Tag: latino voters
latinas to the polls

In Georgia Runoff It's Loud, Visible Democrats Versus Quiet, Covert Republicans

The margins are razor-thin in Georgia’s Senate runoff that ends on December 7, according to interviews with dozens of party insiders, grassroot organizers, and voters at polls and rallies across the state during the past week.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, appeared to lead as early voting concluded on Friday – a sentiment affirmed by CNN’s latest poll, which reached voters from Thanksgiving weekend through last Tuesday. But Republicans say that their base prefers voting in person at local precincts on Election Day, fueling their hope hat a surge will elect Herschel Walker, the Georgia football star whose Republican candidacy was propelled by Donald Trump.

As early voting closed, 1.83 million Georgians had voted in person or returned mailed-out ballots, according to the secretary of state’s office. While daily turnout broke records, including 350,000 votes cast on Friday, only 26 percent of Georgians with active voter registrations have voted so far. In contrast, during 2020’s runoffs when control of the Senate was at stake, about 4.5 million votes were cast.

In many respects, both parties are reverting to core values and loyalties to bring out voters. At Walker’s rallies this week, he presented himself as a man who has been redeemed by Christianity and, if elected, would oppose the "evil" policies put forth by Democrats and the Biden administration.

Such religious and party orthodoxies were well-received by his supporters, who, in interviews after a Walker rally, mentioned that Trump’s offensive behavior did not stop the former president from enacting policies they approved. And, of course, Walker’s status as a football legend and “good old boy” was appealing.

“Everybody in Georgia loves Herschel. You should have seen that boy run,” said Fran, a retired furniture store owner, who declined to give her last name while attending a Walker rally on Monday in Toccoa, in the state’s northeast corner.

Interviews with voters in Republican strongholds, such as Hall County north of Atlanta, suggested that party loyalty – including the last-minute endorsement of Walker by Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s top-ranking Republican, who did not back Walker in the primary election, will push party faithful to vote on Tuesday.

“I do think it will have some influence on people,” Sloane Mattadeen, who serves in the U.S. Navy, said after voting. “I think there is some authority there.”

On the other hand, Walker has an uphill climb. He received 200,000 votes less than Kemp in the general election and was 38,000 votes behind Warnock out of nearly 4 million votes cast statewide. What makes Democrats nervous is that Walker’s campaign has been eerily quiet in all but the state’s remote regions.

“They ran a quiet, very covert campaign this entire midterm,” said a Democratic congressional staffer who asked not to be named. “You didn’t see Kemp. If it was not for Donald Trump and his big mouth, you may not even know what was going on with Herschel Walker. You don’t see them when they come for fundraisers… The Republicans are making phone calls, but it is not overt at all.”

The GOP’s latest lawn signs do not mention Walker’s name; they just urge people to vote Republican. Typically, one usually sees one or two lawn signs for Walker, which contrasts with a half-dozen or more signs for Warnock on busy streets.

A former state government press aide who recently took a private sector job said that many of Georgia’s Republican leaders are tired of all things Trump, including his hand-picked candidates like Walker. That partly accounts for the lower-profile messaging, he said, adding that the GOP base understands Kemp’s signals.

Whether that comment applies equally to men and women is another variable. As of Friday morning, about 10 percent more women had voted compared to men, the secretary of state's office reported. (Academic experts said that split was normal in Georgia elections.)

Walker’s anti-abortion stance, despite his history of previously paying for abortions and of domestic abuse, both of which Democrats have publicized, was downplayed by several women who said they had just voted for Walker. Other voters, women and men who said they were voting for Warnock, said that Walker’s character was deeply flawed. Black voters went further and said that his candidacy was perpetuating ugly stereotypes about Black men that they have worked for years to overcome.

More Visible Democrats

In contrast, the Warnock campaign and many get-out-the-vote efforts addressing constituencies likely to support him have been highly visible and vocal. Groups that barely existed a few years ago have been conducting voter drives as part of longer-term efforts to empower their communities.

In a warehouse district north of Atlanta on Friday, three dozen volunteers – mostly young women wearing black sweatshirts saying “Go VOTA” – assembled for a car caravan through nearby neighborhoods to urge Latina women to vote. They also planned to knock on 1,000 doors. Organizers from seven groups behind this effort said they already had made more than 90,000 phone calls to voters.

There are grassroot efforts like this across the state. By Friday morning, more than 800,000 white voters had cast ballots, 477,000 Black voters had cast ballots and 24,000 Hispanic voters had cast ballots, the state data hub reported. While the Hispanic numbers were low compared to other groups, this voter drive’s organizers said their voters could make a difference if margins are close.

“I was born in Georgia and raised in Gwinnett County, a lovely multicultural, multi-lingual community,” said Leslie Palomino, senior canvass lead for Georgia at PoderLatinx. “Growing up in a mixed-status family led me, the middle child in a household of five, to become the first eligible voter. Today, I’ll be casting my vote alongside my sister, Kimberly Palomino. Latinas are a powerful force and today we make our voice heard.”

A few minutes later, Palomino and a caravan of flag-waving, horn-honking volunteers left to visit one early voting site and then rouse voters. There was no comparable effort from Republicans anywhere in sight.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Trump’s 5 Biggest Lies

Trump’s 5 Biggest Lies

It’s true. Donald Trump probably should be winning this election.

That’s not just the assessment of Trump himself — who has reached the stage of mourning where all he does is complain about how powerless he is to the mean old press and warn his supporters that their votes probably won’t even count. That’s the verdict of the “Time for a Change” model developed by political scientist Alan I. Abramowitz, which has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1988.

But Abramowitz doesn’t see a Trump victory coming any more than Trump does.

“Based on the results of other recent presidential elections, however, as well as Trump’s extraordinary unpopularity, it appears very likely that the Republican vote share will fall several points below what would be expected if the GOP had nominated a mainstream candidate and that candidate had run a reasonably competent campaign,” he wrote last week. “Therefore, despite the prediction of the Time for Change model, Clinton should probably be considered a strong favorite to win the 2016 presidential election as suggested by the results of recent national and state polls.”

Americans want a change. Maybe it’s the eight years of a Democrat. Maybe it’s the 36 years of conservative economics spewing money up while trickling nothing down.

Whatever the cause, it’s increasingly clear the change they’re seeking won’t be coming from Donald Trump.

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In a recent YouGov poll, 50 percent of voters found that Trump’s version of change feels more like regression, which makes sense since that’s the promise of his campaign — to return American to a time when minorities, the LGBTQ community, women and people with pre-existing conditions had fewer rights.

If Trump ends up winning, it will be because Hillary Clinton presents a too rosy view of the possibilities America faces. But Trump’s defeat will come from his assertion that he “alone” can deliver a change that America doesn’t want.

It isn’t just Trump’s policies that are extraordinarily unpopular. It’s the man, personally.

While about 30 percent of the population loves him and would believe him if he started quoting passages from The Hobbit and insisting they were from the Gospel of Luke, much of America senses that he’s trying to sucker them with a constant stream of lies and propaganda more suited for convincing cult members to drink Kool-Aid than sustaining a democracy.

Here are the five biggest lies Trump keeps trying to sell a nation that  doesn’t seem to be in the market for his nonsense.

  1. His supporters are the only “real Americans.”
    In several recent polls, Trump has no — zero — support from African Americans. Trump’s support among Latinos is lingering around 20 percent, much worse than Romney’s 27 percent, which was worse than John McCain’s support in the low thirties, which was worse than George W. Bush, the last Republican nominee to get near 40 percent. To win, Republicans either need to increase to Romney level of support among minority voters or attract more white votes than any candidate since 1988. Instead, Trump is doing worse with white voters, suffering unprecedented losses with college-educated Republicans and Republican women. Still, somehow, Trump has convinced America’s loudest, angriest, and most ungrateful minority that they’re silent and a majority. “Most Americans are white, most are Christian, most don’t have college degrees, and most live in the South or Midwest Census Bureau regions,” FiveThirtyEight‘s Nate Silver wrote. “And yet, only about 1 in 5 voters meets all of these descriptions.” America’s working class is increasingly diverse. While Trump has endeavored to do something Republicans have failed to do for generations — empathize with the pain of American workers who’ve been displaced by globalization — he’s speaking to a stereotype of blue-collar hard hats who won Richard Nixon the 1968 election, while ignoring the millions of service and retail workers who increasingly represent the real working class of America. That working class is sick of blaming minorities for their suffering and is ready to take on the real problem — a system that’s tilted entirely to the rich.
  2. He was against the Iraq War.
    Trump’s one foreign policy credential is a lie. Unlike Barack Obama, Trump was for the war when it was hardest to be against it. And he was for the withdrawal that he now blames for the creation of ISIS. In a sane world what Trump feels about Iraq would be irrelevant, but since he’s using this to bolster his credentials to seek a job where he has promised to use torture, intentionally kill civilians, and shut down basic freedoms of the press and religion that we take for granted, he needs to be confronted on this lie every time he trots it out.
  3. He would help workers.
    In his big economic speech in Detroit last week Trump completed his evolution to full Romneyism/ Bushism/ Rubioism while maintaining his trademark racism. It’s the same old tax breaks that mostly or only help the rich, matched with… nothing to help workers. “If such policies were effective, we would remember George W. Bush’s presidency as one of great prosperity, instead of a period of stagnant wages for blue- and white-collar workers,” said Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. Trump would uninsure 20 million Americans from working families while pushing policies that would drive wages lower and lower, eliminating one of the biggest raises workers have gotten in decades.
  4. The press is killing his campaign. 
    When he’s focused enough to care, Trump is now running against the press. As if the press were to blame for a disastrous campaign that has Republicans abandoning him like he was the Iraq War in 2007. Trump’s act used to feature him bragging about polls and acting awed over his success. Now that the stench of failure follows him like a dazed Mike Pence, he’s stuck ranting against the institution that made his rise possible — free media. The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent points out that while Trump’s “dominate all media” strategy worked in the GOP primary, he was completely unprepared for how “the coverage and scrutiny are inevitably getting a lot harsher, at precisely the moment when Trump is devolving into his worst bouts of depravity and unhinged behavior yet.”
  5. Society is rigged against a fortunate son who’s relied on government help his entire career.
    Trump’s rich daddy gave him every advantage known to man, which helped Trump avoid the draft and launch his business. The courts protected him from creditors — over and over again. City government and tax breaks fueled his first development projects. Powerful lobbyists keep him from paying taxes. Conservative media gave him a platform. Cable news desperate for relevance let him exploit their airwaves to perform informercials of hate. And a Republican Party eager to win an election that could decide the Supreme Court for generations begged him not to leave it. Yes, the system is rigged — for Donald Trump and his kids. And his escalating wrath comes from knowing that as rigged as his success has been, he’s facing the greatest failure of his life, perhaps the most resounding defeat suffered by any candidate in a generation. And he’s losing fair and square. Sad!
Never Eligible To Vote, Young Immigrant Plays Key Role In Clinton Campaign

Never Eligible To Vote, Young Immigrant Plays Key Role In Clinton Campaign

By Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

NEW YORK – Lorella Praeli has one of the most important jobs on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign – even though she’s never voted in an election.

As Latino outreach director, Praeli spends her days at Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn poring over polling data, winning endorsements from Latino leaders and fine-tuning the campaign’s messages to reach the nation’s fastest-growing bloc of voters.

A Peruvian immigrant who lived in the U.S. without legal status until three years ago, when she obtained a green card through marriage, Praeli hopes to obtain citizenship in time to vote in the election that she is helping shape.

That the campaign hired her speaks to the growing influence of the immigrant youth movement she helped lead as well as the distinct demographics of Latino voters.

The median age of Latinos in the U.S. is 27 – just like Praeli – and most Latino voters are either foreign born or the children of immigrants. To win over Latinos for Clinton in key states such as Florida, Colorado and Nevada, Praeli will have to connect with people much like herself.

But doing that is a monumental task. Twice as many Latinos will be eligible to vote next year as in 2000, but Latinos tend to turn out at lower rates than other groups, in part because many young Latinos aren’t engaged in politics.

“We have to give people a reason to vote,” Praeli says.

For Praeli, who came to the U.S. as a child to seek medical treatment, and whose mother still lives without legal status, the race is personal. She took the job in June shortly after Clinton pledged to do more than President Barack Obama to shield immigrants from deportation.

Praeli, who previously worked at United We Dream, one of the nation’s largest immigrant youth groups, played a crucial role in helping to convince Obama to expand his deportation protection program to include the parents of citizens and legal permanent residents. On the day he announced the expansion at a celebratory rally at a Las Vegas high school auditorium, Praeli stood in the front row, crying and clutching her mother, Chela.

A maid in New Milford, Conn., Chela would have qualified for the program. With it, she likely could have traveled to Peru for the first time in nearly 20 years to see her ill father. But that’s all on hold after the administration’s effort to limit deportations was blocked in court by Republican opponents who argue it exceeds Obama’s power.

“To all of a sudden have that pulled out from under you overnight, it makes you angry,” Praeli said in a recent interview, her fists clenched. The experience, she said, convinced her to leave advocacy to help elect a Democrat, a sentiment that has grown stronger in recent months, as Republican front-runner Donald Trump has called for dramatic measures to reduce illegal immigration.

“It’s not enough to sit on the sidelines,” she said.

Not all her former colleagues agree with that approach. Some activists complain Democrats have sought to co-opt the immigrant rights movement, and many have come to distrust promises from politicians. Obama, angling for Latino votes in 2008, pledged to pass immigration reform in his first year, but lost his chance by waiting to make a serious push until his second term. By then, Republicans controlled Congress and blocked efforts to rewrite immigration laws.

At a going away party for Praeli in Washington this summer, some colleagues ribbed her for joining forces with a politician.

“Good luck,” said the group’s managing director, Cristina Jimenez. “We’ll see you on the battlefield.”

Praeli has been a fighter since her childhood in Ica, Peru. She was 2 years old when a drunken driver hit another car and then slammed into her on the street, pinning her small body against a wall. Shortly after, doctors amputated her right leg just above the knee.

As she was learning to walk with a prosthetic leg, she often fell. Her father, who was involved in local politics, forbade anyone from helping her up, insisting she learn how to do it on her own. On hard days, he would sing to her in Spanish: “If you get up, you’ll fall. If you fall, you’ll get up again.”

That message – that there will be bumps in the road, but you will survive them – helped when the family moved without legal authorization to small-town Connecticut when Praeli was 10. An aunt lived there, and Praeli would have access to better medical treatment.

Her mother, trained as a psychologist in Peru, found work cleaning houses and looking after other people’s children. Her father returned to Peru a few years later, unable to get the hang of American life. (He and Praeli video chat frequently; last year, she called him from aboard Air Force One.)

In New Milford, where Praeli and her younger sister were the only Latinos at their elementary school, bullies took notice of Praeli’s prosthetic leg and glossy black hair and taunted her with slurs like “peg leg” and “border hopper.”

She stood up to them – printing out copies of their online jeers and delivering them to school police – and took revenge by excelling in the classroom. She attended Quinnipiac University on a full scholarship. But even as she embarked on academic studies of how municipal policies affect immigrants in the country illegally, she kept her own status a secret.

That changed in 2010, as hopes dimmed for a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for some young immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers. Praeli contacted a leader of the Dreamer movement and a few weeks later was on her way to a meeting in Kentucky with hundreds of other young people in the country illegally.

That 16-hour van ride was life-changing, she said. Everybody seemed happy, and no one was scared. “It’s because they were building a movement,” she said.

The activists, borrowing from the gay rights struggle, talked about the importance of “coming out” – publicly disclosing their lack of legal status. “We wanted to create a moral dilemma in the country so when people say ‘undocumented,’ they know who they’re talking about,” Praeli said.

A few weeks after the Kentucky meeting, she had her own coming out moment at a news conference in New Haven, Conn. “For years I learned to be quiet and to live in the shadows and hide,” she told reporters. “I can no longer just sit and wait for something to happen.”

Praeli co-founded a nonprofit group, Connecticut Students for a Dream, and helped win passage of legislation that grants in-state tuition to university students in the country illegally. After she graduated, she married her U.S.-citizen boyfriend, Tim Eakins, and moved to Washington to push for an immigration overhaul.

Now Praeli is trying to bring to the Clinton campaign the savvy messaging and grass-roots organizing that made the Dreamers among the most successful civil rights activists of recent times.

Photo: Lorella Praeli and her mom Chela Praeli via Twitter

Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Remarks Force GOP Reckoning On Immigration

Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Remarks Force GOP Reckoning On Immigration

As Donald Trump faces corporate boycotts over his recent comments deriding Mexican immigrants, his remarks are also dividing Republicans, and their conservative constituencies, by forcing them to reconcile their “tough-on-immigration,” “secure-the-border” rhetoric with their hopes of garnering more Latino votes than the Democrats in 2016.

In his June announcement launching his presidential campaign, Trump said: “When Mexico sends its people [to the United States], they’re not sending their best…. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Republicans, and especially other candidates seeking the GOP presidential nomination, have been forced to state publicly whether they stand with Trump on immigration policy.

Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, called Trump’s comments “not helpful,” while former Florida governor Jeb Bush distanced himself from Trump, saying he disagreed with Trump’s comments. Texas senator Ted Cruz recently said on Fox News that Trump “speaks the truth.”

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who recently announced his own presidential bid, said Trump’s comments were “wholly inappropriate.”

Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who is not running for president, defended Trump’s remarks, saying critics had taken his statements out of context.

Conservative business interests are singing a different tune. In a June 30 statement, touting the entrepreneurial credentials of the United States’ immigrant community, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce said Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants represent “an extreme and exclusionary position that has no basis in fact and is completely inappropriate in our national political discourse.”

Joining Univision, NBC, and Macy’s boycotts of Trump businesses, the Hispanic Chamber said it will not consider Trump hotels as possible locations for its 2016 National Convention in Miami, Florida, or its 2016 Legislative Summit in Washington, D.C. Likely fearing consumer boycotts, the business community is running from Trump, seeking to push him further away from the Republican mainstream, while Trump, ever the consummate businessman, is breaking ties with any company that seeks to blacklist him.

Criticizing Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for blaming immigrants for a declining middle class in the United States, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has said, “Politicians promote misleading facts about immigration to rile up their political base.” The Chamber might as well have been talking about Trump.

But by playing to the GOP’s right-wing base, Trump’s comments are forcing Republicans to reconsider their hardline stances on securing the border and not offering “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants, causing splits within the GOP over immigration. Republicans want (and desperately need) to court Latino voters nationally, so while moderate Republicans are trying not to alienate potential GOP voters, Trump and the Tea Party faithful prefer sticking with their nativist, scorched-earth rhetoric.

Which explains why Democrats are rejoicing that Trump is becoming the face of the Republican Party. “His outlandish rhetoric and skill at occupying the national spotlight are also proving to be dangerously toxic for the GOP brand, which remains in the rehabilitation stage after losing the 2012 presidential race,” reports The Washington Post.

In 2014, 62 percent of Latinos reported voting Democratic in their congressional district race, according to the Pew Research Center. And in the 2012 presidential election, President Obama had a 44-point advantage over Republican challenger Mitt Romney when it came to Latino voters.

If Republicans hope to win the White House in 2016, winning over more Latino voters will certainly play a large role. The problem for the GOP is not just limited to one well-known Republican candidate’s dramatic, outspoken racism. More so, it’s the fact that Trump’s stance has shined a spotlight on the party’s deeply entrenched xenophobia, and now every candidate has to acknowledge it.

More and more, it doesn’t seem possible for Republicans to have their border-wall-and-deportations cake, and eat more Latino votes, too.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr