Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece titled, “Latino Voters, Once Solidly Democratic, Split Along Economic Lines”. Once upon a time, “X Split Along Economic Lines” would have meant, “Affluent X’s are voting Republican, and working class X’s remain Democrats”. Today, you won’t be surprised to learn that the WSJ reporters – most likely liberals; the paper’s news pages, unlike its editorials, tilt strongly to port – found the opposite:
A few miles from the Las Vegas Strip, in a working-class neighborhood of one-story homes and scattered palm trees, Vania Oronoz is pushing her husband to give up his habit of voting for Democrats.
Mrs. Oronoz and many of her neighbors are shifting toward the Republican Party, a pattern that’s being replicated across the country. The move has been especially pronounced among working-class Latinos, whose votes have the potential to reshape the political parties in the same way that the movement of white, working-class voters has made them a pillar of the Republican Party.
Mrs. Oronoz, a 44-year-old immigrant from Mexico, runs a taco business with her husband and backed President Joe Biden in 2020 when she cast her first vote as a U.S. citizen. She said she has become disenchanted with Democrats over the state of inflation and school quality, as well as the party’s failure to approve a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Instead she is putting her support behind GOP candidates in this fall’s election, including the Republican trying to defeat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, the only Latina ever elected to the Senate.
The article makes it clear that the trend away from an overwhelming Democratic advantage among Hispanic voters is a working class trend and that it is impelled by issues like border security, rising crime rates, woke public schools, abortion and Democratic politicians’ indifference to the real economic needs of working Americans, as exemplified by Covid-19 lockdowns. A taco store can’t do a lot of business over the Internet. In the WSJ’s generic Congressional preference poll, Hispanics with four year college degrees prefer Democrats over Republicans by 26 percentage points. Among other Hispanics, the Democrats’ margin is only six points. Overall, the Democrats’ 34 point lead in 2018 has fallen to 11 points.
The WSJ notes that Senator Masto, whose mother was Italian and whose husband is Syrian, “has been reminding voters she is the granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant”. For unknown reasons, I receive more-than-daily emails from the Masto campaign. Hardly a one omits mention of the Senator’s Mexican forebear, but almost the only political issue ever mentioned is abortion. Today, for instance, she tells people who she hopes will give money to her campaign:
Right now, I’m in the most important fight of my life, and our country’s future is at stake. If we lose this race, Republicans will retake the Senate, and they’ll pass a national ban on abortion. They’ll make it a CRIME from coast to coast.
Does she have any objection to Biden Administration regulations that would force K-12 schools to admit males into females’ gym classes and share the same showers? If so, she’s been very quiet about it.
Does she see anything wrong with closing down the economy for over a year, during which the hidalgos could work from home with hardly any inconvenience, while many of their fellow citizens saw their standard of living collapse or had to rely on government handouts (doled out by a hand that had to borrow the funds)? Not a word.
Will she care when the “greening” of the economy skyrockets energy prices and makes air conditioning (somewhat important to Nevadans) unaffordable to all but the wealthy? Not very likely.
Senator Masto and her financial backers can afford their “luxury beliefs”. Ordinary Americans can’t. It should be no surprise that the Hispanic subset of ordinary Americans is coming to realize that they can’t afford them either.
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