The Daily - The Voters Both Parties Are Ignoring

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Nearly 30 million Latinos in the United States are eligible to vote, representing almost 13 percent of the American electorate. Why is so little attention being paid to them in the midterm elections? Guest: Jose A. Del Real, a national correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, there are nearly 30 million Latinos in the United States who are eligible to vote, totaling almost 13% of the American electorate. So why isn't anyone paying attention to them in the midterms? It's Friday, October 26th. Jose, I want to play this ad for you because I think it's really relevant to what we're going to be talking about today.

They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. Can you just describe what's happening here? So in this ad, we see a sort of disembodied hand, presumably belonging to President Trump, slapping the faces of several Latino voters. We have to do something about it, and we have to start by building a wall, a big, beautiful, powerful wall. For the most part, they're just letting him hit them. And in the closing scene of this ad, you hear a woman say, in Spanish or in English, depending on the version you're watching, How much longer are we going to endure so many trompadas? In Spanish, it's a pun off of the word trompada, which means to punch.

It's a call to arms in a real way and in a very sort of literal way. They are saying, you know, we're done getting smacked around by this guy. They are saying, you know, we're done getting smacked around by this guy. Jose del Real is a national reporter for The Times. This was paid for by an organization called Mi Familia Vota. They are a nonprofit. They're a national organization, but they're not really in the business of, you know, cutting ads like this. What is unique about this situation, and when I talked to them,

the reason that they felt they needed to make this intervention, is they and others truly feel like the Hispanic electorate is not being targeted by campaigns, is not being, you know, contacted. And so this really eye-grabbing ad that they've put out is an attempt to mobilize Latinos when nobody else has been trying to get them to turn out. That's surprising because it seems like Latino vote would be hugely important for the Democrats. Is that generally true? Absolutely. I mean, if you zoom out today, there are nearly 60 million Hispanics in the United States, and 29 million of those are eligible to vote this year. They are particularly important in terms of a voting bloc for Democrats.

And so what is so shocking is to see statistics like from a tracking poll that Latino Decisions released showing that 60 percent of Hispanics nationally have not been contacted by any campaigns. of Hispanics nationally have not been contacted by any campaigns. So why then, if this is such a significant voting bloc, would the Democratic Party itself not put out ads like this? Why is this outside group feeling like it has to take matters into its own hands for the midterms? This is a debate that has been waged within the Democratic Party for years. Two men, one stage, 47 days to go. You have to go back to the 2012 election. Si se puede! Thank you. This was an election where President Obama was running for re-election

and his opponent, Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, was, you know, trying to figure out a way to come up against an incumbent who was hugely popular among young voters, among minority voters, you know, what we've come to think of as the Obama coalition. Your father was born in Mexico. So the question is, are you Mexican-American? Could you be the first Hispanic president? I would love to be able to convince people of that, particularly in a Florida primary.

But I think that might be disingenuous on my part because in my case... What the Republican Party during 2012 was wrestling with was how to mobilize some of its messaging around social conservative issues, around faith, around, you know, small business regulations. Romney's youngest son, Craig, spoke to a group of Hispanic small business owners. On some of these topics that Hispanic voters tend to have in common with conservative voters. Who shares your values? President Obama used his health care plan to declare war on religion. At the same exact time, the president has been feverishly focused on winning Latino voters in Spanish language ads about Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The Democrats and

President Obama's campaign, they were reaching out to Latino voters in very targeted ways. The stories of the Latino community are stories about the American dream. Young people who believe that anything is possible. And parents and grandparents working hard to give their children the chance to succeed. And then in August of 2012. Effective immediately. Right before the election, you have the introduction of DACA. The Department of Homeland Security is taking steps

to lift the shadow of deportA. The Department of Homeland Security is taking steps to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people. Which really was a huge moment of elation for Hispanic voters and for Latinos broadly who cared about immigration reform. So how did these dueling strategies, Obama's and Romney's, work out for each of the candidates when it came to the Latino vote? Well, I think to answer that question, you really just have to look at the results. President Obama won the Hispanic vote by something like 71 percent, and Mitt Romney took just 27 percent, one of the all-time lows in presidential election history. one of the all-time lows in presidential election history.

And what lesson do Republicans take from what looks to be an electoral blowout when it comes to Latino voters? We're a little bit too math-focused and not focused in people's hearts so that we don't relate to, I think, average Americans more than we should. Stuffy old guys. They came out in 2012 with the now famous autopsy report, which really instructed candidates to find ways to communicate with Hispanic voters and with other minority voters, to bring them out to the polls, to show them that the Republican Party is not just open to them, but supports policies that will help them. The report recommends the GOP spend $10 million toward new minority outreach efforts

and even more on technology and building an improved voter database. An important piece of context that we need to remember is that President George W. Bush was actually fairly popular among Hispanics. Bush was actually fairly popular among Hispanics. He pulled in 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, just a few elections before. That is a huge swing. And what it signaled to strategists in 2012 was that if only they could get the messaging right, if only they could show Hispanics that Republican conservative policies were going to help improve their lives, then, you know, in the future, they could wear away at the sort of Democratic Obama coalition that had cost them two presidential elections already. So once Republicans see that there are potential inroads, what do they actually do to try to win Latino voters back? roads, what do they actually do to try to win Latino voters back? So after the 2012 election,

after this autopsy report, you have, you know, Jeb Bush, George W. Bush's brother, of course, running for office, showcasing his bicultural family. I'm married to a Mexican-American United States citizen. I'm immersed in the culture. I'm bilingual. I feel like I'm bicultural. I'm proud of the diversity of my own family. Speaking Spanish at a lot of campaign stops. La mayoría eran hispanos. Mi hijo George, pues tiene un piel moreno, ¿no? You have Marco Rubio running on the strength

of his support in Florida and on the fact that he had, you know, tried to cooperate on a comprehensive immigration reform bill. And when we talk about illegal immigration, it's not about demanding rights. It's about appealing to the compassion of the most compassionate nation in the history of the world. You have even Ted Cruz, senator of Texas, at times attempting to speak Spanish at debates. First of all, I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speak Spanish. And second of all, the other point that I would make. And so you really start to see that the Republicans are taking seriously the idea that they need to reach out to Hispanic voters, really trying to meet them where they are. Right. And what could be a greater testament to this kind of cultural change within the party than the fact that two of those candidates you just mentioned, Cruz and Rubio, are themselves Latino?

It goes beyond political pandering. It's true representation. To have Jeb Bush's bicultural family prominently featured on the news, to have him bragging about his ability to speak Spanish fluently, that sends really positive signals of inclusivity and of support to Hispanic voters. And I really think that that can't be overstated. And then came Donald Trump. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you.

They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. What we see is Trumpism, and in particular, Trump's controversial immigration-related rhetoric, slowly creep into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

During that campaign. During that campaign. But in 2015, when he first announced his candidacy, I think that Republicans were aghast at his remarks and were trying to figure out how to marginalize him, but did not imagine that he would become the nominee for their party and eventually the president. Now, I think I'm going to do very well with Hispanics. He's a legal citizen. You know why I'm going to do well with Hispanics? Because I'm going to bring back jobs and they're going to get jobs right now. They're going to get jobs. I think I'm going to do very well with Hispanics. You know why I'm going to do well with Hispanics? Because I'm going to bring back jobs and they're going to get jobs right now. They're going to get jobs. I think I'm going to do very well with Hispanics. So obviously we know how the election turned out in 2016. But how exactly did the Latino vote shake out in that election? Well, this is where

there was a bit of a shock. Exit polls at the time showed that around 30% of Hispanic voters actually supported President Trump during the 2016 election. He actually did a little bit better than Mitt Romney did at the ballot box. Better than Romney. Better than Romney. That feels genuinely unexpected. You know, when I saw the exit polls, yeah, my first instinct was surprise. I thought that he would get a lot fewer voters than Romney did

in 2012. But then when I started looking at the numbers as they became available, my realization was that it wasn't so surprising that Republican-leaning Latinos showed up at the same rate that they did in previous campaigns. What was surprising to me is that a record number of Latinos didn't vote. 14.3 million Hispanic voters did not cast ballots in 2016. did not cast ballots in 2016. Despite a race that seemed like it would very much animate Latino voters, theoretically, against Donald Trump. And what that indicated to me, and what I think has been borne out in conversations

I've had across the country since then, is that Trump alone was not enough to motivate a lot of voters. Immigration policy alone was not enough to motivate a lot of voters. Immigration policy alone was not enough to motivate some of these voters. What I concluded, and I think what a lot of other people are starting to see, is that the Latino vote is just much more complicated, much more nuanced than we understood before. And they care about a lot more issues than they are being spoken to about. I'm from the New York Times. I actually am based in LA. I'm a correspondent,

and we have euros all over the country. So not too long of a trek here. My first question is... So what does 2016 tell us about the Latino vote that we didn't understand before? If a Republican presidential candidate being so openly anti-immigration doesn't turn the Latino vote out, what does that mean in 2018? You know, that question,

as we're heading into the midterm election was really tantalizing to me. So I decided to just go to Nevada where there is a competitive Senate race. And according to political strategists, the difference between, you know, 15% of Latinos showing up and 17% of Latinos showing up could flip the race. I keep thinking to a woman named Sandra Alvaro, who I met outside of a store called Cardenas. It's a Hispanic market in Las Vegas. And Ms. Alvaro was telling me, you know, I have voted every election for years and years and years. And nothing changes for me or my community. She said, I care about mental health issues. I care about education for my kids. I care about how much money we're able to bring home.

And it just feels like every two to four years, we hear these candidates come out and talk about how they're going to help us. And then the election passes and they forget about us. And she said, I'm basically nonpartisan at this point because I just don't see the point. There's another man I spoke to, Enrique Gonzalez. He's 50 years old. I met him at that same grocery store in Las Vegas. And he had a whole different view

of this. He became a citizen six years ago. He said he hasn't missed an election since then. He had a big smile on his face when I asked him about what it meant to him to vote. And he told me that a lot of his friends don't vote because a lot of the people that he speaks to in his community, have a feeling that the elections themselves, like elections in some Latin American countries and in Mexico, are sort of rigged, are stacked against the will of the people anyway. And the issue of immigration, just from having conversations with people, is itself quite divisive. And people feel differently about it based on their own recent ancestry,

based on whether they have recent family members who are immigrants, or whether they've been here for generations, their income, their age. When people talk about Trump, they're like, oh, he's a racist. Like, come on, the only people he's deported were gay members. The majority of people he's deported are gay members, and they're here for trafficking and drugs. That's one thing we need less in our community as in our state. I had a conversation with a young man named Jose Alvarez.

He's 20 years old, and I just asked him, you know, are you going to vote? Are you following the election? I sort of expected, you know, this is a young Mexican guy. I sort of expected that he would either sigh, which is what many people do, or start talking about how offensive he was. But in fact, he actually supports President Trump's deportation policies. Well, I'm a Republican. Yeah. I like Republicans. Yeah. I like Trump. Yeah. I think he's a great president. I think he made our economy much better. Yes, he might be a little reckless, might act like a little kid sometimes, but our work

has been booming off the charts. It's been building all kinds of work for us all around the country, you know? He works in masonry. He feels like Trump's economic policies and his immigration policies were making things better for him, and in that order.

So how does that complicated diversity that you have found influence how Democrats and Republicans are trying to win Latino votes in this upcoming midterm? I think that the truth is that despite everything we saw in the 2016 election, despite the 2012 autopsy report, despite George W. Bush's relative success with Hispanic voters, there is a feeling and a conventional wisdom that the only way to speak to Hispanics is with regards to immigration issues. And I think that impulse to see this voting bloc as absolutely monolithic is part of what has led to this ingrained political apathy. So because both parties have for so long struggled,

maybe even failed to understand, that Latinos are not monolithic, that there are a variety of interests and issues and passions in this electorate, that they're both still talking to them as if they were a monolith, and that it's that blind spot inside both parties that further alienates Latino voters. Absolutely. Around 60% of registered Latino voters nationwide are not even being contacted by these campaigns. And when they are, it's largely focused on President Trump and his comments, which didn't motivate them to turn out in 2016,

and about immigration policy, which we've been hearing about for decades. How much longer are we going to endure so many trompadas? Enough. And that kind of brings us back to that ad we started our conversation talking about. This outside group, this Latino group, very much worried that Hispanic voters are being ignored by both parties, but especially the Democrats,

decides to take matters into its own hands. But in doing so, in creating this ad, focuses on this one issue, immigration, that pretty much ignores this political diversity that you just described. So it kind of commits the same sin, in a sense. Right, exactly. And it's also coming out just two weeks before the election. And so, you know, of course this ad, you know, has shock value to it, which is supposed to grab eyeballs. But the truth is that

there's only so much that you can do in the last two weeks before an election if in the run-up to November, you haven't made sustained contact with some of these voters about the various issues that they're interested in. So I guess in a sense, because this midterm already feels like a little bit of a wash when it comes to Latino voters, it's a question of who gets to them in time for the next presidential election, 2020. Exactly. And what we find is a real chicken and egg situation when we're trying to figure out how to best approach Latino voters and get them to turn out. figure out how to best approach Latino voters and get them to turn out. Are they not showing up because nobody's reaching out to them? Or are people not reaching out to them because they're not showing up? Jose, thank you very much. Oh, no, thank you for having me.

The Times reports that with less than two weeks until the midterms, President Trump is considering shutting the southern border to Central American migrants and denying them the chance to seek asylum, using the same powers he invoked in 2017 to declare a travel ban against mostly Muslim countries. The move would be his boldest appeal yet to anti-immigrant voters as he seeks to keep Republican control of Congress.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, federal investigators said that the number of homemade pipe bombs sent to critics of President Trump had grown to 10. We have a president who does not understand governance. Forget his policies for a minute. He doesn't understand how the government functions. The recipients of the devices now range from former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential rival to Trump in 2020,

to the actor Robert De Niro, who has repeatedly mocked the president. I mean, he's so blatantly stupid. He's a punk. He's a dog. He's a pig. It makes me so angry that this country has gotten to this point, that this fool, this bozo has wound up where he has. The Times reports that the bombs have triggered a massive nationwide manhunt that is now focused on Southern Florida, where authorities now believe several of the bombs originated.

President Trump, who called for unity after the first bombs were discovered, changed his message on Thursday, pointing the blame at the news media. In a tweet, the president wrote, quote, a very big part of the anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false

and inaccurate reporting of the mainstream media that I refer to as fake news. It has gotten so bad and hateful, he added, that it is beyond description. Mainstream media must clean up its act fast.

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