Trump and the Latino vote 'You can't call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you'

Four years on, the Grand Old Party has chosen Donald Trump as its leader, a candidate who announced his presidential aspirations with a speech about the dangers of unchecked immigration and a promise to deport eleven million people and build a wall between the USA and Mexico. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said. Ugly isn’t the half of it.

Romney won 27% of the Latino vote. In a recent Latino Decisions poll of more than 3,000 Hispanic registered voters, conducted just before Trump’s latest vehemently anti-immigrant speech in Phoenix, the Republican nominee’s support stood at 19%. "We may very well be looking at his high water mark,” observed pollster Sylvia Manzano. The figure represented a rise from his nadir of 11% in April.

Assuming Trump wants to win, he appears to be counting on turning out enough white voters with his nativist rhetoric to offset inevitable losses among ethnic minorities. This appears unlikely, but is not impossible. In the key swing state of Nevada, where more than a quarter of the population is Hispanic, Hillary Clinton leads by just 2.3% according to the Real Clear Politics poll average.

In Florida, home to almost five million Hispanics, the margin is slightly wider at 2.7% but still well within striking distance for Trump. Florida’s Cuban-American emigres have tended to vote Republican (although this is changing among their children and grandchildren) but immigrants fleeing the economic crisis in Puerto Rico and a growing Colombian community in and around Miami have tipped the balance.

“The old Dixiecrat Florida voter is now pretty solidly swinging to the Republican party,” says Brent Wilkes, National Director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “Which move is more significant: the move of whites away from the Democratic party in Florida, or the move of Latinos towards the Democratic party? I tend to think that it’s the Latino population but I don’t underestimate the impact that somebody like Trump can have in part of the Confederacy.”

Between 2006 and 2016, the number of Hispanic registered voters in Florida increased by 61%. Hispanic television network Univision has set a goal of registering three million new voters nationwide this year, and anecdotal evidence suggests Trump’s candidacy is motivating record numbers of Latinos to participate, but there is little hard data to confirm this.

“We’ve seen the number of people requesting registration forms or pursuing citizenship has roughly doubled from previous election cycles,” says Wilkes. “People are telling us that they can’t stand Donald Trump and that they haven’t voted in the past but they’re going to vote this time - but of course until they actually vote, we’re not going to have the statistics.”

Latino Republicans have been urging Trump to moderate his stance on immigration. At the party convention, the Republican National Committee's Director of Hispanic Communications, Helen Aguirre Ferre, told reporters that Trump "has already said that he will not do massive deportations.” After a well-publicised meeting at Trump Tower, members of his National Hispanic Advisory Council pronounced him “humble” and in favour of “humane” immigration reform.

On his recent trip to Mexico to meet President Enrique Peña Nieto, Trump tried a softer tone, describing Mexican-Americans as “spectacular, hard-working people”. He claimed that the two men didn’t discuss the border wall, though Peña Nieto said they did (and that he insisted Mexico would not foot the bill) - but overall, the visit was a deemed a success by the media.

The New York Times was so convinced that it printed a front page story reporting that Trump had made “an audacious attempt… to remake his image on the divisive issue of immigration” - ignoring the red meat that he tossed out at a campaign rally in Phoenix later the same day.

“We will break the cycle of amnesty and illegal immigration,” Trump told supporters. "Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation.” He promised to round up and expel all immigrants with a criminal record and anyone who has overstayed their visa - an estimated six million people.

“Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone,” he said. Hard right pundit Ann Coulter tweeted: “I hear Churchill had a nice turn of phrase, but Trump's immigration speech is the most magnificent speech ever given.”

Three members of Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council resigned in protest. “He used us as props,” lawyer Jacob Monty complained. “We thought we were moving in the right direction…we feel misled,” said Alfonso Aguilar, of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. Pastor Ramiro Peña described Trump’s earlier promises of a more compassionate policy as a “scam”.

All three had appeared on television to defend Trump’s stance on immigration. In their absence, the campaign was left to rely on Marco Gutierrez, co-founder of Latinos for Trump, who said: “My culture is a dominant culture, and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re gonna have taco trucks [on] every corner.”

Clinton’s campaign rushed out an advert mocking Trump’s visit to Mexico. It also announced that it would be running television commercials in Arizona, a solidly red - or Republican - state that Democrats last won in 1996. Trump has an average lead of 2.7% in the latest polls, but the fact that Democrats are expending resources there is an indicator of how the growing Hispanic population and Trump’s deep unpopularity with Latinos is altering the electoral map.

In 1980, 16% of Arizona’s population was Hispanic. That figure is now 31%. Because many are undocumented immigrants, Latinos only make up 22% of the state’s registered voters, but their share of the electorate is growing fast. Between 2002 and 2014 Hispanic voter registration increased by 165%.

Arizona’s notorious ‘show me your papers’ law, SB1070, is a reminder that Trump is merely expressing mainstream conservative views. Nativist rhetoric has been standard in Arizona politics for decades, and Hispanics are registering in greater numbers partly in response to the wholesale denigration of their community.

In a hacked email, leaked shortly before the party convention, Democratic National Committee Communications Director Luis Miranda wrote that “Hispanics are the most brand loyal consumers in the world: Known fact… Once a brand loses this loyalty, Hispanics never re-engage: Unforgiving.”

In 1994, California’s Republican Governor Pete Wilson pushed through Proposition 187, denying undocumented migrants access to public services. With the exception of ‘the Governator’ Arnold Schwarzenegger, the GOP has failed to win state-wide office ever since. Democrats hope that other states with sizable Hispanic populations will follow suit.

Wilkes cautions against taking the Hispanic vote for granted. “I don’t think that many Latino families look at the Obama years as very successful years for immigrants in the United States. If anything, things seem to have gotten worse,” he says. Under President Obama, more than two million people have been deported, more than any previous administration, earning him the title of “Deporter-In-Chief” from Hispanic advocacy organisation La Raza.

Daniel Garza, Executive Director of the Libre Foundation, believes there is an opening for Republican candidates willing to woo Hispanic voters. “There are millions and millions of Latinos who self-identify as conservatives,” he says. “The Latino left feel like they have an ownership of the Latino electorate. I don’t believe it for a second.”

Garza worked in the Office of Public Liaison in George W. Bush’s White House, and was instrumental in his re-election. Bush’s 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004 remains the benchmark for Republican presidential candidates. “George W. Bush deliberately engaged the Latino community and did the outreach, and it was real, and people felt it, and he was rewarded with the Latino vote,” Garza says.

Cesar Blanco, Director of the Latino Victory Project, scoffs at this. He contrasts the opening night of the Republican convention, featuring the family members of people killed by undocumented migrants, with vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine’s speech at the Democratic convention, delivered partly in Spanish. Kaine declared Clinton “lista,” meaning ready to lead, and the crowd took up the chant.

“To be in an arena where everyone is chanting about our presidential candidate in Spanish, that says a lot about the Democratic party. I think there’s a huge contrast,” he says. “Republicans have nominated their leader to represent their values. They have made their decision and they will suffer the consequences.”

More than 27 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote in November, three million more than in the last presidential election. The white share of the electorate declines with each cycle, from 85% in 1980 to 70% this year. Demographers predict that by 2060, whites will make up just 46% of eligible voters.

Trump’s poor standing among Latinos, African-Americans, university-educated whites and women means that he will have to win overwhelmingly among white men without a college degree. Romney won 61% of this cohort’s votes and still lost.

“Republicans have to be concerned that they have damaged the party’s ability to reach out to Latinos for a long time in the future,” says Wilkes. “I think they’ve hurt themselves badly by allowing Donald Trump to be the standard-bearer. People say ‘well, it’s going to be a failed experiment if he loses’ but it’s not just this year that he could colour: it could be many years into the future.”

If nothing else, Trump’s run has demonstrated that the market for white cultural resentment nurtured by Fox News and talk radio is even larger than previously suspected. Hiring Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News as his campaign manager - an accomplished right wing provocateur with zero political experience - suggests that his endgame may be glorious defeat followed by the establishment of the Trump TV network, where he would be both owner and biggest star - a job much more fun and much better suited to his talents than President of the United States of America.

Reiterating his threat to deport every undocumented immigrant in the United States when the entire political class expects him to ‘pivot’ feeds his image as a straight talker. It may also destroy the Republican Party and ensure that the White House is lost to conservatives for a generation, but who honestly thinks Donald Trump cares about that?