Right before an election, like clockwork, articles start appearing in which some Democrats (and the occasional Republican) loudly lament the apparent apathy of Latino voters.
This year’s crop of stories has arrived right on schedule, epitomized by a recent front-page New York Times’s headline, “As Democrats Court Latinos, Indifference is a Powerful Foe.”
This is literally a headline that could have appeared in the New York Times in any election over the last two decades. Not because Latino voters are actually indifferent but because when faced with the specter of less than overwhelming enthusiasm on the part of Hispanic voters, both parties in this country, for the most part, have always just responded with a gigantic “shrug” emoji.
That shrug is code for “we just don’t get why Latino voters aren’t voting or are not completely onboard with our agenda.” It is an excuse for their often abject neglect of Latino voters in between election cycles. And it is a pre-emptive strike to focus blame on any shortfalls to Latino voters themselves. This is both unfair and untrue.
A NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that 71% are very interested in the 2018 midterms. Our sister organization, NALEO, estimated recently that one million more Latinos will vote in November than voted in November of 2014.
And our own experience belies this myth about our community — UnidosUS has just surpassed the 80,000 mark in new voters we have registered this year, already higher than our numbers in 2016, a presidential election year and which means that we will have registered nearly 700,000 voters since 2008.
And all of this happening in spite of the fact that a Latino Decisions poll has found that as much as 60% of Latino voters have yet to be contacted during this election.
Like they do with other groups of voters, notably Black women, too many Democrats are simply taking the Latino vote for granted. As we have argued for years, this is not a sustainable strategy, nor is it an accurate one.
And not to let Republicans off the hook, doubling down on their vociferously anti-Latino agenda is also not sustainable and will be a millstone around their party’s prospects far sooner rather than they realize.
We would note that a Pew Research Center survey on Latinos in America released last week shows the damage the president’s and most of the party’s embrace of anti-Latino rhetoric and policies have already taken.
First, Latino voters are not a monolith. A significant portion has and will support Republican candidates. For our community, candidates and issues matter, not party. Second, our ethnicity has nothing to do with whether we vote or not. What does is our youth and our likelihood to have lower incomes, the key characteristics of low-propensity voters.
So, to make Latinos an enthusiastic, engaged voting bloc will take effort and it will take investment. And not only by our political parties. The investment in this community by those who fund nonpartisan voter registration is small and in decline, at a time when our community has experienced exponential growth and nearly a million potential new voters turn 18 every year.
This is not rocket science. As with anything, you get back what you put into it. And what Democrats are getting back for their shrugs are perhaps some shrugs back from our community.
If, on the other hand, you make investments — like UnidosUS and our sister organizations have done — you can get record numbers and record turnout.
Imagine if Latino voters had been treated like groups of voters such as soccer moms, NASCAR dads, the left-behind Trump voters, and others who have gripped the imagination of the political world. There would have been a deep dive into understanding this group of voters and a slew of analysis into their voting behavior. There would have been multi-million dollar voter outreach, voter engagement, and voter education efforts.
So, when Latino voters get a trendy nickname, ironically that’s when we will know that we are being taken more seriously as voters and as Americans.
