WSJ: Hispanics Now Evenly Divided Between Parties

I'm skeptical of an even split, but I guess I do have to trust there's been some kind of large shift.

The nation’s large and diverse group of Hispanic voters is showing signs of dividing its support between Democrats and Republicans more evenly than in recent elections, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, a troubling development for the Democratic Party, which has long counted on outsize Hispanic support.

One year after giving Democratic House candidates more than 60% of their vote, according to polls at the time, the Journal survey found that Hispanic voters are evenly split in their choice for Congress. Asked which party they would back if the election were today, 37% of Hispanic voters said they would support the Republican congressional candidate and 37% said they would favor the Democrat, with 22% undecided.

Hispanic voters were also evenly divided when asked about a hypothetical rematch in 2024 of the last presidential contenders, with 44% saying they would back President Biden and 43% supporting former President Donald Trump. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 63% support among Hispanic voters, nearly 30 points more than Mr. Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a large survey of the presidential electorate.

‘Latinos are more and more becoming swing voters.…They’re a swing vote that we’re going to have to fight for.’

...

Hispanic voters in the survey ranked economic issues as the priority for Mr. Biden and Congress to address. Hispanic men said Republicans had the better economic policy, by a margin of 17 points. Hispanic women, by contrast, said Democrats had better economic plans, by a 10-point margin.

A majority of Hispanic men said they would like to return to the policies that Mr. Trump pursued as president, while a majority of Hispanic women said they would rather stick with Mr. Biden’s policies.

...

Mr. Fabrizio said: “This says to me that the economy matters, particularly to Hispanic men. The economy and economic factors are driving them.”

Pollsters, what would we do without them?

I'm not sure if the shifts will actually influence the presidential race, though. The biggest shifts were in Florida and Texas. Florida is now a red state and I guess the shift in Hispanic voting is part of why it's a very solidly red state, so maybe the shift has affected the presidential vote. But mostly just to change it from a red state to a "red state that is no longer in any contention."

Another of the biggest shifts has happened in Texas. But then, like Florida, Texas was always a red state. It's just redder now.

Even with Noted Hispanic Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke running for Governor.

There have been "double-digit" swings in "parts of the northeast" but the northeast seems so very blue I don't know how shifts 12% of the population in "parts" of the northeast can change anything.

Maybe in Virginia, though?

In last month’s election for governor in Virginia, AP VoteCast found that Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the race, outpolled his Democratic opponent among Hispanic voters.

Hispanics were basically in-line with the entire population's assessment of Biden's performance, though somewhat more favorable to the Democrat: 42% approving, 54% disapproving. The overall approval was 41% approving, 57% disapproving.

Turns out that LatinX voters don't like Biden's dogshit economy.

Another thing LatinX voters don't like: the left's insistence on calling them LatinX, attempting to portray them, for some reason, as a majority-transexual group.

As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.

But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.

Ya Boi Zach, who lives in a Hispanic neighborhood and who married a Hispanic woman (and divorced her) and has a Hispanic son, is fond of pointing out that Hispanics hew to the most traditional gender roles in America today of just about any race, and yet the left is bizarrely invested in casting them as "gender neutral" and even "transgender."

Turns out, they don't like that too much.

No es bueno, as they might say.

Or, better yet: No es buenoX.

Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.

More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.

...

Amandi emphasized that he wasn’t blaming the erosion of Latino support for Democrats merely on the use of the word Latinx. Hispanic voters have started shifting right for myriad reasons, he said, chiefly because of more aggressive engagement from Republicans who have “weaponized culture war issues at the margins with Hispanic voters.”

We "weaponized the culture war" by saying crazy things like "boys should not be in girls bathrooms or girls sports."

I'm sorry, I mean Girlx bathroomx or girlx sportx.

...

While activists and academics for the past decade have actively supported and adopted Latinx, it has only been in recent years that the term has grown in prominence and drawn pushback from those opposed to its usage as an alternative that doesn’t follow the gender binary in the Spanish language.

Spanish is a gendered language, with nouns typically ending in “A” for the feminine and “O” for masculine words. Masculine nouns are typically prefaced with “el” or “un,” while feminine nouns are used with articles, like “la” or “una.” When referring to a group of mixed-gender people, the language defaults to the masculine — Latinos to refer to all genders.

I think I said that.

Those using Latinx argue that masculine words should not be the default when talking about a mixed-gender group.

Yes, entitled leftwing American white women who spent $200,000 of daddy's money on a degree that makes them qualified to hit the "froth" button the cappuccino machine have lots and lots and lots of opinions about how native Spanish speakers should use their language.

If you want to refer to Latinos by a weird, gender-neutral term, why not follow the media's example of referring to Darrel Brooks, and just call them SUVs?

But Spanish words do not end in the letter X, which is pronounced “eh-kees,” and some Spanish speakers argue it’s tricky to know how to pronounce Latinx in their native tongue.

Latinks? But that would be an English pronunciation of a non-word. There is no Spanish way to pronounce this non-word.

I think most people say "Latin-Ex" which sounds like an acid blocker when you've had too much burrito.

That's also a non-Spanish pronunciation. The problem is that the phoneme -- the unit of sound being represented here, "-inx" -- simply does not exist in Spanish at all.

It's a Colonialist Intrusion into the language.

It's an imposition by Karen Konquistadores.

The term has become more politicized in recent years as the right has increasingly highlighted its use in an effort to portray Democrats as too out of touch or at least worthy of scorn.

Actually we're horrible at politics; you did that all by yourselves.

...

Virginia Republican Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares — who is of Cuban descent and will be the first Hispanic to hold the office in the state — said the word Latinx turns off Latinos.

“By insisting on using the incorrect term Latinx, progressives are engaging in a type of cultural Marxism, a recast of societal norms,” he told POLITICO. “Latinos don't use the term — only upper-educated white liberals who hardly interact with the Latino community. I believe that every time they use the term Latinx, they lose another Latino vote.”

...

One of the founders of Univision, Joaquin Blaya, said they built the network around the concept of using the words Latino and, especially, Hispanic, because it reflected the Spanish language and united Spanish speakers from across Latin America. He said his objection to Latinx is that it’s “too weird. It’s dumb. It’s foreign. It’s not Spanish.”

“Democrats are helping Republicans make them look out of touch,” said Blaya, a registered Democrat. “We built a network around our Spanish language and we have a shared culture around it. Why are we trying to change this? It’s offensive to a lot of people.”

Pretty good objection: Why are you trying to build solidarity with Spanish speakers based on an faux-Spanish English word?

Fuller findings from the poll here.

Hispanics

The new Racists.

Welcome!

Or should I say -- ¡Bienvenido!

posted by Ace at 03:49 PM

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