Donald Trump’s efforts to win over Hispanic Republicans are failing.
Prominent Hispanic GOP activists tell the Washington Examiner they cannot support him and they’re going to sit out the general election.
Trump says he loves “the Hispanics” and last week he tweeted a controversial picture of himself tucking into a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo. If he hoped to improve his image with Hispanic Republicans, the effort seems to have come up short.
Hispanic Republicans are a tiny segment of the party, but are loyal and usually highly active. Every election for decades they’ve toiled to convince fellow Hispanics, who are mostly liberal Democrats, to give the Republican Party and conservatism a shot.
Four years ago, Hispanic GOP operatives backed Mitt Romney despite his rejection of liberal immigration reforms and his controversial support of “self-deportation” to cut the population of illegal immigrants.
But many now cannot abide the GOP standard bearer. Hillary Clinton is equally unpalatable to them but they fear Trump’s rhetoric and policies on immigration could alienate the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group and stall efforts to bring more Hispanics into the Republican Party.
“I could never, ever, ever, vote for this man. I can’t even say his name. He has offended me, he has offended the people I love, and the people I represent,” said Rosario Marin, a California Republican who served as U.S. Treasurer under President George W. Bush.
“I have been a Republican in places not easy to be a Republican,” Marin added. “I have fought for my Republican principles, I have fought hard to register Latinos as Republicans — to run as Republicans. And, here comes along this man who doesn’t represent any of that. And I’m supposed to support him? No.”
Not all Hispanic Republicans, or political groups with party ties, are as strident in their opposition to Trump. But many find themselves in a personal and professional quandary.
They disapprove of Trump’s populist agenda and crude tone, especially as directed toward legal and illegal immigrants. Still, they have always been loyal soldiers, and couldn’t imagine backing Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee. Luis Fortuno, the former Puerto Rico governor who served in the last Bush administration and has been active in presidential politics since 1996, is among them.
Fortuno, who backed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the primary, said he gravitates toward candidates whose values he shares. On that basis, Fortuno said he cannot support Trump and will instead focus on helping Republicans down-ticket. However, Fortuno was critical of Clinton and expressed hope that Trump might evolve to become more “inclusive.”
“At this moment, the ideas he’s been espousing are contrary to the ideas I believe in, so it makes it very difficult to go out and campaign for him,” Fortuno said Monday.
The LIBRE Initiative, a Koch brothers group that focuses on educating Hispanics about conservative fiscal policy, isn’t sure how it’s going to approach 2016. Daniel Garza, LIBRE’s executive director, essentially said it’s up to Trump to earn the support of Hispanics by offering an attractive economic agenda. Back in August, reacting to Trump’s immigration proposals, Garza said they were indefensible that he might oppose Trump if he won the nomination.
Hector Barreto, president of the Hispanic Business Roundtable Institute, said his group is taking a wait and see approach.
The HBRI will have a major presence at the Republican convention in Cleveland, with no plans to scale back. Barreto is hopeful that, with the primary behind him, Trump might soften his language and pivot to a more traditional, conservative agenda that his group can endorse. But the Bush administration veteran conceded that Trump’s nomination is worrisome.
“We’ve been troubled and concerned by not only his statements but also the things he plans on doing. It would be counterproductive,” Barreto said. “We’re hoping we’ll see a major change in how he approaches our community.”
Still, Trump could find some pockets of support.
Republican operatives in South Florida, home of Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the candidates Trump beat in the primary, say that Cuban Americans might embrace Trump. They have historically voted Republican, and because many of them immigrated to the U.S. legally, albeit under special circumstances, they’re not as prone to reject Trump’s immigration policies as Hispanics from other Latin countries. Granted, a recent poll showed Clinton clobbering Trump among Florida Hispanics overall.
In Houston, attorney Jacob Monty, a Hispanic Republican bundler who previously supported Bush and Rubio, said he is backing Trump and that he was in the midst of organizing a fundraising event for him.
Monty, 48, acknowledged some of the deep policy differences between Hispanic Republicans and Trump, in particular his proposal to forcibly round up and deport the 11-12 million estimated to be living in the U.S. But Monty said the two sides could find common ground on border security, while charging that the Democrats use immigration as a wedge issue but never deliver the promised results.
He predicted that Hispanic Republicans would come around to Trump over time.
“I have no problem supporting Donald Trump for president. I think, as a Latino Republican, some of [his] rhetoric has not been good, but I have a decision to make,” Monty said, referring to Clinton as a nonstarter.
Trump begins the general election with some of the worst approval ratings in the history of modern polling, including among Hispanic voters broadly.
In March, Gallup found that Trump’s approval rating with Hispanics was 12 percent, compared to 77 percent who viewed him negatively. Those numbers are similar to a Latino Decisions battleground poll of registered Hispanic voters conducted in April. In that survey, Trump’s approval was cratering at 9 percent. In each poll, Clinton stood at a positive 59 percent and 61 percent, respectively.
These poor numbers are the result of the tone Trump set on Day 1 of his campaign.
In Trump’s launch speech last June, he referred to illegal Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.” Later in the summer, he proposed ending birthright citizenship and forcibly rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants, possibly including their family members who are U.S. citizens.
This could make it difficult for Trump to improve upon the 27 percent share of the Hispanic vote Romney earned in 2012, a poor showing with this bloc that was considered a major factor in his defeat at the hands of President Obama. Trump, worry Hispanic Republicans, could do worse than simply underperform Romney and lose another election.
Some polls have shown that Trump could be on the verge of motivating historic levels of Hispanic turnout to vote against him in November. Some Hispanic Republicans fret that Trump could create a whole new generation of Democratic Hispanics, making it harder for the GOP to win future presidential elections, not to mention undoing all of their hard work to turn the tide. Many argue that that’s exactly what happened in California 20 years ago.
“We have put a lot of people in different states where there are a significant number of Latinos, that are becoming growing bloc, that could actually tilt the election. The party put in resources and people in there,” Marin said. “Here’s comes this little orange man and all that work is for naught. You have no idea how devastated I am, because I know what it means for the future of the Republican Party.”
