![Catherine Cortez Masto]()
Catherine
Cortez Masto speaks during the La Gran Celebración Latina at East Las
Vegas Community Center with less than one month to go before the midterm
election © Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The
first thing to say about “Hispanics” is that they are largely a figment
of white progressive imagination. I’ve lived in America for quite a
while and I’ve almost never come across anyone who actually refers to
themselves as “Hispanic”. Some might use the term “Latino” (almost none
say “Latinx”). The way most “Hispanics” think of themselves is how
everyone else does — overworked, generally patriotic, upwardly mobile
yet worried about making ends meet. Only then will terms like
“Cuban-American”, “Puerto Rican”, “Mexican-American” and so on come into
the equation. These groups do not necessarily think alike. Yet if you
talk to the Democratic National Committee and the caste of consultants
whose living depends on divining the wishes of supposedly uniform
demographic blocs, the term Hispanic is dropped like confetti. It is
terribly hard to persuade people whose living depends on something that
their most basic assumptions are flawed. I
have been thinking about this question a lot recently as Democrats
confront what looks likely to be a midterm election defeat. One of their
problems, which is outlined well by my colleagues Christopher Grimes
and Lauren Fedor in their piece on the Nevada Senate race,
is that minority voters keep delivering unpleasant surprises. Polls
suggest that Catherine Cortez Masto, a Hispanic Democratic senator from
Nevada, might be about to lose to Adam Laxalt — a staunchly Trumpian,
white Republican — even though Hispanics are a large share of Nevada’s
electorate. In spite of Masto’s messaging, Hispanic voters are almost
evenly split between the two candidates. It turns out, yet again, that
appealing to a group’s supposed ethnicity is at best limited and at
worst counter-productive. If you are holding down two jobs and
discovering they no longer cover the cost of the family’s weekly budget,
being repeatedly told that immigration is Democrats’ top priority is
unlikely to sway you. It may even be irritating. Nor
is being told you are a victim of “structural racism”. According to a
survey by Echelon Insights (an opinion data group), 94 per cent of
“strong progressives” — who make up about a tenth of America and who are
overwhelmingly white — say that “racism is built into our society
including into its policies and institutions”. Just 36 per cent of Hispanics agree with that view.
By contrast, 58 per cent of Hispanics endorse the alternative
statement: “Racism comes from individuals who hold racist views, not
from our society or institutions”. They may be wrong about that — look
at the statistical realities facing most African Americans. But to
address Hispanics as though they are black on the assumption they will
see the world the same way is electoral malpractice. As Matt Yglesias
notes in his Slow Boring Substack newsletter, African-American voters
are susceptible to identity appeals for entirely sound historical and contemporary reasons. Hispanics are not. Why is this so hard for Democrats to understand? You
would have thought that the 2020 presidential election in which the
Hispanic vote for Donald Trump rose sharply from his 2016 showing would
have driven that lesson home. He took almost a third of the Hispanic
vote in spite of having repeatedly insulted undocumented migrants,
particularly from Mexico. Yet people of Cuban, Colombian, Venezuelan,
Dominican and other Latin-American origins did not seem to care. Plenty
seem to agree, as we are about to see with likely Republican victories
in a smattering of heavily Hispanic border states in Texas and
elsewhere. The
other Senate race in which I am particularly interested is Ohio, where
the Democrat, Tim Ryan, is running neck and neck with the
ultra-Trumpian, JD Vance, in a state that is nowadays strongly
Republican. To give you some idea of Ryan’s appeal, the Republican
candidate’s lead over his Democratic rival in the gubernatorial race is
more than 20 points. In contrast to DNC orthodoxy, Ryan has strenuously
ignored the culture wars and is basing his appeal on what blue-collar
Americans of all ethnicities have in common. I don’t necessarily agree
with all of Ryan’s policies. Like you, Rana, he blames free trade and
globalisation for Ohio’s post-industrial plight. But I strongly approve
of his politics. If he wins, things could change — especially if other
Democrats running on very different platforms lose. Rana, have you been
following Ryan’s campaign and, if so, do you share my view that it is of
outsized importance? PS
Join Edward Luce, Rana Foroohar, James Politi, and veteran commentator
Norm Ornstein on November 10 for a subscriber-exclusive webinar staged
with the Swamp Notes newsletter to discuss the US midterm results.
Register free today here and submit your questions in advance for our panel. |