The GOP lust for Latinos picks up steam

Ronald Reagan once said that Latinos were Republicans. They just didn’t know it yet.
Never before has the GOP hoped those words were truer than in the upcoming fall elections leading into the 2016 American electoral marathon better known as the presidential campaign.
It is not new that many, including some conservative Republicans, believe that Latinos hold the fate of upcoming political elections in their hands.
What is new, though, is just how diligent and undeterred the GOP has been in quietly wooing the traditionally loyal Hispanics, trying to help them discover that, as the party patron saint Ronald Reagan said, they are Republicans and just haven’t realized it.
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In recent months, the GOP has been spending $10 million in improving its Hispanic field operations in key states and flooding the air with Spanish-language advertisements.
The Republican National Committee has also launched “Hispanic engagement field teams” in nine states, with two dozen paid staff members on the ground reaching out to Latinos.

“The message we are going to give Latinos is about jobs, about education and about Obamacare,” says the GOP’s Rosario Marin, the California political operative who was U.S. treasurer under George W. Bush.

Marin, now a RNC advisory board member, insists that the national debate on immigration has not hurt Republicans, pointing to Chris Christie carrying 51 percent of the Hispanic vote in his gubernatorial reelection triumph last year in New Jersey, and the GOP’s David Jolly winning a special congressional election in Florida.
In fact, a Pew Hispanic Center survey agreed that immigration is not the most important issue to Latinos, ranking behind education, the economy and health care.
Marin and others maintain that the anti-Republican sentiment over the congressional impasse is exaggerated and offset by President Obama’s struggles with the immigrant community over deportations.
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The GOP is also drawing encouragement from a recent Gallup poll in Texas in which more Latinos identified themselves as Republican than in the country as a whole.
Democrats hold a 30 percent advantage among Latinos over Republicans nationally, but that difference is only 19 percent in Texas, where Democrats had hoped to make inroads into the GOP’s two-decade stranglehold on the Lone Star State in this mid-term election.
One of those Texas Latinos who may go Republican this fall is James Duarte, a retired state employee and lifelong Democrat who says he can’t see himself voting for gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis – paradoxically over the issue that made her the state’s Democratic Party darling.

“I can’t get behind a candidate whose chief claim is being pro-abortion,” Duarte, an American G.I. Forum leader among Latino veterans, says of Davis, who skyrocketed to national fame last year because of a legislative filibuster opposing an abortion bill.

But Duarte’s disenchantment goes even deeper. Asked if he would be more enthusiastic over a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, he shook his head.
“I don’t see myself being any more interested in a Hillary Clinton campaign,” he said.
“I think I have just lost faith in the Democrats asking us to vote for them but not having one of us as the candidate at the top of the ticket.

“I’m waiting to see if the Republicans actually go that far. If they do. If they put someone like (Florida Senator Marco) Rubio on their national ticket, well, we’re talking a whole new ball game.”
How Republicans have been able to make those kinds of inroads with Latinos in Texas is unimaginable, given some of the headline-grabbing anti-immigrant rhetoric that has come to be associated with the GOP.
But Republicans say they have been reaching out to Latinos by distancing the mainstream GOP from the extremists and the inflammatory language.
“I understand the need to address the issue of illegal immigration, and I understand the need to secure borders, and I realize that’s critically important,” says Hector De Leon, a leader of the Associated Republicans of Texas, a Hispanic GOP group dating back to 1974.
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“But by the same token, that issue can be addressed by not engaging in rhetoric that sounds like thinly veiled racism.”
It was in 1983, as he prepared for re-election, that President Ronald Reagan made his comment about Latinos not realizing they were Republicans.
He said it to San Antonio advertising guru Lionel Sosa, who as a political consultant would help Reagan secure a then record share of the Latino vote as he won re-election.
“When I say that Latinos share conservative values, when Ronald Reagan said that, we mean the love of family, the love of country, a commitment to personal responsibility, to hard work,” says Sosa.
“Convey those things and you will have a lot of Latinos who nod their heads and say, ‘Yes, yes, we do think alike.’ But from there, the Latino vote has to be earned just like any other.”