At least in Florida, but even the Washington Post can do the math on what that means elsewhere. Hispanic voters in the Sunshine State slipped the knot of the previous Democratic control over this demographic a few years back, and without them Florida has been lost to the GOP. Now, it looks like the trend has gone nationwide, and Democrats’ midterm hopes may slip away with them.
They want to throw money at messaging to counter it, but that’s not the problem:
This year’s midterms are expected to feature historic Democratic investment in advertising and outreach to Hispanic voters, an effort to stunt significant GOP gains and prevent similar inroads in states with burgeoning Hispanic communities.
Despite the investment, Democratic strategists and party leaders are pessimistic about their prospects among Hispanic voters in Florida after losing ground with that demographic in the state in the two most recent election cycles. Strategists privately admit that Democrats are still not investing enough to attract Florida’s Hispanic voters as the party sees that years of neglect and cultural conservatism has made the voting base too partisan to sway.
Florida is emerging as a glaring warning for Democrats about what can happen if they do not aggressively court Hispanic voters in other states, some party strategists say.
As the fastest-growing U.S. voting bloc, Hispanics could reshape the landscape of electoral politics for decades, making them essential in races that are determined at the statistical margins. Strategists for both parties said Latinos should now be viewed as swing voters, a group that needs constant persuasion and engagement because their turnout rate could determine close elections.
Amusingly, Democrats are about to make the mistakes made traditionally by Republicans. They’re spending a ton of money on national messaging rather than engage with voters and craft their policies around their concerns — or at the very least, contextualize their agenda to voter concerns in each community. I wrote about that problem in Going Red six years ago, and it’s amazing to see how little either party has learned in the meantime.
The Democrats’ problem isn’t with Hispanic voters per se, nor is it messaging — at least, not entirely. It doesn’t help that Democrats keep insisting on calling Hispanics “Latinxes,” despite several years of polling that shows how unpopular it is. It’s an Academia-originated diktat to Spanish speakers to degender their language, an insult to some degree and cultural colonization/imposed assimilation on an ironic scale that really can only be missed by people with multiple degrees.
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And please note: not once does the Post even mention the Latinx issue.
The more substantial problems for Democrats now are related to that attitude as well. Democrats refuse to address the kitchen-table issues of the economy, inflation, and crime, issues which have regressive impacts and especially hit the black and Hispanic communities hardest. Instead, they want to contest this election on abortion and Academia’s favorite issue, climate change.
That kind of disconnect won’t get bridged by campaign ads. It won’t get alleviated by bucketloads of cash, either. Republicans used to think that those solutions would work with Hispanic and black voters too, but never did because Republicans weren’t addressing the issues that mattered to those communities. In this cycle, the GOP is the only party talking about inflation, gas prices, and skyrocketing crime that has hit generational peaks under Democrat governance.
That’s why the “demography is destiny” assumption was so dangerous for both parties:
Although a majority of Latinos voted Democratic in 2020, the erosion of their support for the party in Florida and South Texas shook the long-standing notion that demographic change in the United States would automatically benefit Democrats.
Make a better argument, get more closely involved in those communities, and talk about the issues that matter. That’s how you win elections. It may take a while to build up that trust, especially in communities that have been long ignored, but it eventually produces solid results. Hispanics have gotten short shrift from Democrats long enough, and now want real solutions to the issues that matter most to them.
The question isn’t whether Democrats’ ad-campaign snow job will work. It’s whether Republicans will take advantage of the opening and make those long-term investments in Hispanic communities — or whether they’re just showing up for the “breakfast tacos” too.
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