OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The Democratic Party once had a lock on Hispanic-American voters and without question, the party continues to receive the lion’s share of the Latino vote, but that is rapidly changing.
Democrats are losing ground to Republicans because a growing number of Hispanics are not down with the ‘woke’ uber-left-wing culture and socialism increasingly pushed by the Donkey Party.
The Washington Examiner reports:
In the 2020 presidential race, an election advertisement about Democrats taking Latino voters for granted was the hook for one of former President Donald Trump’s most popular ads.
Featuring UFC fighter Jorge Masvidal, the nearly two-minute video showed then-candidate Joe Biden at a Hispanic Heritage Month event one month earlier playing “Despacito” on his cellphone. “To pander to us,” said Masvidal, a Miami native of Cuban and Peruvian descent. “Hell no.”
“The Democrats just think that they’re entitled to the Latino vote,” Masvidal said to begin the video. “They think that we just have to hand it over to them. That’s right. We sure as hell don’t.”
The spot wound up with more than 34 million views online. And last year, Latinos flocked to the polls in Florida, to hand the state to Trump by a larger margin than he won it in 2016.
“But it’s not just Florida where Democrats lost purchase with Hispanic voters,” the Washington Examiner notes further. “An analysis by Catalist, a political data trust for Democratic candidates, found that Latino voters nationally swung 8 points toward Trump compared with 2016 in the two-party vote. The number of votes cast by Latinos surged by 31% from 2016 to 2020. After four years, Trump left office more popular with Hispanic voters.”
Indeed, the UFC fighter’s message — that Democrats have simply taken Hispanic voters for granted (the same with black Americans too, by the way) — is a message that continues to resonate.
A survey this year by Equis Research, which specializes in the Latino electorate, found majorities in 11 battleground states agreed with the statement that “Democrats take Hispanics for granted. They want our votes but forget about us when it comes time to deliver.”
“Fifty-four percent of all registered voters found the statement convincing, while 57% of middle-class voters agreed. It resonated most with voters for whom immigration was a top priority, at 69%,” the Examiner noted, adding that the survey was taken back in August using a sample of 1,800 registered voters.
There’s more:
In Virginia, where Latino voters make up nearly one-tenth of the state’s population and are the state’s fastest-growing ethnic group, AP-NORC VoteCast exit polling after November’s gubernatorial race showed how Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, made inroads with Latino voters in the state up against Democrat and former governor Terry McAuliffe, scoring a 12 percentage-point lead. One year earlier, exit polls showed Trump’s share of the Latino vote from 2016 to 2020 grew by six points.
Surveys, including a comprehensive study of the last presidential race by Equis Research, showed Democrats losing ground, especially with less partisan Latinos, who said they were focused on the economy and moving beyond COVID-19.
And what’s worse for Democrats, President Biden hasn’t done anything to slow the flight of Hispanics to the GOP. Though he easily won the demographic last year (63 percent), polling in recent months reveals that support for him among Hispanics has fallen to the low 40s.
Once called “the emerging Democratic majority” by Ruy Teixeira and John Judis in 2002, the former noted earlier this month that the party has not been able to effectively deal with the massive shift, adding that Latino voter parity with Republicans undermines Democratic efforts to build a voter coalition that will give them perpetual power.
Others have made the same point.
“They can expect a good old-fashioned beatdown if they don’t get it together and acknowledge that the Hispanic trends in other states will mimic that of the Hispanics in Florida,” Sasha Tirador, a Democratic consultant in the state, where more than one-sixth of registered voters are Latino, says.
