So, if the party of secularists and liberalism and “abortion on demand” — and its leader, Obama — are so bad for Hispanics, why did more than 70 percent of them vote for him? The answers and solutions are not as simple, quick, or cheap as GOP and superPAC operatives would like them to be.
Hispanics come to America for the American Dream. They are “trabajadores,” and you would be hard pressed to find an American farmer, contractor, or restaurant owner who would not testify to their work ethic. Unfortunately, the communities in which they live and work are teeming with liberal activists: farm and service-industry labor unions, well-intentioned community-based social services providers and more radical and racially motivated Latino groups such as La Raza, LULAC, and Mecha. In addition, the curricula their kids encounter in public schools are either hostile or silent on the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and ideas that are the foundation of conservative thinking. All of these activist groups and institutions have a common ideology and an affinity for big and centralized government, and of course, entitlements. They go out of their way to sign folks up and to begin the cycle of government dependency. Once hooked to the IV of government handouts, a steady drip of ideology, and a heavy dose of raunchy pop culture, the once vibrant American Dreams and traditional family values of Hispanics drift into a slow, deep coma.
The sad fact is that these activists operate unimpeded. The voices of economic freedom, personal responsibility, and self-determination are virtually nonexistent in Hispanic communities and media. The Catholic Church, a potential counter to these secular and socialist ideas, tends to place its most liberal priests in these communities. Thus, the “social justice” mantra so effectively co-opted by the Left in the Obama/Soros era is often reinforced in the churches Latinos attend.
The argument that Latinos are moving away from Republican candidates relies on the contrast between the number of Hispanic votes that successful GOP candidates like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush received and the less impressive results of John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney this year. On the surface, that argument seems compelling, but it ignores a couple of important points. For one thing, it generally overstates Bush’s numbers among Latino voters, thanks to some bad exit polling in 2004 long since discredited. Today, the media persist in claiming that Bush received somewhere between 41 percent and 45 percent of the Latino vote against John Kerry, a sharp contrast with the 27 percent that Romney captured. Yet subsequent academic analyses of the 2004 elections estimate that Bush actually received about 35 percent of the Latino vote. That wasn’t a “historic” high, as Bush political advisor Karl Rove still claims; rather, it was in line with what Reagan, another victorious Republican, had achieved.
Also, there’s the stubborn fact that McCain and Romney did worse than Reagan and Bush among many other demographic groups, including traditionally strong Republican ones. Romney, for instance, won the vote among those who say they attend religious services regularly, but not by as wide a margin as Bush did. Once we have better data, the larger issue in the 2012 election may turn out to be a sharp decline in white voters, which cannot be explained merely by demographic shifts. It’s possible that 5 million or more eligible whites didn’t vote, perhaps because of a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate.
What’s more likely than race to account for Hispanic voting trends is income, a decisive factor in this election. The Obama campaign did a good job of portraying Romney as a Wall Street multimillionaire whose policies would favor the rich. Despite some conservatives’ belief that the Republican Party is capturing blue-collar America, Romney lost decisively among lower-income voters, who continue to vote Democratic in large numbers. Hispanic households fit into this demographic group: on average, their incomes are about 35 percent lower than the national average. Even more to the point is that Romney did terribly among voters who earned less than $50,000 a year, capturing just 38 percent of their votes—and over 60 percent of Hispanic households fit that income profile.
And as always, have at it in the comments!