Of all the demographic groups that have found themselves on the receiving end of the president’s rhetorical barbs, perhaps none have more reason to feel offended than Latinos. Trump has spoken of immigrants crossing the southern border as “rapists” and “murderers” — and deeming them all “Mexicans,” hence his insistence that Mexico pay for the Wall.
Yet despite the president’s rhetorical harshness, Latino support for the Republican Party has held constant. One-third of Latinos voted Republican in the midterm elections, a four percentage point rise from the share that voted for Trump in 2016. In an election dominated by discussion of Trump’s hostility towards illegal immigration, Hillary Clinton managed to secure less support from Latinos than former President Barack Obama got against Mitt Romney in 2012.
Latinos are not a monolith, and Democrats would be wise to realize now that demographics are not destiny. Americans are far more likely to vote with their bank accounts and personal values than they are with the color of their skin. Politicians hoping that Trump’s toxicity can permeate throughout the rest of the party will find themselves in quite the bind once they no longer have the curt commander in chief to run against.
The emerging progressive wing of the Democratic Party seems even more incompatible with Latino voters than the Republican Party under Trump.
For one thing, Hispanic Americans are disproportionately Catholic and pro-life in comparison to the average American, let alone to the average progressive. A whopping 62 percent of Hispanics are Catholic, and a growing amount are becoming evangelicals, a group that reports nearly double the churchgoing attendance of the average American. Nearly 60 percent of foreign-born Hispanics believe that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and barely four in ten of all Hispanic Americans lean pro-choice.
Back in the days of “safe, legal, and rare,” this wouldn’t posit too much of a problem for Democrats, but as the party moves further left and scalps their own moderates in the name of tolerance, religious and pro-life Latinos will increasingly find themselves left in the dust.
The Left does themselves no favors by assuming that greater quantities of melanin translate into political progressivism, and that all people perceived as ranking lower on the intersectional hierarchy share a common enemy in the much maligned straight, white male.
Intersectionality’s penchant for erasing the reviled “gender binary” doesn’t translate well into Romance languages. Notice how progressives have butchered the beauty of the Spanish language, employing the word “Latinx” to erase that bigoted, transphobic binary of “Latino” and “Latina” from existence. Furthermore, the long-entrenched tradition of machismo in many parts of Latino sexual culture is simply incompatible with aspects of third-wave feminism. Latino men identify as Republican at nearly double the amount of women that do, further indicating that politics have become far more polarized along gendered rather than racial lines.
Most significantly, Latinos don’t automatically subscribe to the Left’s idea of Latino politics. The overwhelming majority of Hispanics say that the U.S. has either too many or just the right amount of immigrants. A mere 14 percent believe we need more immigrants, presumably placing the percentage of Hispanics who agree with open-borders leftists in the single digits. While three-quarters of Hispanics oppose the wall, that’s more likely because Trump’s rhetoric and perceived racial animus has tainted the issue, making it overwhelmingly unpopular among all Americans, who oppose it three to two. Once Trump (and his Twitter account) are out of the picture, Democrats pushing to abolish ICE and flood the country with free immigration while distributing welfare will be far less sympathetic to hard-working Latinos who fought tooth and nail to become Americans.
Republicans have a race problem. But as Democrats slowly and surely embrace the mantle of intersectionality and progressive intolerance, leftism will become their religion problem.
