By Marissa Martinez

Presented by the Brennan Center for Justice

With help from Brakkton Booker, Ella Creamer, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz 

POLITICO illustration/Photo courtesy of Geraldo Cadava

Happy Hispanic Heritage Month, Recast familia! I’m Marissa Martinez. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California has died at the age of 90, the United Auto Workers union expands its strike and a federal government shutdown appears imminent. Today, I wanted to dive into an important demographic to watch ahead of 2024: Hispanic voters.

These days, both Democrats and Republicans are doggedly pursuing Latino voters — and both parties are claiming success in their courtship. But while this push among Republicans may seem like a new phenomenon, the GOP fight for the Hispanic vote has stretched back to at least the 1960s and the days of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. And now that Latinos are the second-largest voting bloc in the country, their turnout (or lack thereof) has the power to tip elections in multiple battleground states.

The way both Democrats and Republicans have claimed victory among this demographic exposes the disparity in how Latino Voters are viewed politically, argues Geraldo Cadava, the author of the 2021 book “The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump.” Campaigns have largely approached the demographic as a monolith which intrinsically votes one way due to cultural values, rather than as individuals who respond to policy and politics like any other voter, he says.

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Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University, says he wrote his book partially because he was inspired by conversations with his own grandfather, a conservative immigrant of Filipino and Colombian heritage who voted for Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980.

A message from the Brennan Center for Justice:

The freedom to vote is in jeopardy. State lawmakers have passed nearly one hundred restrictive voting laws in the decade since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. What’s left of the landmark civil rights law is not enough to fight race discrimination in voting. Every American should have the freedom to vote regardless of race: Congress must swiftly pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

As Cadava sees it, the “rapid departure” of Latinos to the GOP — a major concern of the left — is actually nothing new. Latino support for Republican candidates, he says, has always fluctuated. The difference today: The Latino population has rapidly increased. And that means it now has the power to heavily influence general elections — including the 2024 presidential election.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

THE RECAST: Why research the history of Hispanic Republicans? Why is it important to track this smaller group of people throughout the decades?

CADAVA: My interest in this topic has pretty much everything to do with both my grandfather and the first book that I wrote [about the immigration battle on the Arizona border].

[But] I think first I would challenge the idea that it's a small group of people. Latinos are 60 million individuals, about 20 percent of the American population — not all of them voted, not all of them are eligible to vote — [and a meaningful number went to Trump]. That’s still millions of people.

THE RECAST: What are your thoughts on how these Latino voting numbers have broken down over history and what people are getting wrong when we talk about vote share ratios with Latinos?

CADAVA: After 2022, Democrats were so excited [when Latinos helped stave off a ‘red wave’ in the midterms], and they were so fed up with this narrative between 2020 and 2022 that Latinos were shifting right. It was almost like no matter what the actual outcome was, they were so ready to claw that narrative back.

What's also interesting is that over a course of 50 years, the numbers have been pretty stable. It's ranged between 30 and 40 percent [for Republicans]. … What I find so fascinating about the stability is that the parties have changed a lot over the last half century.

The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush is not the Republican Party of Donald Trump. At the same time, the makeup of the Latino population has changed a lot over the past 50 years, too. So even as the party has changed, and even as the Latino population has changed — growing, becoming more diverse — there's still this kind of relative stability.

[Now,] there's so many people who want to dismiss Florida, like Florida is always the exception, it can't happen elsewhere. I'm not so sure. Who's to say that Florida can't provide the Republican Party a roadmap for how to nationalize success among Latinos? The historian in me knows two things — there's been this remarkable relative stability, but just because there has been stability for a long time doesn't mean that it's going to be like that forever.

THE RECAST: Something that stood out to me is your recounting of former President Gerald Ford eating a tamal with the wrapping still on — a big no-no — and how that seemingly blew a hole in his campaign. There’s been a range of ways that candidates have tried to connect with Latinos. Whether it’s the Jill Biden breakfast tacos incident, the 2020 Democratic debates where everyone tried speaking in Spanish —

CADAVA: The “Flamin’ Hot” [movie screening] at the White House, Marco Rubio making fun of Ted Cruz’s [Spanish during a primary debate]—

THE RECAST: Yes! So throughout the last few decades, is there a candidate prototype that’s done well on either side that can show how to reach Hispanic voters in an authentic way?

President Gerald Ford, apparently unfamiliar with tamales, starts to stuff one into his mouth without first removing its corn shuck wrapper, San Antonio, Texas, April 9, 1976. | AP Photo

CADAVA: Some of the more successful candidates are those who, before they became candidates, have been able to credibly claim some sort of connection to Latinos. George W. Bush is going to have an easier time campaigning with Latinos than Joe Biden because Biden is from Pennsylvania, at a time before there were a lot of Latinos in Pennsylvania, and he spent most of his life in Delaware. He doesn't have a natural connection to Latinos, whereas George Bush, not only was he the governor of Texas, but his brother’s Jeb Bush, he's married to a Mexican woman, his father was a congressman from Texas and a district that had a lot of Latinos. George Bush could credibly claim a connection with the Latino community.

A lot of these Republican candidates in the mid- to late 20th century like Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan, they were all from Arizona, California. They claimed that they had had these lifelong associations with Mexican Americans — whether it was true or not. Goldwater would say he learned Spanish at about the same time he learned English, he was practically born on the Mexican border.

I don't think there are parties that are good or bad at Latino outreach. It’s really about the individual candidates. Now, if there is an individual candidate that doesn't have some sort of natural, longtime connection with the Latino community, they can hire good people. I assume that Joe Biden didn't decide on his own that it was a good idea to play Luis Fonsi’s [music] in Florida [in 2020], but I have no idea who it was that told him that that would be a good idea.

Biden plays "Despacito" from his phone at a Hispanic Heritage Month event Sept. 15, 2020, in Kissimmee, Fla. | Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

THE RECAST: Based on what you’ve studied, do you have a sense that there’s always going to be this divide among Republicans and getting the Hispanic vote, or are there ways to draw back from history to see what worked in the ‘60s and ‘70s?

CADAVA: It's different across time. The theory of George W. Bush's Republican Party was that the way to win over to Latino voters was largely to toe the line in the middle of things like immigration politics … after the 1990s, where the Republican Party was kind of going further to the right. After George W. Bush won 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2000 and 44 percent in 2004, the way to reach Latinos was through moderate stances on immigration.

When I've interviewed Hispanic Republicans after Trump, they now call Bush “Republican lite” and they compare Trump more to Reagan as someone who really walked the line of conservative ideology. And to their mind, Trump proves that you can have it both ways. You can have strict immigration laws at the same time that you win over Latinos.

So is the Republican Party today going to learn lessons from Reagan's border policies or George W. Bush's border policies? I think they would say no. They would say they don't need to return to those old lessons [but instead they’re] doubling down on conservative principles.

A message from the Brennan Center for Justice:

THE RECAST: What have you noticed about Latino self-identification and regionalism that might translate to whether people end up voting for Republicans or Democrats? I’m thinking of the big example of the Valley in Texas, where entrenched Democrats started inching to the right.

CADAVA: Latino voters in the Central Valley of California are going to be much more like Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley, than they are going to be like Latino voters in Los Angeles. And Latino voters in Los Angeles are going to be much more like Latino voters in Houston, than they are going to be like Latino voters in the Central Valley.

A sign in English and Spanish points voters to an official polling location during early voting Feb. 26, 2020, in Dallas. | LM Otero/AP Photo

Regional identity isn't just about California versus Texas versus Florida. It's also about rural versus urban areas, suburbs versus inner cities. That's where you really need to get into the particular group of Latino voters that you're talking about.

In the world of electoral politics, when you hear Joe Biden out on the stump, talking about the dairy workers of Wisconsin or the autoworkers of Detroit, the image that comes to mind is white working-class voters.

It's almost a signal to white working-class voters that Joe Biden is talking about them. But it's important for Joe Biden and any political candidate to realize that they're also talking to a bunch of Latino dairy workers in Wisconsin and autoworkers in Detroit. … Latinos, by this point in 2023, are a truly national population.

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It’s Fri-yay! As always, we’re sending you off for the weekend with a few things for you to check out:

The pressure is already building on Gov. Gavin Newsom to select a temporary replacement for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who died overnight. While he’s vowed to appoint a Black woman, he isn’t considering Rep. Barbara Lee, the only one running in next year’s race. POLITICO’s Jeremy B. White, Melanie Mason and Christopher Cadelago have more.

Nikki Haley has been criticized for taking a both-sides approach to politics. Now, she’s leaning into it as her campaign strategy, pairing tough immigration talk with her personal identity as the child of immigrants. POLITICO’s Michael Kruse has more on the bet she’s making.

The Associated Press reports a man was taken into custody in Las Vegas this morning in connection with the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur.

Kerry Washington’s new memoir, “Thicker than Water,” ushers readers behind the scenes of her sparkling Hollywood success — and the closely held secret behind her conception.

The final episode of “Reservation Dogs” is here (cry!). Watch all three seasons, which follow the lives of four Indigenous teens in rural Oklahoma, on Hulu.

Becky G drops an album, “Esquinas,” celebrating Mexican American identity, and a new video that might just put you in the mood for weekend laundry.

In “Story Ave,” talented artist Kadir (Asante Blackk) enters the world of graffiti gangs after his brother’s death. But his life changes when he attempts to rob a subway conductor and the victim invites him for Cuban sandwiches.

Cordae laments a fickle partner on “Make Up Your Mind”, complete with a cinematic video set between home, a garden, a restaurant and a deserted parking lot.

TikTok of the Day: Available for bookings

A message from the Brennan Center for Justice:

The freedom to vote is in jeopardy. This year marks a decade since the disastrous Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since then, state lawmakers have passed nearly a hundred restrictive voting laws. Racially discriminatory maps have been implemented across the country and racial turnout gaps have increased as a result. What’s left of the Voting Rights Act is not enough to fight race discrimination in voting. Every American should have the freedom to vote regardless of race. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would protect voters from discrimination and strengthen our democracy. A supermajority of voters support the bill and expect action. Congress must swiftly pass the John Lewis Act.

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