2022 and 2024 may very well depend on whether Dems can stop the bleeding in the suburbs and among Latinos. So far there’s no sign of that.
The culture war may be big business, but it’s backfiring badly among Latinos.
Mario Munoz, who won an uncontested race for Democratic Party chair in Brooks County, said he’d seen “a lot of movement to the right” even within his own family.
“There is a lot of fear. There is this idea that Democrats are going to take their guns and make their kids queer. Guns are a big issue there. Abortion and religion in general is a big issue. And immigration,” said Munoz, 37, a strategic enrollment management specialist at Texas A&M University at Kingsville. “In the past, you could be a conservative Democrat. Now things have become so polarized that the Republicans don’t accept that.”
Right, right. The Republicans.
That must be why AOC was in Texas waging a Jihad against Jews and a House Democrat. It’s why abortion, gun control, and anti-religious sentiment are the default among lefties.
But Munoz knows all that. He just can’t say it.
Nor can he say that nominating O’Rourke, who went so far leftward during the presidential primaries that he’s a major liability, will hurt him.
Primary turnout numbers seem to show the wind at the back of the GOP.
By Wednesday afternoon, with most ballots counted, more than 1.9 million voters had participated in the GOP’s statewide primaries — a record for the state’s dominant political party in a midterm year. Just over 1 million Texans cast ballots for Democrats, slightly exceeding the party’s turnout in the last midterm primaries, four years ago, while Republicans ran nearly 400,000 votes ahead of their 2018 total.
And looking good in Latino areas.
In the 15th Congressional District, which stretches for more than 200 miles to connect the border city of McAllen to greater San Antonio, Republican Monica De La Cruz won the party’s nomination without a runoff. More votes were cast in that primary, for a district narrowly carried by Trump in 2020, than in any previous GOP contest for the seat.
In McAllen’s majority-Hispanic Hidalgo County, at least 15,042 votes were cast in the GOP primary for governor — double the turnout there in 2018, and nearly tripling the Republican turnout four years earlier.
That said too many conservatives are getting cocky about the Latino vote.
Latino voters are quite unhappy with Biden and the current lefty/black nationalist base of the Dems. But this is very much a swing demographic and AOC and her allies are not wrong that there’s plenty of room for inroads with various socialist agendas. The Dems are culturally out of step with Latinos more than they’re economically out of step.
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