It Lost Black Voters. Now It’s Losing Latinos. What’s Left Is a Broken, White GOP.
Donald Trump is accelerating a process that began half a century ago.
By Jamelle Bouie
For most of the now almost-forgotten vice presidential debate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence kept his cool, ignoring, deflecting, or outright denying any effort by Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine to tie him to his running mate, Donald Trump. But it’s hard to keep your composure for the length of a debate. It takes work. And toward the end of the 90-minute showdown, Pence began to falter, and then with a single infelicitous phrase he evoked the only wall Trump will ever build: the one between the Republican Party and Latino voters.
It happened after Kaine returned to Trump’s rhetoric, pressing Pence to answer for his running mate’s insults and bigotry. “When Donald Trump says women or Mexicans are rapists and criminals … or John McCain is not a hero, he is showing you who he is,” said the Virginia senator, to which Pence had a reply. “Senator,” he said, “you’ve whipped out that Mexican thing again.” Adding, “There are criminal aliens in this country, Tim, who have come into this country illegally who are perpetrating violence and taking American lives.”
That Mexican thing. That Mexican thing, to be precise, is Trump’s anti-Hispanic demagoguery, which stretches back to the beginning of the campaign. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” said Trump when he opened his campaign last summer. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
The Trump-Pence ticket is well behind its Democratic opponent, trailing by more than 7 points in the Pollster average. And the reason, in part, is his incredibly poor performance with Hispanic voters, who see Trump as an unacceptable risk. This is no small thing. Political parties can make inroads with groups that disagree with them—that’s just persuasion. But it’s difficult, if not impossible, to make gains with groups that see you as a danger to their futures. By placing Donald Trump at the top of the ticket and indulging his nativism and xenophobia, the Republican Party has said with its actions that it doesn’t want Latinos in its tent. Republicans may thus end up estranged from another group of nonwhite voters—not because there aren’t conservative or right-leaning people in the Latino community, but because the GOP has shown itself hostile to the idea of a pluralistic, multiracial America with room and opportunity for Americans of all origins.
snip-
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/trump_and_the_gop_are_alienating_latinos_the_way_they_once_alienated_black.html?wpsrc=newsletter_tis&sid=5388f1c6dd52b8e4110003de
= new reply since forum marked as read