THE HISPANIC REPUBLICAN

A survey of changing political trends among Latino American constituencies over the last half-century.

Hispanics are not born Democrats, although they have trended that way in the last several elections. It seems likely that they’ll do so in 2020, if only because of the current president’s anti-immigrant and nativist rhetoric. Still, Northwestern University professor Cadava points out, Hispanics voted for him “by a slightly wider margin than the percentage of Hispanics who voted for establishment candidates such as John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.” The author rightly observes that the Hispanic population is not monolithic: Mexicans, Cubans, Central Americans, and Puerto Ricans bring different cultural sensibilities to the table. Cubans who left their native country because of opposition to Fidel Castro are far more likely to vote Republican, for instance, than Mexican farmworkers in the Southwest, and though most are at least nominally Catholic, both progressive and conservative elements in the Hispanic population can cite church teachings to back their political views. Cadava looks back at the days when Hispanic support was strongest for Republican candidates, as with the Latinos con Eisenhower organization and its follow-up, Latinos con Goldwater, which enjoyed reasonable success because of Goldwater’s determined courtship of Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans. Even Nixon had a so-called “Brown Mafia,” though it relied for support on “doling out government grants and contracts, dangling appointments in front of prominent Hispanics, cutting deals with some of the Chicano movement’s leaders, and efforts to suppress support for McGovern.” Other Republicans have been more worthy of that support—Gerald Ford, for instance, who expanded the Voting Rights Act to include ballots and other election materials written in Spanish. As for the present, Cadava ventures that Hispanic supporters of Trump believe that while he’s “unrefined,” he’s not a racist.

Of interest to political trend watchers—and a warning to Democrats not to take the Latino vote for granted.