Guest post: There is no “Latino” vote

Originally a comment by Freemage on What the United States really is.

3) The Harris campaign didn’t do enough to convince the Latino community that Harris was going to help them with their economic problems. The campaign assumed that because of Trump’s disgusting comments about Latino people, that this community automatically wouldn’t vote for him: they were wrong. Enough Latinos decided Trump was “stronger on the economy”, and decided to vote him in spite of his vile rhetoric.

Kamala Harris lost the Latino vote.

I’d say the biggest issue is the very notion of ‘the’ Latino vote, honestly. Democrats keep wanting to treat Hispanic-Americans as if they are a single voting bloc, like they do African-Americans. But Latinos have no overriding common historical trauma the way Black Americans do. Instead, they’re at least a half-dozen different sub-groups with agendas that make a very low-overlap Venn Diagram when it comes to what they want to hear. And I could see in the final months of the campaign that the Trump camp was doing a better job of addressing key sub-groups specifically (using lies, of course, but targeted lies on Spanish radio and TV).

Let me put it this way–you know that comedian who made the crack about Puerto Rico being a floating island of garbage, the one that everyone figured was going to secure “the Latino Vote” for Harris? Yeah, I estimate about 10-20% of my Mexican-American neighbors would’ve laughed at that joke, and maybe even made it themselves. And more still wouldn’t be more than generically offended about it, because in their minds, it wasn’t a joke directed at them, because they aren’t Puerto Rican.

And this sort of difference is rife within the broader Hispanic-American population. Hell, Mexican-Americans, in particular, have a non-trivial percentage of their population that are full-on with Deport Them All (where “Them” means undocumented immigrants)–because after all, they or their parents came here legally, and they are just as resentful as the local WASPs are at what they perceive as line-jumping.

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