2016 as John McCain had in 2008, and McCain was a charter member of the “gang of eight” senators who had pushed for comprehensive immigration reform, including amnesty for illegal immigrants, during George W. Bush’s second term.
What has really surprised Democrats, especially given the media’s persistent portrayals of Trump as racist and anti-immigrant, is that Trump has only increased his support among Hispanics since 2016. He won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2016 and is polling around 36 percent now, according to Quinnipiac, after reaching 38 in May. That’s more than any GOP presidential candidate in modern history except George W. Bush, who captured 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. Far from alienating Hispanic Americans, Trump has actually reversed much of the drop in Hispanic support that the GOP suffered during the acrimonious and often ugly debate over comprehensive immigration reform between 2006 and 2008.
Though prominent Democrats have been sounding the alarm for months, the growing strength of Trump’s support among Hispanics has shocked many of them. But they have mostly themselves to blame. They have for too long ignored both their own failures and the strengths of Trump, creating what could prove to be their Achilles heel.
Democrats ignore the failures of their policies at their peril
Despite President Obama’s natural appeal to minorities and Hispanics, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos emerged as a fierce critic — assailing Obama for losing interest in permanent immigration reform, for talking nice while quietly deporting millions, and for taking Hispanics for granted. Democrats seemed to take little notice — a consistent pattern. Worried by rising Hispanic support for the GOP early in 2020, former Obama adviser Cecilia Muñoz observes, “The GOP is associated with the rollback of policies that are intended to benefit minorities and communities at the economic margins.”
But progressive policies have in many ways failed their intended beneficiaries, and the failures are increasingly hard to ignore. Indeed, progressive policies are the root cause of many of the racial disparities they now automatically label as “systemic racism.” Such policies hurt Hispanics and other minorities in all sorts of ways.
Because minority communities tend to be disproportionately low-skilled, they are bunched up around the bottom of the income ladder in most job categories. If you can’t convince anyone to pay you more than $7.25 an hour, federal law simply deprives you of the right to work, arguably a human-rights violation. That affects a huge proportion of recent immigrants, who often find that the door to the crucial first job is barred by law. If the employer is not willing to risk hiring that person illegally, it will have to pay more for someone more skilled who didn’t need that job as badly. Added to that, welfare punishes tens of millions of ordinary low-skilled Americans if they try to join the labor force at all, the loss of welfare benefits being the economic equivalent of a tax.
These unintended impacts cut a staggering proportion of blacks and Hispanics out of the labor market entirely, depriving them of the most crucial pathway of upward social mobility for the non-college-educated population, which is on-the-job training. In the place of a dynamic labor market capable of delivering both skills and wealth, progressives have created a powerfully inductive cycle of dependency. Many of them seem incapable of understanding how guaranteeing people a basic level of income can deprive them of opportunities to attain their dreams. But millions of Hispanics understand it, because they live it every day. That is one reason we are witnessing a decades-long migration of poor Hispanics from the welfare state of California to the opportunities of Texas.
There is something inherently demeaning in the Democrats’ whole appeal to minorities. By insisting that minority communities are victims of external forces such as “systemic racism” not sometimes but all the time, they imply that those communities are powerless. But they aren’t, and to assume otherwise is not an appealing message, particularly for immigrants. Many Democrats can’t understand why any Hispanic or black would vote Republican; they are only betraying what George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
The Black Lives Matter movement has only dug that hole deeper, because of its insistence on special privileges for minority groups. Of course that implies that minorities can’t compete on a level playing field and that they belong to fixed categories in perpetuity, with permanent disadvantages that can be overcome only by subordinating others. It is an affront to those immigrants who came to America seeking equality before the law, celebrating America’s melting pot, and, above all, believing that they could make it in America if they tried.
Why so many Hispanics continue to support the GOP
Many experts on Hispanic opinion trends start with the observation that Hispanics are not “monolithic” in their attitudes. They note that different groups of Hispanics have very different opinions on politics and issues. While that’s true as far as it goes, one can miss the forest for the trees.
Mexican Americans, the largest Hispanic voting bloc, are themselves far from unified. In the southwestern United States, from Texas to California, Mexicans have deep roots going well back to a time when the area was still under Spanish sovereignty. Many have been there for generations and have adopted English as their main language, even as the güeros have adopted Mexican food and Spanish phrases.
Mexican Americans have considerable pride of place in Texas, and all three of America’s Texan presidents have shown it. Lyndon Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush were all pro-immigration, pointedly appointed Hispanics to senior positions, and shaped policies to appeal to Hispanics. Many credit George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 to his record-setting performance among Hispanics. One might think, given Trump’s animus toward illegal immigration, that Mexican Americans today would support the GOP less than other Hispanics do, but in Texas, at least, the opposite is true. In the 2018 midterms, for example, about 29 percent of Hispanics voted GOP, while in Texas 35 percent did so.
Puerto Rico is the one Latin American country that was annexed whole by the United States. Since then, and especially since World War II, millions of Puerto Ricans have migrated to the mainland. Earlier generations were often drawn by welfare benefits not available on the island until the 1970s and promptly fell into a cycle of dependency, predictably becoming a reliable constituency for their Democratic benefactors. After welfare and minimum-wage laws were introduced at close to full federal levels in Puerto Rico in the 1970s, however, labor-force participation fell steadily, reaching perhaps the lowest labor-force participation of any society in the world. Since the economy went into a tailspin in 2006, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans have moved to the mainland U.S., this time fleeing welfare more than drawn to it. Most of those have moved to Florida, and Democrats may be unpleasantly surprised at the tepidness of their support.
Florida’s largest Hispanic voting bloc is of course Cuban Americans. Their support for the GOP, long astronomical, waned steadily starting in the 1990s, as younger generations began to reach adulthood. But the Clinton-era visa accords have allowed hundreds of thousands of Cubans to migrate normally for the first time since Fidel Castro turned Cuba into an island prison after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The new Cuban immigrants hate communism at least as much as the original refugees did. Now joining them in South Florida are several hundred thousand Venezuelans and Nicaraguans who similarly were forced to flee their country because of socialism. With leading Democrats such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proudly calling themselves socialists, Democrats have grievously hurt themselves in South Florida. According to one recent poll, Trump’s support among Hispanics has increased from 35 percent in 2016 to 50 percent now, a staggering swing of 30 points away from the Democrats.
While it’s true that Hispanic Americans are a diverse group, it may be a mistake to put too much political stock in that diversity. Many are small-business owners who bear the brunt of overregulation and taxation, and Trump has been very effective in appealing to them. That helps explain why 57 percent of Latinos support Trump’s handling of the economy in a recent poll.
Hispanics are fertile ground for Trump and the GOP in another respect. A deep current of admiration and gratitude for America pervades the Hispanic community. It’s not a jingoistic pride, but it is often a fervent pride. Whatever good may come of the progressive campaign to highlight America’s sins, it may be hurting the Democrats’ image among patriotic Hispanic Americans. Images of progressives fomenting riots and mayhem across America, destroying Catholic and Hispanic monuments viciously and with impunity, have scared and offended many Hispanics to the core.
Why Hispanics like Trump
Trump’s vocal nationalism strikes many Hispanics as offensive and even racist, but many Hispanics don’t see him that way at all. Where some critics hear racist dog whistles, many Hispanics hear a committed patriotism that they fervently share. Indeed, paradoxically, Trump has avoided the mistakes that drove many Hispanics away from the GOP in disgust after 2004.
In retrospect, those Republicans who pushed for comprehensive immigration reform in Bush’s second term made a major strategic mistake. Intending to build on Bush’s support among Hispanics, they only squandered it, chiefly by drawing out into the open those Republicans of a more anti-immigrant and sometimes anti-Hispanic bent. In 2008, McCain won barely two-thirds of the Hispanic support that George W. Bush earned in 2004. Then Obama poured gasoline on the fire with the executive amnesty orders, which were terrible policy, but better politics. From 2006 to 2012, Hispanics — and especially those who watch Hispanic media — were treated to an endless stream of leading Republicans vocally attacking immigrants in often anti-Hispanic tones.
But Trump has managed to sidestep the damaging debate over comprehensive immigration reform almost entirely, by focusing on his “wall” first, which freed him up to embrace some version of amnesty later. And while Democrats and mainstream media repeat at every opportunity that Trump is racist and hates Hispanics, he has not been very obliging. He referred to the Salvadoran MS-13 gang members as “animals” and “rapists,” but Hispanics don’t equate being Hispanic with being in a criminal gang, as the mainstream media apparently do. Trump has indeed offended many Hispanics, but he insults everybody. And mixed in with the insults, Hispanics also hear him saying that “the Hispanic-American community is a treasure” and “Mexican Americans uplift our communities . . . and enrich every feature of national life. They are hardworking, incredible people.”
It’s a mistake to give too much emphasis to issue-polling. Lots of people appear to vote on the basis of simple personality: Whom do they like more? Nobody could charge Mitt Romney with being anti-immigrant, but the patrician Romney, for all his humility, was preternaturally ineffective at connecting with voters in the arena of mass-market politics. That, of course, is Trump’s arena. A lot of people, including a lot of Hispanics, just like him, sometimes despite how unpleasant he can be and sometimes because of it. You don’t want the person fighting on your behalf to be too nice, after all. Plus, he’s much funnier than Hillary Clinton or Joseph Biden (a low bar, admittedly) and he has the force of his convictions.
Among my own friends and family in Miami, traditionally strong Republicans, I have been struck by the strength of support for Trump. I asked several of them why, and their answers were pretty consistent: He’s real; he doesn’t care what anybody thinks about him; he is against abortion; he has done more to stop child trafficking than anybody; he stands up for law and order; he’s protecting us against socialists; and of course (probably Trump’s favorite) the media are super unfair to him.
Trump’s achievement among Hispanics is perhaps most clearly visible from another country, Mexico. Early in 2017, I spent a weekend in Mexico City and was mortified by how much Mexicans seemed to hate Trump. At that point, of course, they didn’t have much to go on other than Trump’s more xenophobic statements, duly amplified by Spanish-language media.
What a difference three years has made. Trump may not have moved the needle in Mexico, but according to some Mexicans, the intensity of feeling against him is much reduced. He has not made lots of friends among Mexicans — Univision’s Jorge Ramos remains an eloquent and effective critic — but he has made some very important friends. During a state visit this summer, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador — the most left-wing president Mexico has had in 40 years — was effusive in his praise for Trump. He said:
President Trump . . . during my mandate as President of Mexico, instead of insults against my person, or more important, against my country, we have received from you understanding and respect. . . . That’s why I’m here, to express to the people of the United States that their President has behaved towards us with graciousness and respect.
Democrats appeared shell-shocked but recovered quickly enough to boycott Goya for the much fainter praise its CEO gave Trump that same week. But many Hispanics saw something Democrats missed — the moving tribute that AMLO made at the Lincoln Memorial, where he laid a wreath at Lincoln’s feet and stood looking up at the marble visage in a solemn moment of silence. It portrayed an admiration for America that many Hispanics feel to the core — an admiration that stands in stark contrast to today’s Democrats and their often vicious attacks on the heroes and symbols that made America a beacon of liberty.