Hispanics and Trump: Offend them at your peril

Will the Republican candidate’s rhetoric do long-term damage to his party’s efforts to woo Latinos?
©Getty

Mexican immigrant Nieves Ojendiz holds her four-year-old daughter Jane at an immigration reform rally in New YorkA

s Donald Trump was flying to Mexico on Wednesday for a surprise meeting with Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican president, Nohe Garcia and his friends were emailing jokes about the Republican presidential candidate.

“One is that Barack Obama paid Peña Nieto $5m to keep Trump,” says Mr Garcia, who was born in Mexico but has spent the past four decades in Arizona, where he owns a ranch on the US-Mexico border.






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Mr Garcia is registered as an independent, but he has always voted for Republican presidential candidates. On November 8, however, the cowboy-boot wearing father of four bilingual children plans to vote for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, because he does not like the way that Mr Trump has insulted people of Mexican heritage.

Speaking hours before Mr Trump gave a speech on immigration in Phoenix amid — ultimately incorrect — speculation that he would soften his stance on illegal immigration, Mr Garcia says Mr Trump will struggle to win the hearts of Hispanics.

After a year of harsh rhetoric, including vilifying a Mexican-American judge and proposing to build a wall between Mexico and the US, Mr Trump faces a much more diverse electorate than the predominantly white Republicans who helped him win the nomination.

As the fastest-growing segment of the electorate, Hispanics are already changing the political calculus in the battleground states. Many believe that Mr Trump’s insulting language is pushing more Hispanics into the arms of the Democratic party.

“Donald Trump is the most important figure pushing Latinos to register and go to vote. Latinos are incredibly upset with Donald Trump,” says Jorge Ramos, an influential anchor at the Spanish-language Univision network. “What he has done is really push young Latinos who are turning 18 to register and go to the polls . . . I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Plagued by low turnout

For years, Republican strategists had urged the party to embrace Hispanics, arguing that they should be “natural allies” for conservatives. But Mr Trump has torpedoed their plans — and made it harder for Latinos who were sympathetic to remain with the party.
©Reuters

Donald Trump, above, has chosen 'the wrong giant to wake up', say Latino leaders

Like Mr Garcia, Cesar Salcedo for years identified with the Republican party. A lawyer by training, Mr Salcedo found work in Georgia as a busboy after he emigrated to the US in 1999. Once he was eligible to vote, he registered as a Republican and cast his first ballot in a presidential contest for John McCain in 2008 and then for Mitt Romney four years later.

But this year, he contacted the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (Galeo) with a pressing concern: he wanted to ensure that he could vote for Mrs Clinton in November because he was appalled at what he considered racist and xenophobic rhetoric coming from Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

“I just cannot support Mr Donald Trump. I cannot support someone who insults my race. I am not a rapist, I am not a criminal,” Mr Salcedo said. “If he didn’t make these comments, I probably could have supported him.”
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . .  They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists

- Speech announcing presidential bid,June 16 2015

While Mr Salcedo is going to cross party lines, activists say many Hispanics in Georgia and beyond are registering to vote for the first time to try to block Mr Trump. This is one reason that Georgia, which has only voted for one Democrat since Jimmy Carter won his home state in 1980, has unexpectedly emerged as a swing state along with places such as Arizona.

Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of Galeo, says he expects a record Latino turnout in Georgia, a state where Hispanics represent 9 per cent of the population after doubling in size over the first decade of this century.

“Latinos have been through the failed promises of President Obama with the lack of immigration reform in Congress and the ramping up of deportation of Central American refugees . . . and the toxic GOP primary,” says Mr Gonzalez. “People have started paying attention a lot earlier than they normally do for presidential elections.”


According to the Pew Research Centre, Mrs Clinton in July held a 66-24 per cent lead over Mr Trump among registered Hispanic voters. While that gap is comparable to the advantage that President Barack Obama had over John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 at the same juncture, it underscores how Mr Trump has spoiled Republican efforts to implement a plan to broaden its appeal with Hispanics that was outlined in a post mortem following its 2012 loss.

Given the gap, the question is less whether Mrs Clinton will win a big share of the Hispanic vote, but how large a role the community will play in the election. Pew estimates that 27m Latinos — 12 per cent of the electorate — will be eligible to vote in November, up from 23m in 2012, driven largely by the 3.2m Hispanics who have since turned 18.

Hispanics have historically punched below their weight because of low turnout. In 2012, only 48 per cent of eligible Latinos voted, compared with 67 per cent for blacks and 64 per cent for whites.
Go back to Univision

- Trump to Jorge Ramos, a journalist for Spanish-language network Univision, as he was removed from a press conference, August 25 2015
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The question is how much of a boost Mr Trump’s rhetoric and policies — including a vow to deport the 11m undocumented immigrants and his wall on the US-Mexico border — will provide to Latino voting rates.

Maria Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, a group that is helping Hispanics register to vote, says the “silver lining” to Mr Trump is that his stance has sparked an increase in the pace of voter registration. In the first five months of the year, the group helped register 3,600 voters, compared with 256 during the same period four years ago.

“We are having instances now where . . . parents are saying, ‘My daughter came home today crying because her friends are saying when Trump becomes president they are going to be returned to Mexico,’” she explains. “That is a wake-up call.”

“He chose the wrong giant to wake up,” said Walter Tejada, president of the Virginia Latino Leaders Council, who supports Mrs Clinton. “People feel under attack. There is a tense environment that can only be countered by our coming out and making a significant difference by voting.”

California and Texas have the largest Hispanic populations, but neither is a swing state. The focus in 2016 is states such as Arizona, where Latinos will make up 22 per cent of the electorate, Florida with 18 per cent, Nevada with 17 per cent and Colorado with 14.5 per cent. Other states that have smaller Hispanic populations but are battlegrounds include Virginia and Pennsylvania, where just over 4 per cent of eligible voters are Latino, and Georgia and North Carolina.



Ms Kumar says Mr Trump is propelling the US towards a “California moment”.

She is referring to Proposition 187, a referendum pushed by California governor Pete Wilson in 1994 which limited access to government services for illegal immigrants. It sparked a political mobilisation by Latinos that helped turn the voter-rich state — which voted Republican in every presidential election from 1968 to 1988 — into one of the bluest states in the nation. When Mr Trump recently aired his first television ad, experts noted similarities with an ad that Mr Wilson ran in 1994.
Now he is Hispanic, I believe. He is a very hostile judge to me

- Trump on Gonzalo Curiel, US district judge overseeing Trump University lawsuit, February 28 2016
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Anti-immigrant policies in other states have not always had a similar effect, however. Despite a highly controversial law in Arizona cracking down on illegal immigration in 2010, the governor’s mansion remains in Republican hands. But Arizona has emerged as a potential swing state in 2016, with Mrs Clinton holding a 1-point lead over Mr Trump in the latest poll.

The reliably conservative border state has only voted Democrat once — Bill Clinton in 1996 — since Harry Truman in 1948. A CBS News poll found that 80 per cent of Latinos were “more motivated” to vote this year, compared with 69 per cent of whites.
Registration push

Groups such as Voto Latino and Mi Familia Vota are ramping up their efforts to capitalise. Mi Familia Vota operates in states such as Colorado, Florida and Nevada where volunteers conduct registration drives in supermarkets, churches, high schools and at festivals. Between January and August, it assisted 54,613 applications, the biggest share of which was in Florida, compared with 32,022 for all of 2015.


Ben Monterroso, executive director of Mi Familia Vota, says the pace of registrations was ahead of 2012. He says the legacy of Proposition 187 suggests that Republicans could feel a long-lasting impact from Mr Trump.

“If the Republican party think they can insult the community and then come back and say ‘I didn’t mean it’ and the community will be welcoming, then I think they are in for a surprise. The community has a long memory.”
Mexico will pay for the wall, believe me — they don’t know it yet, but they will pay for the wall

- August 31 2016 speech on immigration
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The same dynamic is playing out across the US. In North Carolina, a state with a rapidly growing Latino population, Pew estimates that only 135,000 of the 248,000 Hispanics who are eligible to vote had registered by February. The gap is greater than the margin by which Mr Romney won in 2012 — leading activists to sense an opportunity.

“With those numbers, there is a growing sentiment in the Latino community that immigration could help decide the outcome of the next election,” says Ivan Kohar Parra, executive director of the North Carolina Congress of Latino Organizations who is leading voter registration efforts in North Carolina.


Some experts have pointed to spikes in citizenship applications as evidence of a “Trump bump”. For example, the number of legal permanent residents applying for US citizenship in the four months from last October is at its highest level in four years.

Robert Shrimsley

Donald Trump practises politics the old Mexico way


Look moderate on one side of the border, and do the opposite on the other

Miguel Basáñez, a politics expert at Tufts University who was until recently Mexico’s ambassador to the US, says his team noticed a rise in requests for information about naturalisation after the emergence of Mr Trump, adding that 3.5m of the 5m Latinos eligible to naturalise are from Mexico.

“Trump made them realise that it was beneficial to get citizenship because they would be safer in the US,” he says. “That has energised those 5m Latinos.”

When Mr Trump spoke to an almost exclusively white audience in Phoenix on Wednesday, he shattered all illusions that he was softening his policy to win over Hispanics. By using the same language that has alienated them all year, it appeared he has all but written off Latino voters in November .

“We will build a great wall along the southern border,” he said as the audience chanted “build the wall”. “And Mexico will pay for the wall, 100 per cent. They just don’t know it yet.”