Real Reasons for Democratic Struggles with Latinos

Another very fine Bouie column from last week is worth discussing. That’s because he nails the real reason for a lot of Democratic struggles. No, it’s not the progressive wing talking about race or demanding big social programs. And as he points out here, use of the term “Latinx” is not why Democrats have seen declines with Latino voters. Now, I think this term is pretty offensive because it’s basically white people on college campuses blindly attempting to show “ally culture” while not actually considering how this affects other people from Latin America who find the butchering of their language offensive. To say the least, this is something the Spanish speaking community needs to work out on their own before whites intervene to be “allies,” especially when all of 3 percent of the affected population uses the term.

Bouie notes that this is not the issue. And what is the issue is an important one:

After Donald Trump and the Republican Party made gains among Black and Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election, a chorus of voices emerged to blame the outcome on Democratic messaging.

Democrats, went the argument, were too “woke,” too preoccupied with “identity politics,” too invested in slogans like “defund the police” and too eager to embrace the language of the activist left. Terms like “BIPOC” (an acronym for Black, Indigenous and People of Color) and especially “Latinx” alienated the working-class Black and Hispanic voters who shifted to Trump in key states like Florida and North Carolina.

It makes sense that this is where the conversation turned. People who work with words — journalists, commentators and political professionals — are naturally interested in the impact of messaging and language on voters.

At the same time, it is important to remember that language does not actually structure politics. Yes, a political message can persuade voters or, on the other end, help them rationalize their choices. And yes, a political message can be effective or ineffective. But we should not mistake this for a causal relationship.

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Does a term like “Latinx” alienate some portion of the Hispanic voting public? A recent survey says yes. According to a new national poll of Hispanic voters, only 2 percent chose the term to describe their ethnic background, and 40 percent said it offends them either “a lot” (20 percent), “somewhat” (11 percent) or “a little” (9 percent). To the extent that Democratic politicians and affiliated voices used the term — demonstrating their distance from the communities in question — that may have left a bad taste in the mouths of some Hispanic voters. But it does not follow from there that use of the term explains anything about electoral trends among Hispanics. For those, we have to look at the material and ideological shifts I mentioned earlier.

It would be too much for a single column to give a full inventory of those changes. But I can point to a few. First, there is the economy. In areas like the Rio Grande Valley of Texas — where Republicans made major inroads with Mexican American voters in 2020 — rising wages for workers in the region’s oil and gas industry helped shift some voters to the right. Nationally, there’s evidence that some Hispanic voters credited Trump with wage growth and rewarded him with additional support. In general, upward mobility and a greater sense of integration into the mainstream of American society have made a significant number of Hispanic voters more open to Republican appeals.

Playing a similar role is evangelical religion. As my news-side colleague Jennifer Medina noted in an article last year, “Hispanic evangelicals are one of the fastest growing religious groups in the country.” Churches remain important sites for political socialization, and evangelicalism is, at this juncture, a conservative force in American culture and politics. It makes sense, then, that Hispanic evangelicals are also much more likely than their Catholic counterparts to vote Republican.

The evangelical issue is a tough one. For all that most whites think all Latinos are Catholic, that is less true every single day, both in the U.S. and in most Latin America nations, especially Guatemala and Brazil, but really everywhere. That evangelicalism is deeply connected to globally conservative politics, often with close ties to American evangelicals. That’s a problem–and as the nation becomes more secular generally, this could rejuventate the churches in ways that liberals don’t like.

But I also want to talk about producerism and back to Bouie:

Entangled in these social and economic transformations is a longstanding and potent American ideology that slots some people as “makers” and others as “takers,” to use Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff language to donors during his presidential campaign in 2012. Although traditionally associated with whiteness and masculinity, this “producerism” holds sway and currency across the electorate. That’s part of why candidates in both parties scramble to associate themselves with blue-collar workers and why some Democratic proponents of the social safety net insist that their policies provide a “hand up, not a handout.”

I think that a part of Donald Trump’s appeal, especially for men, was the degree to which he embodied the producerist ideal. His image, at least, was of the commanding provider, who generated wealth and prosperity for himself and others. Put another way, the prevalence of producerist ideology in American society helped frame Trump — previously the star of “The Apprentice” — as a political figure, making him legible to millions of Americans. Hispanic voters were as much a part of that dynamic as any other group.

This is important on a few levels. First, as I pointed out the other day, good governance does not get rewarded politically. Shutting down the economy and the schools to control the pandemic was unquestionably the correct choice from a policy perspective. It also almost certainly contributed directly to Democrats losses in Virginia last month, not by crazy Trump voters, but by other voters who found having their kids at home or not being able to get out of the house really alienating.

Second, producerism is a central ideology through the Christian diaspora. In debates about the economy’s future, many have thrown around ideas of universal basic income. We saw some benefits from this during the pandemic, when we essentially went there as a short-term policy. It saved a lot of people from homelessness and poverty. It also did not pay off politically for anyone who supported it. Generally put, people want to work, no matter the risk. That may not be true of you, but you (or I) do not represent the totality of the American experience. It’s unquestionably true that people who migrate from Latin American to the U.S. are definitely here to work. As for the pandemic, these are workers used to working in difficult and dangerous conditions, both back home and in the U.S. So to them, the pandemic was just another curveball, not a world changing event. They wanted to keep working, or many did anyway. Bouie is almost certainly correct in how caudillos like Trump can appeal to Latinos, especially men, based on the combination of masculine ideology and producerist ideology. This is why from a policy perspective, I think a government job guarantee makes a lot more political sense than the UBI. It’s also something we have to take seriously when we think about building political coalitions in this nation that include working class folks from all races. The ideology of work is very real. It’s central to the human experience. That’s just a fact. So how do we act on that?