In 1980, the then Republican candidate Ronald Reagan contacted the Latino businessman Lionel Sosa, owner of one of the largest Hispanic advertising agencies in the United States, and told him a phrase that is easy to imagine in the mouth of some political leader in America. Latina: "All Latinos are Republicans," Reagan told Sosa, "they just don't know it yet."
For most of the 1980s, the conservative president who led a strong anti-communist campaign before the end of the Cold War refined the Republican strategy with a speech that, 40 years later, would emerge again in the Trump campaign.
“He had a huge ideological appeal that seduced conservative Latinos: he talked about family values, anti-communism, the ethics of working hard,” says Geraldo Cadava, historian at Northwestern University and author of the book
The Hispanic Republican
( The Hispanic Republican).
Reagan's speech attracted Cubans against Castro, Central Americans against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and other Latinos who during the Cold War had their own version of Castro or a guerrilla.
"That speech is consistent with what Trump repeated during this campaign," Cadava explains.
Although Reagan never spoke of building a wall, his appeal to the triad of patriotism, family, and religious freedom caused 34% of the Hispanic vote - who was predominantly Democratic - to move toward his party.
The arrow of time that goes from Reagan to Trump is not linear: it is full of advances and setbacks that respond to the electoral tactics used by each party and the changing mix of identities that occurs in a nation that still does not understand what it is. be Latino.
For years, the US media spoke of the Latino vote as "the sleeping giant" that could define an election.
This year, when he seemed to wake up, many were surprised to see that the giant was not as they imagined;
or, rather, they discovered that it was actually a heap of different individuals piled up, who appeared to be one under the cover of a category imposed in the census.
"We need to bury the false belief that the Latino vote is monolithic," former Democratic congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell wrote in an editorial in The Washington Post, after losing her seat in Congress to the Republican advance in South Florida.
Looking at the 2020 results it is clear that Biden took the majorities, but also that Trump increased the number of conservative votes in areas with large Latino populations.
A detailed analysis of how these voters behaved shows at least three fundamental lessons for those who aspire to conquer the 32 million Latino voters that could be decisive in the 2022 and 2024 elections: no party will be able to seduce them without differentiated campaigns based on their origin, your experience with migration, or your social class.
What does "vote Latino" mean
In 2004, when George W. Bush approached the Reagan dream like no one before and obtained almost half of the Latino votes at stake, the Republican Party saw itself as the home of all those who - regardless of origin - preferred little government, a lot of business and a strong hand against terrorism.
Just eight years later, Mormon Mitt Romney's crushing defeat among Hispanic voters led conservatives to question his ideological platform, calling it excessively closed and "white."
But, after two more electoral cycles, Trump managed to regain the support of many Latinos, and with him the reconsideration of identity is reopened: what does “vote Latino” mean, if it means anything?
After seeing the growing support for the outgoing president in Texas or Florida, the Latino vote now looks more like a multi-colored mosaic than a concrete block.
"I have no idea if there is something that we can really call 'a Latino vote', but millions of them voted, they represent at least 13% of the voters, so we have to make an effort to understand that crowd," he told El PAÍS Cadava, the author of
The Hispanic Republican
.
Before the 1930s, the professor explains, the majority of Hispanics identified as Republicans, and it was largely the social policies of former Democratic President Franklyn Delano Roosvelt that began to move Latinos toward the liberal party, until the today.
Although since 2016 the rejection of Trump has generated an unprecedented Latino mobilization in some areas such as Arizona or Nevada, in others the Republican has gained ground, such as south and central Florida, southern Texas or cities like Milwaukee (Wisconsin).
There, he successfully appealed to the working class and took advantage of a vacuum created by the neglect of the Democrats, who have not invested enough in understanding the complexity of a group with many differences.
Joe Biden obtained more votes among Hispanics than Trump, but this lever had a very different action depending on where: the clearly 'blue' states of the northeast are, such as New York, New Jersey or Virginia, where the presence of Latinos in certain counties drove the margin of victory of the former vice president.
The same thing happened in more contested territories like Nevada or Pennsylvania.
In border states with a strong Hispanic presence, such as California, New Mexico or Arizona, the relationship between the number of Hispanics and the Democratic vote is less clear, but surely the result would not have been the same without the Latino mobilization.
⇲ A not so clear relationship
The result of crossing the vote and the presence of Hispanics is a weak, non-linear correlation between the margin of votes for Democrats and the presence of Latinos in each zone.
Only the counties with very little Latino population are clearly Trumpist, it is true, and it is also true that the Latino effect fades above 10%, disappears and even turns around from 15%.
There are countless strongly 'red' counties with more than half of their population self-defined as Hispanic.
Some counties, like Los Angeles or rural Kentucky, fit their respective stereotypes.
Others, like the interior of Texas, California, or especially certain areas of Florida, crack them.
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“The main lesson of all this is that you have to get there and you have to talk to the voter and Trump did it in states like Florida.
In Arizona, Nevada or Colorado, the Democratic Party did not do it so much, but several community groups and workers' unions did it, ”says José Parra, director of the consulting firm Prospero Latino, who was advisor on Hispanic communication for the Barack Obama campaign in 2012. Data shows that the president made headway in counties with significant working-class Latino populations - up to 12 percentage points on average in heavily Latino areas with low median household incomes.
In places like Florida, in addition to stirring up the specter of socialism to appeal to Latin Americans who fled from leftist regimes, Trump launched differentiated strategies based on nationality of origin and the characteristics of the groups of voters he was trying to conquer.
That plan worked in places like Miami-Dade, the state's most Latino county, which the president lost by 30 points in 2016 and by just seven in 2020.
"We developed a sophisticated messaging program designed for each community and even within the communities they were different, depending on the generation" they were targeting, says Giancarlo Sopo, one of the Hispanic strategists of the Trump campaign.
For example, to attract Cuban Americans who came to Miami in recent decades, Republicans launched an ad with Susana Pérez, a well-known actress among Cubans of that generation.
The advertising featured images of representatives of the party's most progressive wing, such as Bernie Sanders, mixed with others of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or Che Guevara.
To address the Colombian community in South Florida, Republicans preferred to use the word "Castrochavismo," a term popularized by former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe and that Trump himself used in his tweets.
“All the political gains that the Democrats had with the Cuban Americans in the last 16 years were erased in an election.
They made a big mistake by allowing progressives to take over the party, "says Sopo, the Republican strategist.
The 37-year-old son of a Miami-born Cuban, he became one of the faces of what was sold as a generational change in the young Cuban-Americans who supported the Democrats during the Obama era.
But in 2018 he left the party due to the emergence of that progressive wing that he considers more radical, a trend that many Cubans have followed.
"The problem is not one of public policies, but rather a message problem," says Democrat José Parra, from Prospero Latino.
And he gives as an example that in Florida, despite the fact that Trump won the State, a measure considered progressive was approved, such as increasing the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour.
“There is not really a gap or a discrepancy between the Democrats and the Latino vote.
The question is how can you communicate that and how do you counterbalance what the other side did, because what they did was equate the definition of a leftist in Latin America with a left in the United States, when we know that they are two completely different things.
In Latin America we are talking about totalitarian regimes.
That message got through and the Democrats didn't arrive in time to step out. "
Mucarsel Powell, the congresswoman of Ecuadorian origin who lost her seat in Florida in November, believes that to analyze the Republican advance in some areas with large Hispanic populations, more elements must be taken into account.
“There is a good part of the Latino working class electorate that was desperate to reopen the economy, a party that at the national level did not speak enough about the economy and that thinks that racial identity is the only thing that leads communities of color to vote. and a strong anti-democratic disinformation campaign that was focused on Latinos, ”from Florida to the Rio Grande Valley, he wrote in his Washington Post article.
Trump got more support than in 2016 in rural areas where he did not campaign much and with a large Latino population.
Although Biden did well in metropolitan areas (core and periphery) such as San Antonio, Dallas or Houston, the outgoing president gained ground in some border areas with a Latino majority in the Rio Grande Valley, much less populated.
There, although there was no reversal of the national campaign, the messages of his party's candidates that made reference to jobs related to the oil industry or in favor of security and border protection agencies - one of the largest employers in the area - they worked for the Republicans.
The Texas counties of Zapata, Cameron or Starr, for example, saw some of the biggest gains for Trump across the country between last election and this year.
⇲ Urban Latinos and not so much
By mapping the extremes resulting from the crossover between the number of Hispanics in a county and whether it is rather urban (population 50,000 or more) or rural (low population, low densities), the usual division of Southwest + Latin Florida and white northeast becomes more complex: the dark spots are the urban islands, and the intermediate colors correspond to the suburban interface in which more and more diversity fits.
Indeed, the most Latino counties tend to vote for Biden, but this trend blurs and disappears when they are subdivided according to the degree of urbanization, to the point that when the county is low-density, ruralized, Republicans maintain their advantage, and it is not small.
It is when the county is both densely populated and with a high Hispanic presence that the 'red' victory becomes almost impossible (they only achieved it in Galveston, in the Gulf of Mexico).
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The future
For Antonio Arellano, director of JOLT, a non-governmental organization created in 2016 in Texas after Trump's arrival in power to promote the Latino vote, Hispanics, who will be the majority in that state in 2022 when the next mid-term elections are held. period, they are “an unexploited mine”.
“No one has been able to capture them.
They need representation that understands their needs and offers real solutions to their problems ”.
For his part, Giancarlo Sopo believes that the challenge for Republicans for the next electoral events will be to consolidate the support of minorities that this year have been attracted by Trump's message, which managed to capture the attention of some Latino working classes, despite because the president is a man of the New York elite who during his government lowered taxes on the richest.
“Historically, the Republicans were the party of big business and what has happened now is that the roles have almost been reversed: the Democrats are the party of the elite, of the big technology corporations of San Francisco, of New York, and we Republicans are the party of the workers and the middle class ”.
Interestingly, it was class, rather than immigration policies, that moved the electorate toward Democrats decades ago.
Geraldo Cadava, the historian and author of
The Hispanic Republicans
, explains that the deep economic crisis of the 1930s caused Hispanics to start moving mostly towards that party.
"Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party represented rich Americans in the minds of many Hispanics," writes Cadava.
Instead, the social policies of the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression moved the electorate, which were mostly working classes, toward the more liberal party.
“Latinos gave him credit for putting food back on the table,” Cadava said.
This, despite the fact that the Democrat Roosevelt continued with the massive deportation of 1.8 million Mexican-Americans that Hoover had started.
⇲ Latino inequalities
Indeed, in recent decades, the Latino community in the US has consolidated the same inequality gap that affects the rest of the communities in a country made up of waves of migrants, many times following a similar pattern: arrival in search of a better future that only they achieve some families, usually after several generations, while many others remain stranded in lack of opportunities.
This division, paradoxically, could fuel the competitive capacity that Trumpist republicanism has shown in certain disadvantaged areas.
The anti-elitist message, focused on the promise of a better future through effort (such as the one that, according to the portrait of the Republicans themselves, would have achieved another segment of the families of Hispanic origin) combined with the defense of traditional values , shows potential.
The proof: there is hardly any difference in the pro-Biden margin between Latino counties, according to poverty level.
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The conservative discourse that Trump knew how to capitalize on has been, in Sopo's opinion, more effective than the "elitist" of the Democrats.
“Our culture is not politically correct.
Nobody who has spent 8 or 10 hours working wants to come home and see that they have changed their ethnic label, which they now call 'Latinx', or that they make them feel bad if they support the police and want border security ”.
For Congresswoman Mucarsel Powell, Democrats will have to redefine for the next elections in 2022 and 2024 how messages are launched to working-class Latinos, in conjunction with community organizations and “recruit candidates who reflect the diverse experiences of the community Latin ”.
For his part, analyst José Parra believes that Democrats should have already begun their investment in Latino communities.
"When you have to start working for the 2022 election was on November 4 of this year and you have to do it consistently and be looking for voters from now on, touching them, who feel that they are asking for their vote because the problem if not, the other party comes and asks for it in your place and they take it away ”.
⤰ An awkward category
The uncomfortable category of Hispanics in the census was born in the 1960s with the intention of making it overtly ambiguous, and that is why Latinos will always be enormously heterogeneous when it comes to voting.
It was promoted when groups of Chicano and Puerto Rican activists demanded that the government create this in the census so that Latino groups could have access to greater public assistance like other discriminated minorities.
If there was no data on them as a differentially racialized population, they could not demand specific rights.
"But the demographers knew they needed a category broad enough to have statistical power," explained Cristina Mora, a sociologist at the University of Berkeley who has studied the census.
"Some people proposed to be classified as brown, but that was complicated because who says that there is no place for Filipinos or Southeast Asians."
The Hispanic category was not perfect, but it was a political commitment to obtain data, and over time it achieved that many Mexicans, Cubans or Puerto Ricans were identified in the census as Hispanic even though they maintained differences by their country of origin or their class Social.
"It was a fundamental cultural change, because then the media like Univision, and also the market, began to popularize that category of Latino."
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