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.
Yeah, the assumption that sharing racial characteristics indicates a common “identity” is kinda, um, … There’s gotta be some succinct way to describe someone who thinks, “S is race R, therefore S thinks T.”
Then again, Bonespurs must have driven many Latinos to the same old conclusion: ‘We all hang together or else we each hang separtately.’
Nullius in Verba:
To be fair, it might be more from the perception of shared cultural characteristics, rather than racial ones, that this idea of a political monolith comes from. Of course, it’s still a silly assumption (after all, how much culture do all American “Latinos” share, and to which extent does this inform their political decisions?), but it’s one that I’m more willing to chalk up to innocent ignorance.
Mosnae: Even then, that looks suspiciously like the idea that there’s a necessary relation of “race, therefore culture”, which is just a subset of “race, therefore thought”. I’m so very tired of this ideology that grounds everything in demographic identity.
People infected by the mind-virus, family members, have expressed the sentiment that it would be poetic justice for those Latinos who voted Republican to have their own families broken up by deportation. The mind reels. Not all Latinos are criminals.
[venom] I’m sure some of them might even be good people. [/venom]
I think this fits here: Kevin Drum talking about why the Democrats lost, partly responding to piece in Politico:
Jack Herrera on Latinos and the Democratic Party.
Herrera claims that the Latino vote was lost because so many of them are working class laborers whose concerns have been ignored by the Democratic Party. Drum goes on from there to talk about the power of rhetoric, and how blatant lies and exaggerations are not perceived that way when the sentiment aligns with the needs of the audience.
A couple of paragraphs:
The footnote about “sex change surgeries” for prisoners:
I don’t think Drum (or Herrera) says anything remarkably novel here, but I do think it’s a well-put analysis. The Democrats loudly promote a lot of things, but many important things are either unmentioned or lost in the noise.
Yeah, Sackbut. If they’d stuck with abortion, they might have won. Maybe a bit thrown in about tax cuts for billionaires causing everyone else to pay higher taxes. They could have had Trump on the ropes over abortion, because no matter how much rhetoric he might use about his being good for women, it is impossible to mistake the facts that it was his appointments that pushed SCOTUS over the edge, gave them enough votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. And that was intentional, because the justices he appointed were recommended to him for that very reason.
By the time he leaves office (if he does), the Republicans will probably have the entire United States judiciary. They already have most of it, in spite of two two-term Democratic presidents and one one-term. That’s a total of twenty years of Dems in office. The Senate stonewalled candidates nominated by Bill Clinton to the effect that Dubya was able to appoint a lot of justices. As we all know, they did the same with Obama. Now they are appointing young judges across the judicial system.
That might have been a winning campaign.
iknklast: Abortion and labour issues, combined, I think, could’ve done massively better, at the very least. Harris running meant that anyone turned off by taking a strong pro-choice stance would’ve been out, anyway, so they should’ve doubled-down on that issue.
And for folks who don’t care about abortion (mostly men, of course), a really aggressive pro-labor campaign with concrete promises could’ve done a much better job mobilizing the vote than trying to get into the weeds of tariff policy.