Why Cruz And Rubio Can't Count On The Latino Vote

NPR ^ | 2/27/2016

[BlackFemaleArmyColonel]

If Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz make it to the White House, it will be historic -- it would mean this country had its first ever Latino president.

Both Rubio and Cruz both have a Cuban background, but neither candidate can necessarily count on the support of Latino voters to win. That's because most Latinos in this country lean Democratic, even with no Latino candidate represented in the Democratic field.

During Thursday night's Republican debate in Houston, moderator María Celeste Arrarás of Telemundo asked Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas if his and Sen. Marco Rubio's campaigns were missing out on appealing to Hispanic and Latino voters with their stances on immigration.

Cruz countered by stating he had widespread Hispanic support during his senatorial campaign in Texas, while Rubio responded by saying Hispanic voters care more about more than just immigration. Rubio also noted the Republican dais had two Hispanic and one African-American presidential candidates, while the Democrats had two white candidates.

We turned to Maria de Los Angeles Torres, director and professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago, to walk us through some of the nuances.

[lentulusgracchus]

So any talk of any GOP Latino support is just whistling past the graveyard ... an activity that GOP voters engage in WAY too often.

"Competing for Hispanic votes" is a Karl Rove-inspired figleaf for open borders. Rove and others talk disingenuously about trying to capture a share of the Mexican vote, but they'll never get it except among Mexicans from northern Mexico, the prebend of Vicente Fox's business-oriented PAN party. They and Central Americans (who are vote-splitters) are who gave Dubya the 35-40% splits Rove always goes on about, when Dubya was running for governor.

Mexicans from the interior are basically Socialists in the Eastern European sense -- nearly Communists -- and explicitly Communists if they're from the south, where not PRI but the very Red PRD holds sway, where Comandante Cero once led a guerrilla band in recent memory. Worse, Mexicans are "culturally conservative" -- if Grandpa Triunfador voted PRI back in the 1920's, so are his descendants today: they won't switch to the PRD or PAN for any reason. This tenacity goes on for generations, which is how we can tell Rove is lying. He knows better than what he is telling people.

In the States, Mexicans split 70/30 'Rat, that's why LBJ, Slick, and Barky want(ed) open borders.

People from Central and South America, on the other hand, split their ballots about 50/50, interestingly -- which suggests a future immigration policy that tilts away from Mexico and instead takes its intake of Latins from South America through Miami. (Just thinking out loud.)

Oh, and Moslems split 80/20 'Rat. Just in case you were wondering about all that Moslem immigration Barky's been inviting -- and directing disproportionately toward Texas, as part of an attempt to tilt Texas blue.

[lentulusgracchus]

FRiends, ping to my last coupla.

Possible interest, speak to yours.

[zeestephen]

Re: “People from Central and South America, on the other hand, split their ballots about 50/50, interestingly — which suggests a future immigration policy that tilts away from Mexico and instead takes its intake of Latins from South America through Miami. (Just thinking out loud.)”

The reason Miami votes 50-50 is because of the massive “First Wave” of Cubans that arrived in the 1960’s.

Most of that First Wave were well educated business owners and professionals with European ancestry, and they, and their children, still vote overwhelmingly Republican.

The Second Cuban Wave that began in 1980, and continues today, was overwhelmingly poor, badly educated, and their ancestors were mostly African or native Caribbean or Hispanic.

The largest group of Second Wave Cubans settled in the New York metropolitan area, and they vote overwhelmingly Democrat.

Huge numbers of Puerto Ricans have immigrated to the Orlando area, and they, too, vote overwhelmingly Democrat.

Except for Miami, I'm not aware of any other heavily Hispanic Congressional District in America that votes Republican.