As Latinos start acting like a swing vote, Dem pollsters keep putting out warnings that they don’t like Latinx. Here’s the latest one.
As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.
But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.
Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.
More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.
Will this make Dems abandon the term? Nope.
This is about avoiding its use in voter outreach. And that most Dems are likely to do. However expect it to keep on creeping into social welfare and community groups, public education, and daily life anyway.
Latinos hate the term in the way that women hate “birthing people” with its connotation of devaluing and replacing them.
But that’s just what lefties do. And they hammer away at a practice until it makes inroads and people just give way. They’ve won nearly every culture war they’ve fought for a century and a half by taking control of the high ground and not giving in.
“The numbers suggest that using Latinx is a violation of the political Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no electoral harm,” said Amandi, whose firm advised Barack Obama’s successful Hispanic outreach nationwide in his two presidential campaigns. “Why are we using a word that is preferred by only 2 percent, but offends as many as 40 percent of those voters we want to win?”
Yes, why?
Dems do some things to make inroads with minority voters and other things because it’s about transforming society and the country. The former is a strategy and the latter is an article of faith.
Using Latinx isn’t about minority outreach, it’s an article of faith.
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