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Elections

Why Latinos will play a critical role in determining the election winner in Texas

Jonathan Tilove
Austin American-Statesman
Mike Guevara, a GOP candidate for Texas House in Williamson County, speaks during an Oct. 24 car rally in support of President Donald Trump in Cedar Park.

CEDAR PARK, Texas — There is nothing in politics quite like a Trump Train, said Mike Guevara, a Hispanic Republican candidate for state representative in Texas, referring to the carnivalesque caravans that have revved the campaign’s emotional engine.

“It’s like tailgating on steroids,” said Guevara, who kicked off a Trump Train on Oct. 24, clocking 350 vehicles.

Merchandise flew. Fists bumped. Flags billowed. Horns honked. There were heroic banners, like the one with Trump as Rambo: “No Man, No Woman, No Commie Can Stump Him.” There were signs for Veterans for Trump, Women for Trump, Latinos for Trump.

“The question might be asked, why would a Hispanic vote for Trump? I don’t know why a Hispanic wouldn’t vote for Trump,” said Guevara, 46.

It comes down to three words, he said: “God, guns and gas.”

Guevara, whose grandmother immigrated from Mexico and father was a 41-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department, is city attorney for 16 smaller communities around the state. He stepped down from a seat on the City Council of Cedar Park, Texas to run for state's House of Representatives.

“You want to talk about the American dream,” said Guevara, who sees Trump as the dream’s guardian.

Or its undoing — in the view of Maggie Juarez, 20, an activist and pre-nursing student at the UT-San Antonio from Texas. Her parents came to the U.S. from Mexico as children, and met working at a McDonald’s in Austin. Juarez voted Wednesday, not so much for Joe Biden as against Trump.

Trump’s election “changed my view on America,” she said.

“I’ve always been an American — in my head I identified as Mexican American, but I was an American, I was part of America,” Juarez said. “So for you to turn around and tell me that my lineage, that my people don’t belong here, that I don’t belong here?”

Maggie Juarez, a student at the University of Texas at San Antonio, opposes Trump in part because of his divisive rhetoric. She has been canvassing for Jolt, a group that seeks to mobilize young Latinos in the political process.

Guevara and Juarez are two of the 5.6 million Latino citizens who were potentially eligible to vote this year in Texas, more than in any state but California.

That’s 30% of all eligible voters in Texas, the same share as California. But California is a done deal electorally, the cornerstone of any blue Electoral College majority, while Texas is its opposite number — the bedrock of GOP national fortunes.

Texas voting for a Democrat for a president in 2020 would be as big a political earthquake as California going Republican. Only it might actually happen in Texas on Tuesday, almost certainly with decisive impact. And Biden’s margin of victory with Hispanic voters — and the hardiness of Trump’s Latino loyalists — could make all the difference.

Latinos in Texas don’t vote equivalent to their share of the eligible voting population. In the past decade, they have made up between 17% and 24% of the electorate.

Most polling, which has Biden and Trump within a few points of each other in Texas, has Biden with a range of advantages over Trump among Latino voters, from 18% to 48% in five recent surveys, the wide fluctuation a consequence of different projections of the size and composition of the likely Latino electorate.

According to 2016 exit polls, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 27 points among Hispanics in Texas — 61% to 34% — on her way to losing the state by 9 points, narrowing what was a 16-point margin in the 2012 presidential election and 12 points in 2008.

“In order for Joe Biden to win Texas he must reach and slightly exceed the water mark set by Hillary Clinton in 2016,” said Jason Villalba, a former Republican state representative from Dallas, who now serves as president of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation. It commissioned a poll in August, sponsored by The Dallas Morning News, in which Biden was leading Trump by less than 10 points among Hispanics.

Hispanic voters long have been vexed by Democratic expectations that they ought to be a more commanding and cohesive electorate.

Mark Jones, of the Baker Institute at Rice University, which conducted the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation poll, said that “a lot of Latino political elites, academic elites and members of the media tend to look at Latinos through the lens of African American voters,” for whom a sense of collective identity, and a shared distrust of the Republican Party, trumps individual policies.

Perhaps, said Josh Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, it is more useful to liken Hispanics to whites as a group than to Blacks.

“Hispanics may not be as Democratic as you think, but they are about as Democratic as white people are Republican,” Blank said. “That’s really the overarching long-term story here. I think every election there’s a focus on what’s going to happen this cycle and if x million Hispanics vote.”

“What you are really talking about long term is the slow churn of a group that’s predominately Republican, in white voters, that’s being replaced by a group that’s predominately Democratic, at least for now, in Hispanic voters, and that’s just going to keep happening,” Blank said.

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Range of views

Texas Republicans generally get between 35% and 45% of Hispanic votes. But that has become tougher as the climate on immigration and border issues has intensified in recent years.

While Trump appears to be doing a little better nationally with Hispanics than he did last time, Austin organizer and activist Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, who founded Jolt, an organization designed to politically activate younger Latinos, predicts that Texas Republicans will suffer lasting damage because of Trump.

“I think their alignment with Donald Trump has hurt their standing long-term with Latinos in Texas,” said Tzintzún Ramirez, who finished third in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary in March.

“My biggest concern is that the Latino vote is the largest nonwhite voting bloc in this country, and there has not been enough investment early enough in the Latino vote,” she said. “That kind of late investment and outreach produces poor results. It’s incredibly frustrating to be taken for granted when you represent the community that’s the key to unlocking the entire political system of Texas and the country.”

Mike Guevara, a GOP candidate for Texas House in Williamson County, holds his son, Anthony, 8, during a car rally in support of President Donald Trump on Oct. 24 in Cedar Park.

Generational differences

Jones, who conducted the National Hispanic Policy Foundation poll, said the closer to the immigrant experience, the more likely a Hispanic voter is to back Biden.

So for example, those with four Hispanic grandparents prefer Biden over Trump by a large margin, while those with fewer Hispanic grandparents only narrowly prefer Biden.

Hispanics who speak Spanish or both Spanish and English at home prefer Biden, while those who exclusively speak English at home narrowly prefer Trump.

“I see our Latino communities very split between Republican and Democrats, and I often see it split along first generation vs. multigenerations,” said Larry Gonzales, a former Republican state representative from Texas, who works as lobbyist.

“My family is three generations of college degrees. My family is further removed from my grandfather, who didn’t speak English, with a third-grade education selling cantaloupes in Pearland, Texas,” Gonzales said.

But that man’s son, Gonzales’ father, went to UT, got a degree in aerospace engineering and worked 43 years at Mission Control.

“We understand the opportunities put in front of us, took advantage of it generationally, have played by the rules and been rewarded,” Gonzales said. “I think what you see in a lot of the first-generation folks, they are fighting very hard for that educational opportunity, the DACA, the Dreamers, they are fighting hard, and they see that path through the Democratic Party and not the Republican Party.”

But the successful succeeding generations, he said, are teeming with “hard-core conservatives,” who followed the rules and “really want the rules followed.”

“I am surrounded by Hispanics who are avid Trump fans, huge Trump fans,” Gonzales said.

Gender gap

Notable also in all the Biden-Trump polling is a very distinct gender gap among Hispanics, with Hispanic men, like Anglo men, more likely to back Trump.

If Texas ends up being razor-close, and Trump prevails, Trump’s chemistry with Hispanic males might prove decisive.

Villalba’s theory: “Trump identifies as such a strong candidate. He’s got this very tough guy image, this very macho image, that really resonates with Latino men in Texas who are very focused on being strong, on being tough in the face of adversity, and I think Trump embodied that in maybe a way that Biden does not.”

Despite pandemic setbacks, he said, Trump is still seen as the candidate of work.

And there is nothing in Trump’s history or deportment that would discomfit those in more patriarchal settings.

In Hispanic families, “The male is still the one that provides for the family. That is one of the conservative cultural values, and that goes along with a lot of Trump’s values," said Dr. John Guerra, a Republican running for Texas' House of Representatives. 

Even if many Hispanic women might be more liberal in their outlook, Guerra said, when it comes time to vote, couples “come to the polls together and they vote together.”

Matthew Lopez, 24, a videographer, follows Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, founder of Jolt, middle, and Maggie Juarez as they knock on doors in San Antonio seeking to persuade young Latinos to vote. Lopez is helping with a documentary featuring the two women called "Turning Texas."

“Mandar,” said Juarez, using the Spanish word to command, order or boss, that defines the traditional male role — but, she said, “I feel like with the generations, women have begun to butt heads with Mexican men.”

“The machismo has definitely lessened,” she said.

However, when UT government professor Eric McDaniel created a white masculinity threat index — measuring the extent to which people believe that white males have become a discriminated-against group — and applied it to the results of a June 2020 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll, Hispanic men were more likely than white women, Hispanic women, Black men or Black women to believe that whites and men were discriminated against at higher rates than Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays, and transgender individuals.

Only white men scored higher than Hispanic men on the index, suggesting an identity between Hispanic and white men that might help explain the durability of Trump’s appeal.

“The way I view it, Trump has said things about the LGBTQ community, Trump has said things about the Latino community, Trump has said things about the Black community. Trump has said things about women,” Juarez said. “So at this point he has essentially blatantly disrespected every community except white men. Voting for him you’re voting against every single community that he’s attacked.”

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