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Tag: hispanic vote
Jump In Florida, Nevada Early Voting Could Reap Latino Gains For Clinton

Jump In Florida, Nevada Early Voting Could Reap Latino Gains For Clinton

MIAMI (Reuters) – The man answering a volunteer’s knock on the door in the Kendall section of Miami-Dade County on Saturday was emphatic: Not only would he vote but “esperamos que la presidenta gane” – Spanish for “we hope Madam President wins.”

Volunteers across Florida made a last-minute push to get voters to the polls this weekend with early voting ending on Sunday ahead of Election Day on Tuesday, pitting Republican Donald Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton, or “la presidenta,” as the man at the door called her.

Latino voters like the man in Kendall and elsewhere could have an outsized influence in Tuesday’s election. Early voting data may portend a jump in the number of Hispanic voters this year, especially in the key swing states of Florida and Nevada.

Clinton has polled much stronger among Latino voters nationwide, suggesting she would benefit more from a surge in early voting in those two states, voting experts say. Trump has fared poorly in that demographic, having repeatedly angered Hispanics with disparaging comments about their communities.

A recent poll conducted by the firms The Tarrance Group and Bendixen and Amandi found that Hispanic registered voters in Florida favor Clinton 60 percent to 30 percent. In Nevada the gap was even wider – 72 percent for Clinton and 19 percent for Trump.

In Florida, the Clinton campaign estimates early Latino voting is up 139 percent, or more than twice as much, compared to 2012, according to a field report dated Wednesday.

Democratic strategist Steve Schale, a Florida expert, estimated that 170,000 more Hispanics had voted early or by mail as of Wednesday than had voted early or by mail in the entire 2012 election, according to a post on his blog.

“And keep in mind, because Hispanic is a self-identifying marker, studies have found that the real Hispanic vote is larger than the registration. So while Hispanics might make up 14.2 percent of the voters who have voted so far, in reality, the number is larger,” he wrote.

But the raw data leave a number of questions. Will Latinos keep up the higher turnout rates on Election Day? For which candidate did they vote? Will turnout from Latinos and other minorities make enough of a difference to swing Florida and other states?

Trump kicked off his maverick campaign last year by calling many Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, and his relationship with Latinos hardly improved from there. From his calls to build a wall on the border and have Mexico pay for it, to comments that an American-born judge could not do his job because of his Mexican heritage, Trump has consistently had low polling figures with Latinos across the country.

The state of Nevada does not note race or ethnicity on its voter registration but other data there suggest Latinos also are turning out in force.

DEMOCRATIC EDGE IN KEY COUNTY

For one thing, Clark County has seen a surge in early voting. Between in-person and absentee voting, registered Democrats have now returned over 72,000 more ballots than registered Republicans there. Those figures do not indicate which candidate voters picked, only the party with which the voters are registered.

Friday alone saw 57,172 votes in person in Clark County. Photos making the rounds on social media showed especially long lines at a Cardenas market voting site, which stayed open late to accommodate the surge of voters.

Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, has a large Latino population – 30.6 percent, compared to 28.1 percent for Nevada as a whole, according to the U.S. Census.

Even more Republican votes elsewhere in the state are so far not enough to counterbalance that Democratic lead in Clark County. Overall, the Democrats have cast around 46,000 more ballots in Nevada than Republicans.

That’s not an accident, said Artie Blanco, the Nevada state coordinator for the progressive group For Our Future. Her organization and others banded together in a major get-out-the-vote push, especially among voters of color, and the coalition’s data suggest that the effort paid off.

Twenty-two percent of Democrats who voted on Friday had a conversation with someone from that progressive coalition at some point after Oct. 15, Blanco said. Among Latino voters on the last three voting days, the coalition had conversations with 14 percent of them after Oct. 15, according to the group’s data.

Trump on Saturday hit out at the early voters in Nevada, looking to undermine the state’s results before Election Day.

“They didn’t get the kind of vote that they needed to stop us on Tuesday,” Trump said in Reno. “Tuesday is our day in this state.”

He said Reno and northern Nevada could “carry us all the way to Washington.”

But Blanco said the votes were instead the result of major work to bring out voters, especially people of color and that progressive organizations were not done yet.

“We have all these voters that we need to now go back and say, ‘You’ve got one day,’” she said of those who had not yet cast ballots.

(Writing and reporting by Luciana Lopez; Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson; Editing by Bill Trott and Mary Milliken)

IMAGE: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a “Latinos for Hillary” rally in San Antonio, Texas October 15, 2015. REUTERS/Darren Abate

Hispanic Leaders Announce Mobilization Efforts Against Trump

Hispanic Leaders Announce Mobilization Efforts Against Trump

As Donald Trump steps up his attacks against the largest minority in the country, Hispanic leaders are gearing up to unite and fight back.

Last Wednesday, civil rights icon Dolores Huerta joined forces with People for the American Way (PFAW) and former Miss Universe Alicia Machado for the “Donald Trump’s Year of Hate” campaign.

Launched on the one-year anniversary of Trump’s campaign announcement, the anti-Trump effort aims at making sure Latinos are aware of Trump’s rhetoric against Hispanics, and encourages them to register to vote and get politically involved in the upcoming presidential elections.

Huerta, an 86-years-old activist who gained notoriety as an American labor leader, emphasized the gravity of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, and her belief that his words represent the ideals of the Republican Party as a whole. “We will get out to vote against him, we will talk with our friends and our families and make sure they go out to vote against him as well,” she announced at a press conference in Virginia.

“Since the day he announced his candidacy, he’s talked about immigrants as ‘rapists,’ ‘killers,’ ‘criminals’ and ‘drug leaders.’ Whether it was out of ignorance, insensitivity, or he did it on purpose, he hosted a campaign rally where a Latino man was killed in a hate crime,” Huerta continued, referring to Trump’s rally in the Long Island village of Patchogue, just steps away from the site of the murder of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant

Lucero’s murder was the culmination of a number of attacks committed by a group of Patchogue teens, who called themselves the “Caucasian Crew,” and had a history of harassing and attacking immigrants in the village.

As part of the outreach effort, PFAW, a progressive policy group, has released Spanish language ads in eight states warning Latinos of the danger Trump poses. One of the ads states that the GOP nominee will take the country “down, down, down to a dark place where intolerance, racism, and hate rule.”

In a statement, PFAW outlined the campaign’s goals. “Our campaign highlights just some of the ways Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policies hurt Latino communities and all Americans, and it urges people to stop Donald Trump’s hate by registering to vote and casting their ballots against him in November.”

Machado, who won the Miss Universe pageant in 1996 — the year Trump took over the business —  shared how the billionaire businessman would mock her weight and force her to work out in front of the media when she was 19 years old. When she gained weight after earning the crown, Trump told Howard Stern she was “an eating machine.”

“She weighed 118 pounds or 117 pounds and she went up to 160 or 170. So this is somebody that likes to eat.” Trump told Inside Edition back then.

Machado says Trump humiliated her constantly, making fun not only of her weight, but also of her ethnicity. “He would call me ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ that was the nickname he liked to use to make fun of me in front of his friends, and he would laugh.”

Now an actress, Machado said it took years of therapy to get over Trump’s mistreatment, which she says led to depression and an eating disorder. She decided to get involved in anti-Trump activism after Trump’s attacks on Judge Curiel inspired her to become a U.S. citizen so she could vote.

“Is he saying that if my daughter wanted to be a judge when she grew up, she couldn’t do it fairly because her mom is Venezuelan and her dad is Mexican?” she asked. “Would he not see her as American, even though she was born here? It’s absurd.”

Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton tweeted Machado to congratulate her on her new citizenship

All Star Boxing Inc, a prominent U.S. promoter of Latino boxing, is also working towards Trump’s defeat. According to Reuters, the Florida-based company will announce on Tuesday that it will provide free television ad space to Mi Familia Vota, a Hispanic civic group working to increase Latino voter participation.

The group’s name and website will be featured on signs in boxing ring corners as well as on T-shirts worn by the athletes. They will appear Telemundo’s Boxeo Telemundo show starting on June 24.

Ruben De Jesus, the director of operations at All Star Boxing, told Reuters that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” and that he contacted Mi Familia Vota after hearing alarming rhetoric against the Hispanic community in the presidential election.

According to De Jesus, the free ads could reach as many as 5 million people. Fighters will also hold voter engagement events in Florida, a key swing state.

Already, Hispanic naturalization and voter registrations have spiked, possibly as a response to Trump.

Hispanic leaders aren’t the only ones to realize the impact Hispanic votes will have in November: Tom Steyer, a billionaire environmentalist, bought a Spanish-language ad for the California primary through his NextGen Climate Action Committee super PAC.

The ad showed Trump calling Mexicans “rapists” and announcing his idea of a “deportation force,” and concluded with Speyer encouraging Californians to vote, in Spanish.

Will Hispanics Ever Love Republicans Back?

Will Hispanics Ever Love Republicans Back?

A new book of numbers by a Republican pollster doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges ahead for his party. Far from influencing politics at the margins, author Whit Ayres says current demographic trends are “changing results” in presidential elections and must be confronted.

Yet Ayres’ diagnoses and prescriptions raise a recurrent question for Republicans trying to map a way forward: In their emphasis on an inclusive tone and their confidence that Hispanics share their values, and in the absence of fundamental policy evolution, are they missing the point?

Ayres wrote his book 2016 and Beyond: How Republicans Can Elect a President in the New America for all White House aspirants in his party. He is advising freshman Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is expected to enter the 2016 race this month in Miami and comes pre-promoted by Ayres as “the most transformational” of the large, emerging GOP field.

Rubio is so talented as a politician, Ayres told me and other reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, that he recalls onetime basketball superstar Michael Jordan. “He could do things with a basketball that were not teachable and were just instinctively amazing,” Ayres said. “Marco Rubio is the Michael Jordan of American politics.”

He’s not just gifted, “he’s substantive,” Ayres said, pointing to Rubio speeches on how to energize the economy for the middle class, make higher education more affordable, and reform the tax code “to create greater opportunity.”

On top of all that, Rubio is young, Hispanic, and Spanish-speaking. He’s 43, and his parents were born in Cuba.

If Rubio has a chance to be transformational, it will be due to his generation, ethnicity, and skills. When it comes to substance, he has inarguably done a lot of thinking about today’s domestic and international problems. Yet many of his prescriptions are more traditional than transformative: He’s a hawk on foreign policy, highly critical of how the Obama administration is handling Iran, Cuba, and the Middle East. His tax plan relies on the conservative standby of huge cuts for the wealthy and the bipartisan penchant for running up deficits. Like the rest of his party, he is a vehement foe of the Affordable Care Act.

His big step outside the box was his key role in crafting a bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate 68-32 two years ago. But the GOP turned against its reforms, such as a lengthy path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Rubio now stresses border security and calls himself “realistic.”

Given his background and abilities, Rubio is an ideal purveyor of the Reaganesque message that Ayres rightly insists his party should adopt. The template is Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address about a city teeming with people of all kinds, engaged in commerce and activity. And if the city had to have walls, the walls had gates, and the gates were open to all those with the will and the heart to get here,” as Ayres paraphrased it at the breakfast. “It’s that sort of inclusive message that built the last major Republican majority in this country, and it can do so again.”

Making that a reality, however, depends very much on appealing to Hispanics and young people, who have increasingly spurned GOP presidential candidates. The backlash over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act underscores the youth disconnect. “This is where we’re headed as a country. A political candidate who is perceived as anti-gay at the presidential level will never connect with people under 30 years old,” Ayres said bluntly.

He was equally pointed about immigration. “If your position is that you want to deport 11 million Hispanics, then you’re going to find it very difficult to persuade Hispanic voters that ‘we want you in the Republican coalition,'” he said. That was pretty much Mitt Romney’s approach in 2012, and it netted him 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. As the white share of the electorate continues to shrink, Ayres and other GOP strategists say the 2016 nominee will need mid-40s support from Hispanics to win.

This is no slam dunk. Like many Republican strategists, Ayres contends that Hispanics are in tune with “the panoply” of core GOP values — “individual liberty, free enterprise, strong families, strong national defense, greater opportunity for all” — but election results and other indicators suggest the case is not so cut and dried. There’s also the question of whether any Republican can sustain an inclusive, tolerant message during a primary process influenced heavily in its first critical weeks and months by the party’s most conservative loyalists.

A nominee who managed to maintain such a Reaganesque tone throughout would be in relatively good shape for a general election. But that would still leave the problem of Reaganesque policies tailored to very different times.

Follow Jill Lawrence on Twitter @JillDLawrence. To find out more about Jill Lawrence and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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