Washington, D.C. – Democrats are lost when it comes to connecting with Hispanic families, who care about the real issues impacting them, not the Democrats’ woke ideology.
AJC: ‘We have woken up’: Georgia GOP looks to make inroads with Hispanic electorate
For a moment in late September, Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Herschel Walker’s attention was on Mojitos — a Cuban restaurant in Gwinnett County packed with dozens of supporters, many Hispanic.
As the sound of Walker’s stump speech gave way to blaring salsa music, Cuban immigrants and longtime Atlanta residents Marilu and Fredy Alvarez were buzzing. The couple’s conservative views had historically made them a minority within Atlanta’s Hispanic community. But now, Marilu Alvarez said more people close to them are “hurting financially … they are looking at the way things are now, and they are not liking what they are seeing.”
“For us, it’s incredible, that a politician at the statewide level has come to a Hispanic, Cuban restaurant to look for our vote,” Fredy Alvarez told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in Spanish. “Before, no one would come.”
Mindful of reports of economic anxiety among Hispanics — and buoyed by signs from across the country that the Hispanic electorate may be increasingly open to their views — Republicans are displaying an unprecedented level of interest in Latino voter outreach. In Georgia, they hope to chip away at the multiracial coalition that helped flip the state in Democrats’ favor in 2020.
“I think (Hispanic voters) are realizing that they are more like Republicans than they are Democrats. … We’re very encouraged by it,” Gwinnett County GOP Chairman Sammy Baker said. “I don’t think enough outreach was done, and I think we have woken up to that.”
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Recent polls indicate that Republicans are faring better with Latinos, particularly in the southern U.S.
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But simply making any gains with Hispanic voters could be enough to block Democrats’ path to Georgia victories, said Bernard Fraga, an Emory University political science professor.
“The Republican outreach efforts understand that their success will not be measured in whether or not they get a majority of Latino voters,” Fraga said. “It will be if they win the election, and Latino voters could be a part of that.”
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Republicans are hinging their 2022 improvements with the Latino electorate on increased outreach efforts and colorblind messaging campaigns that paint the GOP as the party of economic opportunity.
Many are encouraged by a perceived overlap between the Hispanic community and the GOP’s values, said state Sen. Jason Anavitarte, the sole Latino Republican in the Statehouse. Widespread respect for self-reliance among Latinos, the thinking goes, aligns well with Republicans’ business-friendly policies and their support for lower taxes and limited government.
“The steady rise that we’ve seen with the Hispanic electorate with Republicans has just continued to grow and grow — I think we’re almost at a generational turning point where Hispanics believe that Republicans have their best interests at heart,” Anavitarte said.
To boost their chances, the Republican National Committee opened Georgia’s first Hispanic community center in Suwanee over the summer to facilitate grassroots connections between GOP campaigns and Latino communities. For Maria Verde, a Gwinnett resident and a Venezuelan immigrant, visiting the center felt like a political homecoming.
“Being here, it’s like, wow, there’s hope,” she told the AJC in June. “There’s people that think like me.”
On hand at the RNC center’s opening was Mexican native John King, the Republican insurance commissioner who is hoping to become in 2022 Georgia’s first Hispanic person elected to statewide office (he was appointed to his job, which he is now running to keep, back in 2019).
Baker said Spanish-speaking RNC staffers have teamed up with the Gwinnett GOP to knock on doors. The party has also created Spanish-language pamphlets and produced a video ad for Hispanic Heritage Month. (“Hispanics don’t come to the U.S. to support socialism. … They come in search of the American dream,” a narrator says in Spanish).
Republican efforts that directly target Latino voters may see initial success, Fraga said, because there is a significant number of unregistered voters among Georgia Latinos that may not have seen outreach until now.
“In the Latino community, in particular, there’s a large amount of new voters waiting to be activated,” he said.
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“For years, they put us Latinos in a separate box. … Today, that’s not the case,” Garcia said. “Today, the message is the same for everyone — country, economy, family, safety — and Latinos feel identified by that.”
Speaking to Latinos as if they were average voters — as opposed to a racialized minority — could be an especially good fit for an election cycle dominated by pocketbook issues that do not discriminate along ethnic or racial lines, Republicans hope. Many Hispanic voters have cited economic concerns as their top issue, something the GOP has frequently addressed in its messaging.
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Read full article HERE.
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