The NPR Politics Podcast - Latino Voters, Trump, And The Republican Party

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

President Biden has tested positive for the coronavirus and is experiencing mild symptoms. Our coverage: https://n.pr/3zoCtkbIs there such a thing as "the Hispanic vote"? Is Latino a more suitable term? And who is Ben Fernandez, the first person of Hispanic origin to run for president?In our latest installment of the NPR Politics Book Club, Danielle Kurtzleben talks to Geraldo Cadava about his book The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump.Our September book selection is The Family Roe, by Joshua Prager. Join the conversation in our Facebook group, send your questions to @titonka on Twitter or via email to [e-mail] the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there. Before we start the show, President Biden has tested positive for COVID-19, the White House announced on Thursday. Biden addressed his condition Thursday afternoon in a video posted to his official Twitter account. I've been double vaccinated, double boosted. Symptoms are mild. And I really appreciate your inquiries and concerns. The White House says he has begun taking Paxlovid, a standard course of treatment for anyone over 50. We've got more coverage on the radio and on NPR.org, and we will be sure to update if there's major news about his condition. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And today, as we do every so often, we're getting away from the breaking news of the day to talk books. And we talk so much on this podcast about different demographic groups

of voters. And today we're going to go deep on Hispanic voters with Geraldo Cadava, author of The Hispanic Republican. This is another episode of our NPR Politics Podcast Book Club. It's a chance for our listeners to connect over books about politics and the issues of the day. We read the books together and then we discuss them in our podcast Facebook group or on Twitter or both, as was the case this time. Geraldo Cadava is a professor of history and Latina and Latino studies at Northwestern University, and we are super excited to have him on today. Geraldo, welcome. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. It's really a pleasure. And thank you also for reading the book and wanting to have this conversation. Well, let's start with a really basic question with defining our terms. You talk in the opening

about the squishiness of the word Hispanic and how it is in and of itself a kind of invented political category. And a lot of people asked about the term when I put out the call for questions, including Dr. Felicia Kornbluh on Twitter. She asked if Hispanic is even a useful term. It was the name of the largest kind of advocacy group, the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. And it also evokes a relationship with Spain and the Spanish empire, which many Hispanic conservatives are excited about. Let's talk specifically about the groups that Hispanic came to encompass, because it encompasses a wide range of groups that Hispanic came to encompass, because it encompasses a wide range of groups. And like I said, and like you wrote about, it's an invented

category, but that doesn't mean it's a meaningless category. So what animates the many people under that umbrella and what brings them together and how do they not fit together? Some people will say that coming from Spanish speaking countries is the kind of common denominator among all Latinas and Latinos. But then you get into debates about, well, Brazilians, are Brazilians Latino? They speak Portuguese. So some people talk about the Catholic faith, but then the fastest growing religion among Latinos is evangelicalism. So this is a really contested category. I think from the government's perspective and my actors and other people

involved in politics, it did become useful, say, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s to begin to think about the relationship between individual national group identity, like Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Ecuadorian, et cetera, and group identity. And I think Latinos, that wasn't the first time when they entered the arena of politics in the 50s, that wasn't the first time they thought about these things. But the government started categorizing Hispanics and Latinos in the 60s and 70s. And Hispanic first became a term used on the U.S. census in 1970. Before that, it was Spanish-speaking Americans or Americans of Latin American descent or something like that. You mentioned Catholicism in there, and this brings us to another listener question. We're starting right off with them. This is from Drew

on Twitter. He asked, how much of a role does Catholicism play in causing Hispanics to either identify as a vote Republican? And I want to broaden that out a bit, too, because there's a sort of shorthand that often happens when we're talking Cuban Americans, there's a shorthand that comes up in punditry that, well, they vote Republican sometimes because of communism or rejecting socialism or that a lot of Latinos vote because they care about immigration. I mean, are those shorthands good explanations? And when do they verge into just being crutches and not helpful. I think when it comes to explaining why Latinos vote the way that they do, whether it's conservative or liberal, we tend to grasp at these explanations that rely on individual issues like Catholicism or immigration or healthcare or whether you support public schools or charter schools. And I think the inclination to do that is to understand. But I think in this case, you know, it's like wanting to understand why Latinos do what they do so that you can close the box on them, put them on your shelf and forget about it because you think you kind of understand.

So I think you have to take a more holistic approach to Latino voters and understand that there is not the Latino vote. There is no singular Latino voting bloc, but there are 60 million Americans for whom their Latino identity means something to them. I want to dig more into the history and sort of the meat of your book, because one thing I was continually struck by is how things that feel like recent developments are often longstanding patterns. For example, you write about how even in the 1950s and 60s, some Hispanics believed the Democratic Party took them for granted, which I hear a lot of on the campaign trail today. And that back then that opened the door to Richard Nixon having more success with them. And so I'm wondering, tell me how that has evolved over time. So for the past 50 years, Latino voters have given somewhere between 25 percent and 33 percent of their votes to the Republican candidate. That has stayed fairly

constant. There have been some years, like in 1976, when Gerald Ford ran, and 1996, when Bob Dole ran, when that level of support dipped below 25 percent, something closer to 20 percent. And there have been years where it's crept north of 33%, like George W. Bush's wins in 2000 and 2004. So as a historian, I can look at the past 50 years and say that the level of support has been fairly consistent. But once you look at particular elections, I think that's where you can start to notice differences within those elections and how Republican strategies have shifted over time. And so I think what's interesting about the recent past is that, you know, I wasn't surprised that Donald Trump won 38% of Latino support in 2020. That's more or less in line with historical averages, maybe a little higher,

but I would have never expected that someone like Trump would have been the second coming of someone like George W. Bush, because for a long time, the Republican model of outreach to Latinos really was George W. Bush's model about compassionate conservatism, pro-immigration, things like that. But Trump had a very different approach. And so Latino conservatives in the 1950s, when they were trying to convince their fellow Latinos to, you know, change sides, because one prevalent idea had been that ever since the New Deal and FDR was president, when, you know, he provided jobs to Latino families, when he helped them put food on the

table and helped them gain some sense of economic security. Ever since then, Latinos, the idea went, were kind of blindly loyal to the Democratic Party. So that's why in the 1950s, Latino conservatives were trying to convince other Latinos that they should flip sides because they were asking a basic question, for all of your loyalty to the Democratic Party, what have you gotten? How have your lives improved? How have they become better? And that was kind of the first recruiting pitch to Latino conservatives or to Latinos who Latino conservatives were trying to recruit to the Republican Party. It was one of their first sales pitches in the 50s and 60s. And the Republican Party, it was one of their first sales pitches in the 50s and 60s. And the Republican Party, I think, in the years since has come up with some pretty smart ways of using that line in their outreach efforts. All right, time for a quick break. And when we get back,

we'll talk about some forgotten history. And we're back. And I want to go back to the history that you present in your book, though, because I want to talk about Ben Fernandez, a historical figure that perhaps plenty of our listeners don't know about. So tell us quickly who he was, what he accomplished, and of course,. He ran as a Republican against Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Howard Baker, and about nine or 10 other people. philosophy going into the 1980 cycle was that at that moment, the United States needed a Spanish speaking president and they needed an economist. He was an economist. He had been involved in politics for a little bit more than a decade. He went to Redlands University in California. He worked at General Electric in New York. And then he kind of got involved in Republican Party politics during the Nixon years when he was the head of a kind of a group called the National Economic Development Agency, which was really about kind of offering consulting services to Hispanics who wanted to open up thrift or savings banks. And this is important because Nixon's whole approach to

Latinos, Hispanics was about economic uplift, which he called the third plank of the civil rights movement that didn't get as much attention as the social and political protests that were all over the news, but were every bit as important to improving the lives of Latinos. So that's Ben Fernandez's political origin. And then he became the national chairman of this new group called the Republican National Hispanic Assembly after it was formed in 1974. So I say this kind of context, just to give you a sense that he didn't come from nowhere. He had been involved in Republican Party politics for a while, but he had this theory in

the late 1970s that the United States not only was ready for a Hispanic president, but needed a Hispanic president. There were so many problems in the hemisphere, civil wars in Central America. He argued, like many Republicans argued, that Jimmy Carter had bottomed out the economy and made a mess of things. And so the country needed a Spanish speaking economist as a president. This was his theory. And to be honest, to this day, I still don't know how seriously to take him or how much I think he was just kind of had an overinflated sense of himself and his powers. I don't know because there was absolutely no chance that he was going to win. No chance at all.

He stayed in the race for way too long. I think he won a total across the country in the different primaries that he was even eligible to run in because he didn't even make the ballot in some. I think he won a total of maybe 25,000 votes. But what's interesting, I think, is that his whole theory of his campaign was that he was going to buck the trend of focusing on Iowa, which is where most candidates focus because it has an early primary. This was the first year in 1980 that there was a primary on the island of Puerto Rico. And his whole theory was that he was going to focus all of his energy on Puerto Rico. And that once he won in Puerto Rico with support from other Spanish

speakers, everyone across the country would take notice. And as he put it, would watch the dust trail behind me as he just kind of took off. This didn't even come close to happening. George H.W. Bush actually won Puerto Rico with 60% of the vote on the island. And he has his son, Jeb Bush, who was 27 at the time, who he kind of sent to San Juan to camp out in Puerto Rico for months before the primary election to really drum up support for his dad, George H.W. Bush. So it's all it's all a very fascinating story. I could take it in lots of different directions, too. But the point is that he, as a Republican, was the first Hispanic candidate for president. We barely remember him today. Yeah. I want to end by asking more specifically

about Republicans and also more current politics. said GOP, you need to be more welcoming to Latinos. But then the party elected Trump, who said some truly racist things about Mexicans, among others. And then he didn't do as badly as many expected with Latino voters and improved his numbers from 2016 to 2020. So do you think that says more about the GOP or Trump learning lessons about how to speak to these voters? Or is going about politics in general, but Latino outreach in particular. I mean, the autopsy yet was all about becoming more welcoming, becoming more friendly. What's been super interesting to me is to hear how Latino Republicans have justified the shift between George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Because it hasn't been easy. It's taken work and it's taken some kind of intellectual rationalization and justification.

But what some say to me now is that George W. Bush's theory of the case was that you needed to recruit Latino support by basically pandering to democratic issues, that it was all about immigration reform. You had to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and you had to be a kind of compassionate conservative. But I've heard Hispanic conservatives these days talk about that as pandering. And what they like about Donald Trump is in some ways they see Donald Trump not as the heir to George W. Bush, but as the heir to Ronald Reagan, because he's the one who embraced a kind of true ideological conservatism. And so Reagan, for example, was the one who said he wasn't going to play ethnic group politics by pandering to Cubans in particular, although he did plenty of

that or pandering to Mexican Americans. But he was going to look at these issues like religion and free enterprise and anti-communism. And those were the conservative issues that were going to draw Latinos into the party. And some see Donald Trump more as the heir to that kind of thinking. But, you know, there are also vast differences between Reagan and Trump. I mean, Reagan said that we didn't need a border wall between the United States and Mexico. He passed an immigration reform bill that included amnesty for more than a million Latinos. He wasn't at all a kind of build the wall, Mexicans are murderers, rapists, and immigrants. So, you know, I think that part of the point is that Latino Republicans today,

I think, are still really wrestling with their relationship with Trump. All right. We're going to leave it there today, even though I get the sense we could go on for another hour or so. But Geraldo Cadava is a professor of history and Latina and Latino studies at Northwestern University. The book is The Hispanic Republican. Geraldo, thank you again. Thank you again, Danielle. And listeners, you can join the discussion at n.pr slash politics group. That is our Facebook group where we discuss the books

and also announce our next books. Or you can follow me on Twitter at at Titanka or follow NPR Politics at at NPR Politics on Twitter. Our next book for September is The Family Row by Joshua Prager. It is about the history of the fight over abortion rights in the U.S. and specifically the history of the landmark Roe v. Wade case. It is very timely. Go grab a copy of that book. You don't want to miss this. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics and thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.