Free Republic

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is vying to become the nation's first Latino president, but the conservative Republican won't be able to count on Hispanic voters in 2016. Despite his heritage, Cruz, the son of a Cuban immigrant, is unlikely to rally voters around his potentially historic candidacy the way President Barack Obama did in 2008, when black, Hispanic and other important voting demographics were eager to elect the nation's first African-American commander in chief. "I can't envision any scenario in which Ted Cruz can make any appeal to Latinos at this point," said Matt Barreto, co-founder of the polling and...

Alternate headline: “GOP loses election.” “A Republican nominee is going to need to be somewhere in the mid-forties, or better, among Hispanic voters,” Ayres said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. The pollster noted that his candidate is “extraordinarily talented” and could be “transformational” in expanding the GOP’s appeal.That would represent a quantum leap from 2012, when Romney won just 27 percent of Latinos—a major reason for his electoral drubbing at the hands of President Barack Obama. Romney’s abysmal numbers were even a drop-off from John McCain, who took 31 percent of Latinos against Obama in 2008…Ayres predicts that...

Ted Cruz’s official campaign isn’t even two weeks old, and already it’s done the nation a favor — by highlighting the duplicity of the “multicultural” left and what it is really after. Ever since Cruz announced his candidacy for president, “Latino leaders” have been stepping all over themselves to declare that not only does he not speak for Hispanics (something only they presumably do) but he’s not even a “legitimate” Hispanic. All of which serves to pull the curtain back on multiculturalism: Defined by liberals, it’s a concept that exists solely to advance liberal objectives. It’s not ancestry that makes...

Ted Cruz won’t sit around and wait, because waiting is a loser’s game. Cruz, the first-term Republican senator from Texas, officially announced his candidacy for president of the United States early Monday morning. While there are many fascinating aspects to Cruz’s candidacy announcement—his climate change denials, his political grandstanding that led to a government shutdown— there is one question that immediately arises in my mind: What will he, a Cuban-American, do to speak directly to Latino voters over the next several months? Cruz has been dismissed in the past for not being “Latino enough.” And although he doesn’t speak fluent...

Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz, native of Canada, junior senator of Texas and lover of Wagner, has thrown his hat into the ring to be the Republican nominee for the 2016 presidential election. But it's not his hat that many recoil from so much as it is the head beneath it. Let's talk about the elephant in Ted Cruz's presidential campaign: his face. OK, it's symmetrical in its composition, not too pudgy or gaunt -- all in all, a fine face, really. Some might even say he has the face of an angel. Not me, mind you, but some. Like the...

When John McCain launched his candidacy for president in 1999, the Arizonan made his announcement in front of the decommissioned aircraft carrier the USS Yorktown to underscore his military service. When Texas US Senator Ted Cruz jumped into the race for president on Monday, he did so on the “deck” of an “evangelical battleship” at the Rev. Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University. Considering the major influence evangelical voters have in the GOP primaries, especially in the early states of Iowa and South Carolina, Cruz could not have been shrewder in selecting a venue for his declaration of candidacy. Rick Santorum would...

Latinos likely haven't made up their minds about Republican Sen. Ted Cruz's newly announced candidacy for President. So in a selfless gesture, a whole slew of non-Latinos have quickly stepped forward to spare us the trouble of thinking for ourselves about whether Cruz stands a chance of winning and whether he can get the votes of fellow Latinos. The answers were "No" and "No." Here's the conventional wisdom, courtesy of the liberal media and other critics of the junior senator from Texas: Cruz doesn't have the slimmest chance to win the Republican nomination, let alone to eventually become President. Which...

The president of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce questioned in a meeting with reporters Thursday whether Sen. Ted Cruz’s snubbing of the group’s annual summit this week marked an attempt to avoid Latinos as he runs for president. “Ted Cruz chose not to come,” said a visibly displeased Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “I hope it is not indicative that he’s backing away from the Hispanic community in order to get through the [GOP] primary.” Other presidential hopefuls such as Senators Rand Paul, R-Ky, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also did not speak at...

RONALD REAGAN ONCE said that Latinos were Republicans. They just didn’t know it yet. Ted Cruz, the Republican U.S. senator from Texas who has become the first major candidate to officially enter the 2016 presidential campaign, is quietly gambling that those words were never truer than in the upcoming campaign where he also apparently becomes the first major Latino figure to run for the White House. The importance of Cruz’s entry into the race, however, is not that he is running as a Latino. Clearly he is not. Nor, quite frankly, should any Hispanic be running for that or any...

Liberals across the country rejoiced today as Ted Cruz announced that he is officially running for president, thus ensuring a plentiful gaffe harvest for progressive writers like myself to feed upon for months. The GOP has pretty much nothing to gain from Cruz’s decision to throw his hat in the ring. In fact, if anything, it will probably hurt them, as Cruz will only serve to solidify the idea that Republicans are anti-women, anti-LGBT, and anti-immigrant. Yes, Ted Cruz, the son of an immigrant from Cuba, is anti-immigrant. As a Latino, I can tell you right now that Latinos won’t...

The proper response to liberals spewing AntiCruz hate and rhetoric is to remind them that they are just: "RACISTS that hate the idea of a Hispanic President". Who want Hispanics trimming their hedges, or cutting their grass, and voting how they are told to, rather than running for President. Remind them that all of their opposition to Cruz and his ideas are based in their own Racist Privilege. If they ask how such a thing can be, remind them of the MANY examples we have been given of this over the last seven years by the likes of: OPRAH WINFREY:...

"Firing up America" is the cover line on the March 20 issue of The Economist, heralding a 16-page special report on America's Latinos. Its tone is resolutely upbeat -- perhaps a bit too much so. "America is lucky to have millions of energetic young people filling its schools with kids who will eventually pay taxes and fund pensions and health care for the old," The Economist writes. "Like other immigrants, they talk a lot about the American Dream. By that they mean the baby boomers' hopes of home ownership, a college education and upward mobility." Unfortunately, it's not clear how...

Latino Americans – or Hispanics – occupy a stigmatized status in America alongside blacks. For some, that is cause for activism, social change, lobbying for legislative action, or preservation of their ethnic heritage. For others, it is a reason to deny their own heritage and abandon their genetic makeup. Sadly, the number of folks who choose the latter option seems to be growing. According to a recent Pew Research study, more than one million Americans who previously identified as Hispanic and “some other race” on the 2000 US Census checked Hispanic and white on the 2010 census form. While the...

“The Republican Party as we know it cannot survive,” according to Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. Note the caveat: “as we know it.” The Republican Party we know today can barely get 20 percent of the non-white vote in presidential elections. That kind of political party can’t survive precisely because it is the non-white population that is growing, much faster than the white population. By 2044, the United States will be a majority-minority country; there will be more non-whites than whites. The word “minority” will probably be mothballed by then. Unless the GOP can figure out how to stop...

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has become the darling of the Tea Party and other extreme right Republicans. He is seen as their potential presidential candidate. Cruz is a superb orator and the big plus: He's Hispanic. One needs to put a pan below the chin of the right-wingers to catch the drool. They now know that in order to win the White House their candidate must take between 35 and 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. So having a candidate that not only thinks like they do and is a great orator with leadership qualities, they feel, is a winning...

The Republican presidential primary field is shaping up to have about a dozen contenders in 2016, and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas may become one of them. But if Cruz decides to mount a campaign, his biggest strength -- strong support among conservative, tea party voters – may also be his biggest liability. While he hasn’t yet officially announced a run for president, Cruz has said he is strongly considering it. In October, he made a visit to the Wichita, Kansas, headquarters of the oil billionaire Koch brothers to make the case that Republicans need a grassroots conservative as...

Alfredo Padilla grew up in Texas as a migrant farmworker who followed the harvest with his parents to pick sugar beets in Minnesota each summer. He has not forgotten the aches of labor or how much the weather — too little rain, or too much — affected the family livelihood. Now an insurance lawyer in Carrizo Springs, Tex., he said he was concerned about global warming. “It’s obviously happening, the flooding, the record droughts,” said Mr. Padilla, who agrees with the science that human activities are the leading cause of climate change. “And all this affects poor people harder. The...

According to New Mexico 2013 state population estimates, 46.4% of New Mexicans were Hispanic, and 41.3 % were White, so why do Hispanic women account for the majority of abortions in the state? Hispanics in New Mexico In New Mexico, reporting of legal induced abortion became law in 1977, and 1978 was the first full year of reporting. The number of abortions reported in New Mexico in 2013 was 3,408. This is an 8.7% increase from the 2012 number. In 2013, 67.6% of abortions in New Mexico were to women who were less than nine weeks pregnant and 86.0% of...

GOP presidential hopefuls are cozying up to anti-immigrant extremists and right-wing billionaires. When I was growing up, my older Mexican-American relatives had an expression: “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” It was my family’s way of making me careful about choosing my friends. Even then, I could see they were right. The smart kids mostly hung out with other smart kids. The athletes stuck with other athletes. The troublemakers befriended other troublemakers. That saying comes to mind when I think about the Iowa Freedom Summit, a big gathering in Des Moines that basically...

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas has earned a singular honor once reserved for movie villains, according to a Friday story on Breitbart TV. Bill Maher laid into the possible Republican presidential candidates on his HBO political rant show. He had little good to say about any of them, but he reserved a special sort of ire, on the level of what he has used for Sarah Palin, for Cruz. Putting it simply, the bad boy of pay for view cable is deathly afraid of the junior senator from Texas. Maher minced no words about how terrified he is about Cruz. “Maher...