Culture wars fuel Trump’s blue-collar Latino gains - POLITICO

Donald Trump lost the presidency, but showed Republicans a way to win the culture wars with working-class Hispanics.

But, in interviews with more than a dozen experts on Hispanic voters in six states, no factor was as salient as Trump’s blue-collar appeal for Latinos.

“Most Latinos identify first as working-class Americans, and Trump spoke to that,” said Josh Zaragoza, a top Democratic data specialist in Arizona, adding that Hispanic men in particular “are very entrepreneurial.

Amid the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter protests and the sputtering economy during the pandemic, Trump’s campaign found that Latinos were almost as receptive as non-Hispanic whites to a pro-police and pro-jobs message.

“Let’s face it, ‘defund the police’ is just not the best slogan, especially in a place like Miami, where a lot of people work in law enforcement, or along the border of Texas, where Latinos are in Border Patrol,” said Jose Parra, founder of the consultancy Prospero Latino and a past adviser to Democratic Sen.

Parra, who dislikes the “defund” slogan but not its goal of stopping police violence, said Trump’s improved standing with Latinos amid the protests reflects a little-discussed problem in Hispanic communities: anti-Blackness.

“Something to those [Hispanic] voters is more important than what we might call cultural issues that a lot of people on the left are kind of obsessing over,” said Ryan Enos, a political geographer from Harvard University who was among the first to tweet a graphic showing the correlation between Hispanic voters and increased support for Trump nationwide.

In Texas’ majority-Hispanic Rio Grande Valley and along the Texas border, where Trump did well for a Republican, progressive organizer Ofelia Alonso pointed out that "Latino" is a broad and imprecise catchall term for members of an ethnic group in which people identify as Black, white, indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern or mixed race.

“A lot of people who voted for Trump, while they’re Latino, they’re also white,” she said, pointing to the city of Harlingen as a Trump-supporting “white city with money,” or South Padre Island, where “the class and race demographic is different than other parts of the Rio Grande Valley.

In South Texas, Alonso said, Biden gave the community “nothing to organize around.” The President-elect distanced himself at times from voters who weren’t threatened by socialism or “defund the police” — or who backed Sanders.

He said Latinos along the border are deeply patriotic, pro-business and favor fossil fuel development because of the jobs it brings, he said.

Carlos Odio, a Democratic co-founder of the Hispanic research firm EquisLabs, said the scope of Trump’s win in Florida overall, and his vastly improved margins over 2016 with Hispanic voters in the state, was troubling.

Trump, he said, was able to maximize turnout among Republican-leaning Cuban Americans and appealed to swing voters with roots throughout Latin America.

Now that the election is over, and Biden won, Odio said Democrats need to learn from it to keep Republicans from building on Trump’s success with working-class Hispanic voters.

Trump’s TV brand as a successful businessman and his all-out efforts to ignore the coronavirus pandemic to get people back to work also may have paid dividends with some Hispanic voters, especially blue-collar workers — despite the disproportionate impact on their health.

But Odio and others worry another Republican, without the racist baggage Trump had, can regain the suburban white voters Trump lost while continuing to make inroads with Latinos.

“I’m worried that there is a chink in that armor — that what Trump did sends a signal that now allows more Latinos to feel like they have permission to think about the Republicans, that’s it’s perhaps socially acceptable to do so,” Odio said.

He said Trump assembled a strong coalition in the state that the GOP could improve as it appeals to Hispanics as patriotic Americans and working-class people.

“There are people in this community who happen to be Hispanic — from Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic or wherever — but their primary political identity is not Hispanic.

They’re “working people who believe that the people that Trump is against are just crazy.” Rubio said.

Julio Guerrero, a veteran Democratic community activist and organizer in Milwaukee, said his community has lots of third-generation Mexican-Americans for whom Democrats’ messaging about undocumented workers and immigration has relatively little salience, and progressives aren’t speaking to them as the working-class voters that they are

In Philadelphia, Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez, who started out as a progressive organizer, credited Biden’s campaign for coming up with good Puerto Rico policy that her constituents cared about, but it did a poor job of engaging voters in her community

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign dispatched his son Eric Trump to an evangelical Latino ministry in the community, which she said helped the president improve his margins in her district

“All the Trump campaign did was remind people what was important to them

It was about fear,” said Quiñones-Sánchez, recalling how strongly her constituents reacted to the “defund the police” message at a community meeting

Giancarlo Sopo, one of the Trump campaign's Hispanic communication strategists, who used to be a Democrat, said he has doubts about his former party’s ability to learn from Trump’s gains