How The GOP Built A Loyal Hispanic Base: Decades of Appts, Policies Win Reliable 1/3 Latino Vote
"How the GOP Built a Loyal Hispanic Base." For decades, Republicans used appointments and policies to win a reliable third of the Latino vote. By Cecilia Muñoz, Magazine, Washington Monthly, July/August, 2020.
What’s the deal with Hispanic Republicans, anyway? For anyone following Hispanic politics, it’s a perplexing question. The GOP is associated with the rollback of policies that are intended to benefit minorities and communities at the economic margins—the very policies that made the vast majority of Latinos Democrats. The current standard-bearer of the party launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, and is regularly, famously, deeply insulting. And yet roughly 30 percent of Hispanics voted for him. Indeed, Republican candidates for the presidency have generally been able to count on 25 to 35 percent of the Latino vote for most of the past century. How could the party build a base of support stable enough to withstand what seems like constant attack?
t’s a question that Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University who specializes in politics, policy, and American Latinos, gets from his students and attempts to answer in his most recent book, The Hispanic Republican. As he explains, there are many reasons why some Latinos have embraced the GOP. Among Cuban Americans, Republican support has deep roots in Cold War anticommunism. Some Mexican Americans in the Southwest identify strongly with Spanish roots going back centuries, and, as Cadava writes, for complex reasons, identification with Spain became one of the hallmarks of Hispanic Republican identity. Some Puerto Ricans, for their part, connected to the party in the years during which Republicans flirted with the possibility of statehood for the island. And many Hispanics, like other Americans, simply embraced the GOP for its generalized commitments to free enterprise and liberty.
But Cadava makes the point that Hispanic loyalty to the party can’t be understood through the simple lens of conservatism, and the book is a deep dive into the specific history that created a relatively stable and resilient base of Hispanics among the Republican ranks. Cadava introduces us to individual leaders who fostered ties between the Republican Party and their communities and details the outreach efforts that Republicans ultimately adopted in order to keep—and hopefully grow—a Latino base. What results is a chronicle of the ways in which a segment of the community, inclined toward Republicanism for historical reasons, worked with the party to create both substantive connections and symbolic signals of respect and inclusion. These tactics helped ensure that roughly 30 percent of Latino voters remain stalwart Republicans even now.
Cadava introduces us to the political evolution of various Hispanic subgroups, beginning with the Eisenhower years. The book gets off to a bit of a dizzying start (there are a lot of constituencies to get to know, and each of them is quite different), but it hits its stride as it takes the reader through time. After Eisenhower, one of Cadava’s first major subjects is Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who in some ways symbolizes the GOP’s tortured political relationship with Latino constituents. Like many future Republican candidates, Goldwater’s staunch anticommunism attracted some Hispanics, but his opposition to civil rights put others off. “The views Goldwater expressed about civil rights contributed to his extremist reputation and to the suspicion of many Hispanics that he just didn’t like them,” Cadava writes...
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https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2020/how-the-gop-built-a-loyal-hispanic-base/
- Trump’s Secret to Victory in 2020: Hispanic Voters. Politico, Feb. 24, 2020 (Prior to full coronavirus pandemic)
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/24/2020-hispanic-voters-donald-trump-225192
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