Yes, Donald Trump has Black and Latino supporters. Democrats can learn from it
Could this be the election that ends the “Latino vote”?
No, I’m not talking about actual voters. I’m talking about the way many of us routinely talk or write about the “Latino vote” or “Hispanic vote” in the same way that we news and opinion workers typically talk about the "Black vote.”
The confusion comes in when we invest more of a sense of tribal unity in our racial-ethnic labels than the labels deserve.
Increasingly, that leads to old stereotypes being replaced by new ones that defy reality.
For example, most African Americans share an ancestry in slavery, the Great Migration, the civil rights era and other key historical turning points that shape our political attitudes today.
The term “Hispanic Americans,” like Asian Americans, tries to include a wide range of nationalities and political ancestries.
The folly of those broad categories emerges as they collide with the reality of ethno-surprises such as revealed by exit polling in the latest presidential election.
For example, contrary to widely held expectations — including some of my own — Latino voters did not rise up en masse or with near-unanimity against a president who separated Central American refugee families, dissed Mexicans as “rapists,” tossed paper towels to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans and insists that we’re “rounding the corner” on a coronavirus pandemic that continues disproportionately to victimize Black and Latino Americans.
Instead, about a third of Latino voters supported Trump, according to exit polls by the AP’s VoteCast, conducted with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which is about the same Hispanic percentage that Republican candidates have received in other recent presidential races.
Less dramatic but still significant was Trump’s building his Black support to double digits, a first for a Republican candidate since President George W. Bush in the 1980s. Exit polls by Edison Research for the National Election Pool found 18% of Black men voted for Trump and 8% of Black women did the same.
...continued
(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
