The Great Opportunity With Latinos

By Robert Wenzel

A stunning thing happened in the election that just passed. It signals the start of a flight by Latinos away from the Democrats.

Cubans and Venezuelan voters played an important role in helping  President Trump gain a victory in Florida but the gains were not limited to the panhandle state.

A number of heavily Hispanic Texas counties in the Rio Grande Valley shifted toward Trump: Zapata County, for one, broke for Trump by 5 points with most of the expected vote counted after Clinton won it by more than 30 points in 2016. The president’s share of the county’s vote jumped from 33 percent to 52 percent in his reelection bid.

The Texas Trump voters were not Cubans and Venezuelans, they were Mexicans. It is a Hispanic thing.

Regular readers at Target Liberty should not be surprised. I have long been pointing out that Latinos are prime targets that can be poached from the wacky Democratic left.

I wrote in January 2019:

The serious lefties in California are for the most part American-born and educated, white or black. The newly-elected governor of California, Gavin Newsom. is a total lefty. He is in favor of universal healthcare, gun control and, get this, six months paid parental leave...

Newsom is a  is a fourth-generation San Franciscan, attended Redwood High School in the city of Larkspur, California and graduated from Santa Clara University. One of Newsom's maternal great-grandfathers, Thomas Addis, was a pioneer scientist in the field of nephrology and a professor of medicine at Stanford University.

The lefty House Speaker, the California rep, Nancy Pelosi was born in Baltimore. California lefty Senator Kamala Harris was born in Oakland. Her father is Professor of Economics, Emeritus at Stanford University.

Talk to any white person in Los Angeles or San Francisco and odds are you are going to be talking to an American born lefty.

The Hispanic immigrants that I have spoken to keep their heads down and don't talk politics. They want to talk about their families---and the two or three jobs they have, which they are proud of.

And it should be remembered that these people are very culturally conservative and pro-traditional family...

To be sure, they vote with the current trends around them when there is no clear cultural conflict. For the most part, like almost all, they are trend followers but given their work ethic and family values, it is probably much easier to flip them toward liberty then spoiled white kids who are educated in American anti-liberty colleges and universities and never worked a day while they went to school.

In September of this year, I wrote:

 Both right wing Hispanic-haters and Democrats have misunderstood Hispanics in thinking that they were a solid lefty voting block. When you attack families and the police, Hispanics are not going to support you...

Lefties are clueless by trying to lump Hispaniocs as "people of color."  When Hispanics think of POC, they think urban primitives. Why would they want to be lumped with them?

And no one has a better read on how to succeed in America starting with nothing than Hispanics. They know the black elitist cry of white privilege is a con. You put your nose to the grindstone and keep it there. Why would Hispanics want to have the money they have earned that way taken away from them to give to people who object to the nuclear family and who want to defund the police?

So I am not late to this game trying to for the first time to explain what went down during Tuesday's election. I saw it coming.

If I was a political person affiliated with the Republican Party, I would send my best people down to the Rio Grande Valley and find out exactly what Mexicans are thinking. There is a huge opportunity to steal Mexicans and the entire Hispanic vote away from crazed lefty Democrats.

The start of a break with Democrats by Hispanics is really the big story of the 2020 election, bigger than the Trump-Biden battle. It is about a developing trend that could last for decades. 

Now, the question is: Who is shrewd enough to take advantage?

In the Republican Party, I would like to see Rand Paul have a go at it somehow, even though Kentucky has a very small Hispanic community. Perhaps it would be an important early reach out for Rand as a part of a building block to a 2024 presidential run.

"¡Viva la causa de la libertad!"

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is the author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person, and most recently, Problems With Modern Monetary Theory: A Comment on Stephanie Kelton’s "The Deficit Myth".

Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.