Trump seduced Latin Americans in US elections, here’s how
How Trump broke through among Latin Americans – according to the Economist weekly – in the US elections
Trump began his campaign to become president of America in 2015 by calling on Mexican rapists and drug traffickers. When the families crossed the southern border of America, his immigration police separated the children from their parents. Before the 2018 mid-term elections, he tried to scare voters with the prospect of migrant caravans headed to America. Its failure to control covid-19 has caused disproportionate harm to Latin Americans, who are far more affected than whites at the sick, hospitalized and dead from the virus.
For all these reasons, and because of Trump's hostility towards immigrants and his mockery of Mexicans, many Democrats thought he had little hope of winning the votes of Latin Americans. They were wrong, as his victories in Florida and Texas proved – writes The Economist.
For years, Democrats across the state of Florida have treated the heavily Democratic Miami-Dade County as a place to increase their margins to compensate for losses in the north. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton won 63% of the vote, improving on Barack Obama's totals (58%, 62%). Joe Biden regressed, winning just 53.3%.
Two factors drove Mr Trump's success among Florida Latin Americans. The first is sui generis: Cuban Americans comprise an exceptionally large share of the state's Latin Americans, and tend to vote Republican.
Many believed that Obama's success in South Florida nullified Cubans' attachment to the Republican party. This hope has proved fallacious: 52.6% of Cubans in Florida – and 76% of those who arrived in Miami between 2010 and 2015 – identify themselves as Republicans. Cuban-Americans, along with Venezuelan, Colombian and Nicaraguan-American communities, all well represented in South Florida, have proved receptive to the fact that Biden and the Democrats have been falsely referred to as "socialists."
The second factor explains why Trump was also successful among Latin Americans in Texas : he paid attention to them. Carlos Odio of EquiLabs, a Latin political consultancy firm, says Trump "has made Florida a priority since he was elected." He followed a path traced by Florida Republicans, such as Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, junior senator and state governor respectively, who also did well among Latin Americans (in 2018 DeSantis won 44% of the votes of Latin Americans in Florida).
Republicans have also invested this year in Latin voter registration in Texas. This seems to have paid off: While Biden won nearly 1.3 million more votes than Ms. Clinton in 2016, Trump also improved her performance, in part by eliminating infrequent Latin Americans. The county of Hidalgo, for example, on the border with Mexico, is over 90% Latin American; Trump won 90,000 votes there, up from 49,000 in 2016, while Biden won 127,000, just 8,000 more than Ms. Clinton four years ago. While Biden won Hidalgo County, the relatively small margin helped Trump offset his losses in the state's cities and suburbs.
Similarly, in New Mexico, Ben Ray Lujan, a six-term congressman, won his Senate run with just 5.4 points instead of the expected double digits. Pete Saenz, the mayor of Laredo, Texas, believes Trump's message of law and order has proven effective with Southwestern Latin Americans, many of whom work in law enforcement along the Mexican border.
These findings have a lesson for both political parties. First, Latinos – a category that includes white Cubans, black Dominicans, and indigenous people of Central America, among others – are too diverse to be treated as a monolith. Second, this suggests that many Latin Americans follow a familiar path. Just as no one would suggest that, for example, the votes of Greek-Americans or Hungarian-Americans should belong to one party, the same is true of Latin Americans.
What is important to a 25-year-old pregnant immigrant from Mexico to Los Angeles, recently naturalized, may be less important to a Wyoming Latino breeder whose family has been in America for seven generations. Ronald Reagan said: “Latin Americans are Republicans. They just don't know ”. Many Democrats believed that Mr Trump's immigration policy would push Latin Americans into their arms. Both ideas are wrong: Latins' votes, like any other American, must be fought, not taken for granted.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-trump-ha-sedotto-i-latino-americani-nelle-elezioni-usa/ on Fri, 06 Nov 2020 14:55:52 +0000.