I am reminded of the time I was giving a friend in politics in Utah advice on how to best engage with Hispanic voters a few years ago... Short lil thread on this.
For anecdotal context, I've block walked for a few campaigns in Texas as a Repub, my most recent one was for a Tejano CFO running for a congressional district, unfortunately we didn't win, but we gave it a solid shot. I'm relatively involved in the local GOP here.
My wife is an old school Tejana from El Paso, her family has lived in Texas since it was Mexico, and their lineage goes back to the Parras who had been there since before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, most of her family are middle class Republicans.
Myself, I'm a California central valley boy at heart, I grew up in a rural orchard town where peaches and other fruit are grown. My earliest memories of Hispanics were the "picker kids" being snobs to everybody else, including mexican-american kids, in elementary school.
So what I mean to say is I'm not inexperienced in this regard despite being a white boy, the distinction between "Mexicans" (foreign) and "Hispanics" (born here) was shown to me by example really early on. A lot of Mexicans are assholes, but Hispanics are generally alright.
The big things to understand from a campaign perspective though, are that pandering gives you diminished returns (unless you yourself are a hispanic doing the pandering in a convincing way, then they buy it) and that the economy is the #1 concern.
The hispanic demo that is eligible to vote doesn't really care about many ideological or policy issues until they're about 3rd or 4th generation, and then they generally start to dovetail into the college liberal or tradesman conservative crossroads.
So that's why you'll see 90 lbs latina girls who go to college and get into viva la raza or brown beret crap that pisses off their dads, or they LARP as native americans in an act of carnivale similar to what white women do in college.
What confuses both dems and reps is that they can't be appealed to on the same traditional lines as whites and blacks, not as easily. Mexicans in particular, want to be seen as hard working and productive, and not talked down to. A lot of upper crust repubs have a hard time w/ it
Dems talk to them in a patronizing matter like they don't have any agency and are there to "uplift" them, which seems to work on black voters a lot better, but as time goes on falls flatter on them. All the worship blacks get doesn't go unnoticed by them.
Immigration was mostly a lynchpin issue for people who had parents or grandparents that came here illegally, but there are now larger contingents of hispanics who have been here a long time and made something for themselves worth protecting, including the labor rates.
My wife has like 3 plumbers in her family, and these guys get undercut by illegals who don't have to get licensing and will take like half the wage to do shoddy work, and for the american born hispanics who can vote they're seeing what immigration does to labor.
I do think there is one specific flashpoint that started to tip the scales, and it's an underrated one that even the most vaunted political scientist won't know or tell you, and it was the time a central american migrant scoffed at rice and beans offered to refugees in TJ.
thelibertytimes.com Believe it or not, it was this. The lions share of migrants illegally crossing are now central americans and not mexicans. Central americans are a very different breed, they are very culturally different from Mexicans, easily the largest hispanic vote bloc
The Mexicans and the central americans generally don't like each other, the Mexicans are way more mestizo (mixed with european) and the centracas are more indio (indigenous). They have way different food and different history and norms.
So there is a general perception and idea that the Mexicans are hard workers, and the Centracas are ungrateful and shameless and want to live on the dole. When a centraca caravan crushed a border fence and injured a ton of mexican border guards, mexicans were outraged.
So now the Mexicans get a taste of what it's like to have foreigners trampling the sovereignty of their border, by the Centracas, and then having them call rice and beans "pig food" when offered to them as charity. The response to this carried over to Mexican-Americans too.
I saw tons of the hispanics I know in my own life go from sympathetic to immigration to "shoot those centracas out of a catapult" within the space of like a few weeks after those events circulated, and that really removed their last reservations to flirting with the GOP.
The Dems didn't really have anything to offer them besides being immigration friendly, and with most mexican immigration pretty tapped out and the majority of it being people that mexicans despise, there's no guardrail left to them voting to keep people they think uncouth out.
Either way, representation does matter. I've noticed as a GOP door knocker, it's way easier to convert blacks and hispanics to the cause if you're one of their own, but once you get them to cross over and vote Republican *one* time, they are generally there forever.
Once they're effectively "onboarded" by their first enthusiastic GOP vote, they don't seem to care what race a candidate is and start to vote based on values, but don't underestimate the value of race in a primary either, in-group preference is still a thing.
Just go out of your way to be welcoming without being patronizing, and treat them the way you would treat a white dude showing up to the neighborhood GOP meeting and they'll generally fold right on in enthusiastically after a bit. Onboarding is the hard part.
They'll also have the lifelong enthusiasm of a convert in the case of mexican-american dads, Texas is filled with tejano dad phenotypes rocking punisher skulls and all sorts of other conservative cringe that would be right at home on an old white boomercon.
Most of them also don't have any of the racial guilt whites seem to have, they'll say things that the more well to do neocons with pucker factor won't say, and they don't give a shit about Israel either. I think this trend is going to keep going.
For now, this is a trend that is mostly accelerating in the southern border states, where most hispanics in the US live, as well as Florida due to Cuban emigre influence. But I've noticed that due to family ties, these things echo on down the chain. Polling seems to be bearing it
Just focus on economic factors like lowering the prices of shit and wage growth, unfortunately there's a culture of believing the govt and doing what they say that has to really be ground out of them, but for the 3rd generation ones and beyond it's not too hard.
They also prefer machismo in their political candidates, even if they are female. Insulting opponents, boasting, all the stuff you hear Bolsonaro doing, it plays really well with the hispanic demo because they like people that act like winners.
Those are my observations, and in response to the inevitable roasts I'll get from some RW buds, just remember, never ask a man his height, a woman her weight, or an internet racist the skin color of his wife.
Curiously enough it is for "some reason" extremely hard to search for articles about the incident where the Honduran called the rice and beans pig food. "Central American migrant complains about food in tijuana" turns up nothing but pro immigrant articles.
It's like there is deliberate SEO fogging around the event, you have to search specifically for the "pig food" remark.
@goraidersbaby But then again who is going to dodge the "hard worker" stereotype? It's complimentary so there's no reason not to accept it.
In person, you want to be as welcoming as possible and mention race as little as possible and just treat them like adults, I hate that paternalistic shit.
In person, you want to be as welcoming as possible and mention race as little as possible and just treat them like adults, I hate that paternalistic shit.
@goraidersbaby And at the end of the day, in many ways they really just aren't the same as whites, my wife can be a military officer with a masters degree and at the end of the day she's still got a bit of in-group preference I'm beating out of her.
Also if anyone in the GOP is actually listening and wants to stop ignoring me like they do at the County meetings, if you want to win over Hispanics just do huge "information" based ad campaigns showing cases where Centraca migrants have killed mexican-americans in DUI crashes.
Doesn't even have to be centracas even, just any case where an illegal has killed or robbed or beaten a brown guy with a spanish name and highlight that the perp is illegal and the victim is a citizen. That'll rile them the fuck up.
The way hispanic colorism works is when all the actual white people are out of earshot they all mog each other over who gets to be the whitest and who is the most indio, true story. This can be leveraged.
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