Mike Gonzalez: Democrats Are in Denial About Why They Are Losing Hispanic Voters

Recent brouhahas over Jill Biden comparing Hispanics to tacos, the purchase of conservative Spanish-language radio stations with George Soros’ money and the plucky campaigns of four GOP Latinas in Texas and Virginia are symptoms of something deeper and perhaps more durable than progressives want to admit.

In fact, a reason progressives dismiss what is taking place is probably that they know that their extreme and irrational ideology is the force driving a political realignment that may rival that which took place in the 1850s, which gave us the Republican and Democratic parties.

If you want to know the catalyst for the Great Migration of voters with ancestries in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, etc. to conservative radio and the Republican party, look no further than this week’s surreal exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley and a Berkeley law professor insisting that men can and do get pregnant. Yes, that happened, in a Senate hearing.

You say that to an abuela, and the most likely response will be “que?” followed by a quick “adios!” That type of deep societal confusion gets you quickly to inflection points.

In the 1850s, the boiling, stinking cauldron of slavery destroyed the Whig Party and divided the Democrats. The two parties that we still have to this day emerged from the ashes.

After the Civil War, elites in the Democratic Party worked against a union by small white and black farmers in the South, and immigrants and industrial workers in the North, by splitting the coalition over the issue of race.

Today’s Democratic Party also has become the redoubt of a coastal, college-accredited, rich, managerial class which benefits from the global division of labor, open borders, and the refusal of Congress to legislate, leaving decision-making in the hands of technocrats.

This elite’s main concerns have become the usage of right pronouns, the insistence that — against all biological evidence — men can menstruate and become impregnated, and the farcical proposition that America is an oppressive society. Oh, and they want to call Hispanics “Latinx,” which Hispanics abhor.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, now vies to defend the interests of what the denizens of this Acela Corridor refer to as “Flyover Country” without blushing. That is, working Americans for whom President Biden’s inflation causes deep pain, for whom the division of labor has often meant the subtraction of jobs, and who can’t vote Washington bureaucrats out of office.

Among these hard-working working Americans one finds many people named Garcia, Flores, de la Cruz, and Vega, which also happen to be surnames of Cassy, Mayra, Jessica, and Yesli, four spunky candidates running for House seats in the midterms this year. The first three are from Texas, while Yesli Vega is running in a toss-up seat in Virginia. Raul Reyes, member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, huffed and puffed this week that these women are “not the real deal.” Yeah, that happened. The New York Times — after years of heaping praise on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — also haughtily referred to the four Republicans as “Far Right Latinas.” That happened, too.

What these papers cannot explain, however, is why polls have for two years now consistently shown a significant migration of voters with Spanish surnames to the Republican side. In a special election in June, Mayra Flores became the first Mexican-born woman to be elected to Congress and the first Republican in 150 years to be sent to the House by Texas’s 34th congressional district.

Democrats like Reyes may dismiss all this, but behind the surface progressives are in a deep funk. This is why a hastily put together media consortium led by two Democrat activists — one of whom a BLM surrogate — is seeking to buy 18 Spanish stations with money from George Soros, the multi-billionaire backer of far-left causes.

And it is also why this snake-bitten White House sent the First Lady to speak to a radical group that for decades went under the name of La Raza (it has now tried to clean up its act and goes by UnidosUS, shedding the name “The Race”). Reading from the teleprompter, Biden compared Latinos to Bronx bodegas — which she unhappily pronounced “bow-geh-das”) and to San Antonio “breakfast tacos.”

Humiliation ensued — as it often does in our social media age — and the First Lady apologized.

But that won’t end a demographic and political tsunami that may be coming for Democrats.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation. His last book was “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution”

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