Culture wars fuel Trump blue-collar Latino gains



[ad_1]

Parra, who dislikes the ‘defund’ slogan but not his goal of stopping police violence, said improving Trump’s stance with Latinos amid protests reflected a little-discussed issue in Hispanic communities : anti-blackness. This is a view shared by other Latino commentators as well as Black Lives Matter protesters.

In context, Trump’s gains debate with Latinos is a microcosm of the broader fault lines of US politics that shatter race, class, gender, age, religion, region and culture. . The GOP increasingly represents an older, strongly white, conservative coalition of working class people, devotees and small business owners. Meanwhile, the younger Democratic Party includes a more progressive assortment of highly skilled whites and people of color from all academic backgrounds.

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

“Most of the Latinos in this country are working class,” Enos said. “One would have to assume that this working class identity is more important than this Latino identity.

Drama in the valley

In the predominantly Hispanic Rio Grande Valley in Texas and along the Texas border, where Trump has done well for Republican and progressive organizer Ofelia Alonso has pointed out that “Latino” is a broad and imprecise catch-all 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, are also white,” she said, referring to the city of Harlingen as a “white town with money” supporting Trump, or South Padre Island, where “Demographic class and race are different from other parts of the Rio Grande Valley. More and more people have money and are really organized around the fact that they might not be taxed as much, and they feel the need to protect their wealth.

Biden did much better with Hispanic voters in the areas most populated by Latino-heavy around Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. But overall, Trump lost the country’s predominantly Hispanic counties by a combined 12 point margin to Biden. In 2016, Trump lost them by 20 points.

From the start of his candidacy, through the primary and through the general election, Biden’s outreach to Hispanic voters has been criticized by critics in his own party.. In South Texas, Alonso said, Biden gave the community “nothing to organize.” The president-elect has sometimes distanced himself from voters who were not threatened by socialism or “defeated the police” – or who supported Sanders.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist like Sanders, spent the days following the Nov. 3 election similarly pushing back moderates who blamed Latinos for Biden’s proximity to the Oscillating States or the losses of the lower ballot Democrats. She noted that moderate candidates who rejected her aid lost their race.

But unlike those congressional seats, the Bronx District of Ocasio-Cortez is more progressive, although that doesn’t stop Trump from performing better there. Preliminary election results show the president won 29 percent of the vote in the district, compared to less than the 20 percent he received in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.

In Texas, Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar took issue with his comments about their colleagues who lost, pointing out that their California colleague Gil Cisneros was defeated in a race where his opponent featured him in socialized medicine mailers that included the photo of Sanders.

“What Trump has done is understand the core values ​​of Hispanics,” said Cuellar, a conservative Democrat who survived a major challenge from the Justice Democrats group that helped propel Ocasio-Cortez to Congress. He said Latinos along the border are deeply patriotic, business-friendly, and promote fossil fuel development because of the jobs it creates, he said. Jobs in the oil industry and law enforcement were the two main issues Republicans found themselves on.

“This message about cutting police funding is real. When they talk about cutting jobs in oil and gas, it’s real, ”Cuellar said.

Republicans called Democratic candidate Gina Ortiz Jones in her run for the 23rd Congressional District of Texas a “radical socialist,” according to one of her consultants, who declined to speak officially and described the biography of the candidate as “the treble of conservative terrorism: a woman, a person of color and gay.”

Miami chaos

As the Trump wave rose in Latin American communities along the Texas border, it was a tsunami in Miami-Dade County that drowned two Democratic women in Congress, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala.

Miami-Dade is the largest county in the state with the largest Latin American population. Trump lost nearly 30 percentage points there in 2016. He lost it by just 7 points in November, the result of spending four years devoting time and attention to communities marked by dictatorships and guerrillas. from left: Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Colombia.

“The fear of socialism is real and ingrained for those of us who have fled dangerous places in search of the American Dream,” Mucarsel-Powell tweeted Wednesday.



[ad_2]

Source link