There’s a column by Ruy Teixeira in today’s WaPo that has a scary title: “The evidence mounts: Hispanic voters are drifting toward the GOP.” (Gift link here.) Teixeira was a controversial hire for The Post. The paper foolishly (in my opinion) dumped Radley Balko, who does original investigative work that challenges assumptions (gift link here), and hired “think piece” people like Teixeira along with National Review benchwarmers Jim Geraghty and Ramesh Ponnuru earlier this year. Bad move, IMO.
But I digress. If you care to, you can read Teixeira’s column and make up your own mind about it. My opinion is that while the Hispanic electorate’s right turn in Florida has been a disaster for the state, we can’t necessarily draw wider lessons from the experience here. Florida is still quirky in the sense that it’s been a serial outlier of Team Red success lately.
Also, maybe it’s as pointless to analyze the Hispanic vote for clues to party fortunes as it is to evaluate votes by gender, e.g., women’s voting patterns, and for the same reason: the groups aren’t monoliths. There are baseline factors that political analysts need to know. But it’s not all that helpful to harp on metrics or subset statistics drawn from the behavior of a gigantic group of human beings as if it’s super meaningful. Too many other factors come into play, e.g., region, religion, class, education, marital status, etc.
If you chart Latino votes in presidential elections over time, support for Dems and Repubs fluctuates. Analysts in Florida are understandably trying to get a handle on it, and there was a piece about that in yesterday’s Tampa Bay Times: “Florida’s Latino evangelicals back DeSantis amid fear of new law.”
The law in question is a crackdown on undocumented workers which requires, among other things, emergency room patients to disclose their immigration status. But this paragraph from an evangelical group spokesperson attempting to explain evangelical support for DeSantis stopped me cold:
“We want a country that provides freedom and opportunity for everyone. We want leaders who will inspire the best in us, not pander to our fears and prejudices.”
Having been raised among evangelical Christians, I think that person has it exactly ass-backwards — there’s nothing the evangelicals I know enjoy more than having their fears and prejudices stoked, which is why they watch Fox News and support politicians like DeSantis and Trump.
I don’t know if that’s true of Latino evangelicals. Maybe a message from Democrats emphasizing personal freedom and minding your own damn businesses might resonate with them. I think it would definitely resonate outside evangelical circles.
Open thread.
kindness
Florida is dominate by Cubans who tend to be much more conservative than other Hispanics. Republicans had been making inlines with the Mexican immigrants here in California. Then they blew it all up with Prop 187 in the early 90’s. It was so heavy handed and anti Hispanic that it altered the framing and Republicans lost their votes for a couple decades. It’s hard to talk about this issue without using generalizations which make one sound a bit racist. So for my part, I’ll say these observations aren’t across the board, just general.
Old School
While that’s true, I’m also not sure they admit that to themselves.
Kay
I just always take people like him with a huge grain of salt because he wants Democrats and Democratic orgs to hire him to tell them how to persuade Latino voters. These editorials are like pitches to get work.
I think his conclusion – “Democrats are losing share among Latinos” – means we should not hire him and instead should hire new people.
Kay
And he’s ideologically motivated too- He gets paid by the Right wing American Enterprise Institute and he believes Democrats have gone too far Left. He starts there and looks for polling evidence to support his beliefs.
Kay
@kindness:
It isn’t just Florida though. Latino men moved Right in just about every state. I just question this persons analysis of that.
Roberto el oso
It’s a truism that the conservative tilt of Florida’s Hispanic/Latino population is due to the number of Cuban-Americans compared to other states, but one thing I’m uncertain of is where do Haitian-Americans land on the spectrum of GOP-Dem voters. Are they ignored, or do their views run parallel to that of Cuban-Americans?
Kay
I wish they’d ask some womens rights questions in these polls. They all end up blaming trans issues for this bleed when I suspect it has just as much to do with “me too” and womens rights as it does with trans issues. It’s like its forbidden to consider whether sexism affects mens votes. Bizarre.
RobPierce
Spanish Evangelical churches, like the English ones, are big-time pulpit-pounders for the GOP.
To the extent that Spanish Evangelical churches are more ubiquitous than taco trucks in Hispanic areas, expect to hear more about the Hispanic drift to the dark side in the coming years.
Chris
@Kay:
Frankly, I always take these narratives with a big grain of salt because any shift away from the Democrats in any constituency is always portrayed in the media as a massive, defining change which proves Democrats have either lost them forever or are about to if they don’t [insert something here that somehow always ads up to “do whatever Republicans want”].
(After 2016, I saw a hell of a lot of op-eds scolding Democrats for having lost touch with the White Working Class of the Rust Belt; after 2020, I didn’t see anywhere near as many op-eds scolding Republicans for having lost touch with the White Working Class of the Rust Belt, even as they lost most of their 2016 gains).
I have no idea if Teixera is part of that trend or not, but the various people who’ll pick up and amplify this message definitely are.
Almost Retired
Interesting. Obviously, lumping the California and Florida Latino vote together as a bloc is lazy thinking by pundits. The “fleeing Communism but drawing the wrong political conclusions” crowd in Florida differs greatly from California Latinos, as Kindness noted above.
There was an article in today’s Los Angeles Times regarding Florida Venezuelans’ growing trepidation about DeSantis’ anti-immigrant measures and cross-country stunt-busing. That vote is his to lose. Hopefully, this is Florida’s Prop 187 and DeSantis will soon become as irrelevant and forgotten as Pete Wilson.
trollhattan
@Kay: AEI? That’s virtually the Mark of the Devil. Hell with him and the horse he rode in on.
On another topic, the Stupidest Man on the Internet© had a role in the case that has the Trump judge forbidding the federal government from touching social media with a 10-foot pole.
https://digbysblog.net/2023/07/05/another-trump-judge-fulfills-his-mandate/
Kay
@Chris:
I didn’t look at his underlying numbers but he does enough backpedalling just in that piece from his central point where he practically falls off the page.
BUT. There’s some truth to it and Democrats should take it seriously, if onluy because IMO they shouldn’t give up on Florida- It’s too big to ignore and it’s growing. They can’t just walk away.
I would like a poll question on womens rights, please. I would like to know what role the backlash to womens rights plays in this- I suspect it does play a role.
trollhattan
@Almost Retired:
Oh now, we all know California is packed to the gills with Anti-Castro Cubans. I even went to a Cuban restaurant once.
Kirk
Small data point. Texas is minority majority with Hispanics being the largest plurality. If that population voted primarily democratic and or voted proportionally to Caucasians, Texas would be a blue state.l
Kay
@trollhattan:
The Deep State and the Medical Establishment and Big Pharma lied. to. them.
I see no other recourse for them other than swearing off all modern medical and public health advances.
I encourage them to do this. They should rely on herb tinctures, massage and chanting. It’s the only way to be safe.
OlFroth
Also, the Hispanic right-wing population in Florida basically consists of sugar and tobacco owners and old mafia gangsters and their decedents.
Almost Retired
@trollhattan: Indeed, there are even two Versailles Cuban restaurants in Los Angeles, if Trump wants to renege again on a promise to buy everyone’s lunch.
ETA Unrelated to the famous Miami locale, although the local version does little to counter the perception that they are connected.
Betty Cracker
@Roberto el oso: I think Haitian Americans tend to be reliable Dems, at least in Florida, but we don’t hear nearly as much about them because there aren’t as many.
@Kay: I did wonder at one point whether the losses he cites are more of a function of gender than an ethnicity data point. I don’t know. It’s complicated!
ian
This is from the AS/COA link above
This is the Brookings Institution from 2022
I am not convinced Latino/a/x voters are moving rightward in any meaningful sense nationally.
Josie
@Kirk:
There is a certain amount of voter suppression in Texas that keeps many Hispanics away from the polls.
Brachiator
The media often continues to treat Hispanics as a monolith no matter how much they are cautioned against this. Some in the media also insist on treating Hispanics as though they are all poor and oppressed.
I have read some Hispanic leaders complain that Democrats treat them for granted, are poor at outreach and make assumptions about their beliefs without exploring more deeply. I have seen this across a couple of election cycles. I don’t know how true this is, or whether some state or regional efforts are better than national efforts.
But the leaders who say this are not saying that they see Republicans as offering them anything. They suggest that this lack of engagement encourages voter apathy and low turnout.
evodevo
@Kirk: Yeah…you can’t treat the Hispanic community as a block…within each state are Spanish-speaking groups who could be peeled off, like the Venezuelans…Hispanic males are ALL about family, and those on work visas contribute a huge amount to Latin countries by sending wages back to families there. The ones who have made it here with their families are usually involved in running a small business, and this is where the Repub obsession with small govt./less local regulation/taxes appeals to them. And a lot moved over from the catholic church to protestant denominations over contraception use. If the Repubs go whole hog on THAT, some of them may wake up. Dems need to find issues that resonate with such concerns if they want to engage Hispanic voters, and funding grassroots organizing and local candidates will do more for that effort than national campaign ads…
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
They should ask! I don’t think they want to because they would rather blame it on trans issues and “wokeness” then admit there has been a backlash to womens rights and we’re moving backward.
But I would bet my fucking house that’s in there as a factor. A lot of men admired Trump because he treats women like shit. That was a DRAW. I don’t imagine Latino men would be any different than white men inn that regard.
Chris
@OlFroth:
I mean no, that’s grossly oversimplified. But what’s true is that the old plantation owners and mob bosses are the ones that came here early, originally created, and still to this day control most of the civil society institutions of the Cuban-American community. So the more ordinary people who come, and look around for other Cuban institutions to help them in their transition, are automatically glomming onto these people. And of course it doesn’t hurt that they, understandably, all have a strongly held shared opinion to bond over – “fuck the Castros.”
Venezuelans are following pretty much the same trajectory.
I don’t defend them, but even in the Cuban and Venezuelan immigrant communities the average person is just some, well, average person, not an oligarch.
trollhattan
Random “only in California” experience: the rivers are filled with summertime boats and the other day I spotted a fancy skiboat with two big ol’ flags and pondered, “Trumper?” given that’s a thing. Imagine my surprise when it got close enough that I could make out the brace of UFW flags.
Sí, se puede
Steeplejack
Just got an email from Bot Sentinel saying that their Twitter account, as well as that of Spoutible, was suspended Monday “without any prior warning or communication from the platform.”
Old Man Shadow
Republicans have made this assumption a “given” in the political analysis world with their insistence that Democrats are trying to “replace” white voters with immigrants from Latin America. Folks just tend to take it for granted so anything less than getting 80-90% of the Latino vote is presented as “DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY!”
trollhattan
Oh hi, Florida. Gators not enough?
trollhattan
@Steeplejack:
The death spiral continues. Nice work, Melon.
Matt McIrvin
If there’s one thing we keep hearing, it’s that “the Hispanic vote” is not a thing–they’re not a unified bloc with common interests. There are some who are evangelicals (some of them I’ve known since I was a kid), there are some who are traditionally Republicans because they’re extremely anti-Communist, some consider themselves white and some don’t; all of these things have an effect.
Do I have trouble believing that some of these various subgroups are turning Republican? No, it seems perfectly plausible to me. But I don’t think any single solution is going to fix this.
Kay
@trollhattan:
I’m kind of glad he banned lurkers. I loved lurking on Twitter but this will break me of it. Good!
Maxim
@Brachiator:
I cannot remember which campaign it was, now, but it was a Democratic national campaign — Obama or HRC or Biden. And I noticed at some point that their Latino outreach was terrible, as in practically nonexistent.
Democrats probably do take the Latino vote for granted to some extent, and it’s utterly foolish. Every campaign at every level in any area with a decent-sized Latino population should be doing outreach.
@Kay: Machismo and the accompanying sexist attitudes surely play a role with some percentage of Latino men. It would be very useful to have better data on that.
sdhays
Wasn’t a (the?) major story out of “The Free State of Florida” in 2022 the spectacularly successful voter suppression/enforced apathy among typically Democratic voters? People not showing up doesn’t equate to “drifting rightward”.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
well, not Teixeira’s solution. His solution is the same as every other center Right pundit- “abandon core constituencies and principles to reach this group of men”.
I just don’t think they’re worth paying. It’s the definition of conventional thinking. They have to come up with something else. One other thing.
BeautifulPlumage
Thanks for everyone’s insightful comments on the article. I’m with Kay in asking questions about women’s rights. The RWNJs have been targeting select populations of men (the article analysed trends in TX in border areas).
MattF
@Matt McIrvin: Agree. ‘Hispanic’ is mostly noise and competing factors. Like the thirty different versions of ‘Moms’.
Kay
@Maxim:
I loled when our earnest and clueless punditry said “grab them by the pussy” would sink Trump. I knew his supporters would fucking love it and they did.
Donald Trump treating women like shit is a big part of his appeal. No idea why this isn’t analyzed more, other than no pundit wants to admit it.
Maxim
Re the bird place, just saw an article that the login requirements for viewing have been removed.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: I’m remembering how George W. Bush successfully courted Muslim Americans in 2000 and won the Muslim vote that year by a big margin. The next time around, very few Muslims were inclined to vote for him. He didn’t catch a lot of flak for that.
Chris
@Kay:
I mean, it’s not even conventional wisdom: it’s arguing in bad faith. You said the guy gets paid by AEI and thinks Democrats are too far to the left? Yeah, that’s not a guy who has our best interests at heart. That’s a guy who’s already concluded that Democrats need to be Republicans, and reasons backwards from that to spin narratives that use whatever evidence he can find and discount whatever evidence doesn’t support his conclusion. (Which is pretty much the mainstream pundit position in general at this point).
Kay
@Maxim:
Too bad. I was hoping the jerk would kill it once and for all.
Baud
I’ll say something which may or may not be true: The vast majority of immigrant citizens are thrilled to be in America and can be turned off by liberal pessimism and cynicism about the country’s future, and this hurts our ability to grow our coalition at the margins.
I have no proof and YMMV.
Matt McIrvin
@Maxim: IIRC, Obama was pretty bad at Latino outreach, Hillary Clinton somewhat better. (But even that statement is making assumptions about “Latinos” as a group.)
Baud
@Kay:
Have faith.
Maxim
@Kay: Punditry is more about getting paid for mouth noises and / or column inches than any search for truth. We could probably count on one hand the opinionizers who’d be willing to point out that this is a deeply misogynistic country.
zhena gogolia
@Maxim: Doesn’t seem to be true for me.
OlFroth
@Chris: So its similar to a dirt farmer in Bugtussle voting for a conservative because of…reasons.
Tom Q
@Old Man Shadow: I think that’s a key point. The implication is that, unless Dems score the roughly 90% of the vote they get from Black voters, they’re failing with Hispanics. Whereas the fact is, if Dems continue to get 2/3 of Hispanic voters nationwide, while Hispanics enter the voting pool each year and old white people die out, that’s clearly horrible news for the GOP.
Wasn’t there some thinking that Hispanic voters are more likely to vote for incumbents of either party, and thus Trump’s small movement with that bloc might not be replicated if Biden is running as sitting president?
TerryTime
@Maxim: If you have a link to a specific tweet, yes.
If trying to access a user’s feed, no.
Kay
@Chris:
There is SO MUCH motivated centrist commentary now. I have no problem with advocates! I love them! Just be an honest advocate- write a column that says “I think Democrats are too far Left”- there’s no need to dress it up with a sprinkling of misleading numbers.
Liberals do it too – they’ll use some poll that vaguely says people want “public heath care” to mean it’s a 80% position but they don’t do as much of it as centrists. Centrists never, ever admit this “analysis” is ideological. He’s pushing a position.
Kay
@Baud:
Agree. I think it’s a terrible mistake by liberals.
Matt McIrvin
Teixeira was the guy who wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002, right?
(looked it up: yeah, him and John Judis, who has also gone completely off the rails)
The book came in for a lot of ridicule during the Bush years but as I recall, it was kind of describing the Obama coalition in advance. But now I guess he’s writing about how it didn’t happen because of the menace of the woke that drove away the salt-of-the-earth whites, etc., etc.
Maxim
@Baud: I think that’s right. It’s hard not to be cynical, sometimes, given so much of our history, but I do think we could do better at seeing the positives (without lapsing into “see no evil” territory).
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Ha! Good point. He needed an explanation or why his theory didn’t work. The Woke! The all purpose scapegoat.
Betty Cracker
@Kay:
Mainstream pundits tended to go straight to “they’re economically anxious” or “they resent being looked down on” and glossed right over the appeal of Trump’s overt misogyny. I found that hard to accept too, and I don’t think any one thing explains the appeal of Trump, but that’s a phenomenon that could have used more analysis.
Tom Q
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, I think both he and Judis are upset Dems didn’t follow their precise formula — they seem unhappy Dems have lost WV, while kind of ignoring that VA has swung so far their way.
They weren’t exactly wrong in their thesis — Dems have only once lost the presidential popular vote since the book cane out. It’s just that the Electoral College has come to be an unusual effective impediment to majority rule. And there’s disagreement over the best method of overcoming that, with people tending to advocate for their particular predisposition rather than looking for the freshest evidence.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: There’s many who are observant Catholics and who are pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and hold most of the same positions on social issues as Evangelicals, too.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker: I agree with you and Kay (like I almost always do). There is a whole cohort of America that longs to treat women like shit. I know being a feminist is unfashionable these days, but hot damn.
NutmegAgain
Since this is an open thread, I just gotta ask– why did we never hear about coke (the sniffy kind) in the Trump White House. And am I really supposed to believe there wasn’t any? (Maybe just ground up adderall, but I’m betting on coke: liquid for Dad-o, and powder for the kids.
Oh, and eta, I can’t be the only one who is beyond tired of hearing the same boilerplate about the current coke in the WH, syllable for syllable.
lowtechcyclist
@trollhattan:
I even ate a Cuban sandwich once!
@OlFroth:
Thought graveyard voting was more of a Chicago thing. ;-)
Eolirin
@Baud: Democrats, rather than liberals, and especially tragically online liberals, tend to center optimism though? Biden does. Obama did. Both Clintons did.
Though I have no broader data. So similar caveats as to yours.
japa21
@Maxim:
@Baud:
Actually, in general, I think liberals and progressives are more positive about the future than conservatives.
H.E.Wolf
Alas no, it doesn’t seem like it.
Chris
@Baud:
That’s true, but I think it’s also exaggerated. It feels true because the average Very Online and very politically aware liberal is much more likely to be like this than the norm (and I’m very much including myself in here). But… we’re not the average Democratic voter. Or the average Democratic politician. Or even the average Democratic activist. What those guys want, and what they usually end up pushing, is stuff like the explosion of red-white-and-blue “this is America at its best!” celebrating that went with the Obama inauguration. And plays like Hamilton and shows like The West Wing.
There’s plenty of pessimism among very politically aware liberals, but who are we kidding, conservatives are exactly the same. I met plenty of College Republican types on campus in the mid-2000s who thought America hadn’t been right since FDR, maybe even Lincoln, and were very gloomy about their chances of ever really setting it right again. But the pundit discourse tends to massively amplify the liberals who are like this and completely gloss over the conservatives who are like this, because The Narrative says that Republicans are patriots and Democrats are haters.
(How much The Narrative moves the needle on immigrant groups, I can’t say).
JaySinWA
@H.E.Wolf: You can go to specific tweets without logging in, but you can’t go to Twitter.com and browse.
Steeplejack
@Kay:
It’s killing me! I have even thought of breaking down and getting a Twitter account so I can continue to read, but It feels like that would be like rowing out to the Titanic and boarding right before it hits the iceberg. (Right after it hits the iceberg?)
gwangung
@Brachiator: These leaders are white and tend to be male. And, most importantly, are older. They traditionally don’t reach out to marginalized groups because a) they don’t know how to, and b) they don’t have a sense of how important they are to their coalition.
With newer and younger leadership, I’m betting this will change….though we shouldn’t need to wait to pay more attention to their concerns.
Maxim
@japa21: I think the ones who are regularly negative and cynical tend to be the far left “horseshoe” (so-called) liberals. But recently-arrived immigrants aren’t necessarily going to make that distinction.
Eolirin
@Suzanne: Almost all of our ills stem from men being assholes. Mostly about women but also about vulnerable minorities.
It’s toxic masculinity all the way down.
MattF
@NutmegAgain: Given that ‘Hookers And Blow’ is the motto on the Trump family crest… What is that in Latin?
Chris
@OlFroth:
Kind of? I mean, the average person isn’t very political in any community. A lot of them will end up reflecting what the authority figures in their communities say, and due to the people who laid the groundwork in 1959, the authority figures in the Cuban-American community are pretty much all reactionary shitheads (who have mostly passed on by now, but passed the institutions down to their children or likeminded figures).
So yeah, probably a lot like the dirt farmer in rural America for whom all the radio stations are set to Rush Limbaugh talking heads, all the TVs in public places are set to Fox News, and every authority figure from their boss to their preacher is a dyed-in-the-wool Klansman.
japa21
@Maxim: And I’m not sure immigrants are even aware of them.
Jeffro
It’s a relatively slight shift, but a real one. Tex has correctly identified the problem; he’s overblowing how big of a problem it is; he has not correctly identified the solution.
The Moar You Know
Commenter Kent and I both have been telling you all this has been happening for years. It is not think piece speculation, it is fucking real and Dems are either going to have to remake the party to appeal to them more (which I don’t see happening) or learn to navigate future elections without them. Which I don’t see being successful.
Chris
@Kay:
A year or two ago there was a former congressional aide who gave a talk at my bank to try to explain to us the effect that this or that banking regulation would have on the business… And at some point, as a complete aside, he dutifully launches into the obligatory “and you’ve got to realize, Washington is totally polarized between the extremes on the left and right, you’ve got to look for the moderates to get anything done!”
… And I’m just trying to imagine an officially sanctioned talk like that, to a local business whose employees you’ve never met and whose politics you don’t know a damn thing about, where the guy says “it’s only the right that gets anything done!” or “it’s only the left that gets anything done!” and coming up completely blank. The norms among Official Washington types and their observers are so completely up their own ass that they honestly don’t realize that saying “we should all be moderates/centrists” is just as ideological as saying “we should all be leftists” or “we should all be rightists.” Centrism isn’t an ideology. It’s just… how things are!
Betty Cracker
@Jeffro: & @The Moar You Know: I agree there’s a shift — you can see it in the chart linked in the OP, which also shows that it fluctuates over time — but I don’t think it’s necessarily inexorable unless we throw other members of our coalition under the bus.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Democrats win handily among naturalized citizens.
tokyokie
@evodevo: In Texas, the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley has in the last couple of elections voted more for the GOP than Democrats. But the Hispanics there are from families that have lived north of the Rio Grande for generations. Hispanics in working-class neighborhoods of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio, whose families tend not to have been in the U.S. for as long, tend to vote Democratic. They may share a language and heritage with those in the Valley, but they don’t have the same life experiences, and that makes all the difference.
I remember years ago Larry Flynt started a magazine geared toward young Asian-Americans, as though there was no difference in the experiences of Chinese-American kids whose parents were professionals, Japanese-American kids whose grandparents were put in concentration camps, Vietnamese-American kids whose parents were boat people, and Indian-American kids whose cultures and religions have little in common with the aforementioned Asian-Americans. Needless to say, the magazine folded pretty quickly. The more encompassing the grouping — such as Latinos rather than Chicanos — the less distinct the category becomes.
Old School
@The Moar You Know:
What kind of changes do you think would appeal to Hispanic voters?
Eolirin
@Betty Cracker: I could see at least part of the shift in males being inexorable without throwing other parts of our coalition under the bus.
But I think that’s something we can work around more. And it doesn’t, yet, seem like it’s such a large shift that trading off another part of our coalition is as important as figuring out how to boost Latina turnout
Eta: I’m pretty sure there was also a slide with black men.
Another Scott
I’m no expert on Florida, or various issues with Hispanic voting. There are always going to be voters that “should” be natural constituencies for Democrats that don’t vote, or don’t vote that way.
Too many people don’t vote, either because it is too difficult for their circumstances or because of active measures put in place to prevent them from voting. Grow the pie higher is the way to address that.
BrennanCenter.org (from May 18):
Oh so moderate governor fuzzy vest strikes again….
Grr…,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: They tend to be Democratic than R
Republicans win the most important demographic, a majority of almost every other demographic votes D. They don’t seem to need a college degree to decide to vote D either.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
That’s why I talked about how it affects our growing at the margins, rather than it being the determinative factor.
Eolirin
@Baud: Idk. We are in a two party system, and the Republican world view is even more intensely pessimistic and they run on hate pretty constantly. So I’m not sure how that wouldn’t affect them even more.
I suppose an argument could be made that cynicism depresses turnout, but that’s probably going to be most true with the youth vote, not the immigrant vote?
gwangung
You DO realize that this is the reasoning that created the term “Asian American” in the first place? That there was more common among second generation kids than with their parents?
It’s just that in the 1980s and laters, immigrants outnumbered the native born Asian Americans, and for that generation, the group differences ARE vast and overwhelm similarities.
Lyrebird
Did you see this DKos diary with some Jennifer Rubin at her finest?
Teixeira and Flores can go start knitting. Let’s hear from Pulse survivors, NV activists, the farm worker organizers in CA…
Subsole
@Kay:
Same. It is startling just how much time I spent on that site. It feels a bit like when I was just starting to quit smoking cold-turkey. It makes you realize how habitual it was, and how cconsuming.
It honestly kind of creeps me out.
Eolirin
@Lyrebird: Jennifer Rubin’s transformation really has been something to see.
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: Their constituencies like hate and pessimism. Even when they say they don’t.
trollhattan
@H.E.Wolf: Have had blips of functionality today but they’re fleeting and the best I can achieve is somebody’s home page intact but no tweets below. “Something went wrong. Try reloading.”
Such a loaded word: reloading.
chrome agnomen
@Baud: whaaa?? nobody who pays any attention (yeah, I know) thinks this. who is more pessimistic and cynical about America than the right, especially with a democratic president and/or congress? nobody waves the flag harder and then shits on it than the right. of course, we jackals pay more attention, but even if you’re not paying attention, you’d have to hear the unrelenting negativity from the right.
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: Sure, but if that turns off immigrants from joining our coalition, surely it’d turn off immigrants from joining theirs even more, one would think.
Data does seem to support that.
Subsole
@Kay:
It seems a lot of punditry really doesn’t know how to engage with men as anything but noble savages.
If they admit that these good, simple, downhome avatars of the true masculine verities are in fact just a bunch of insecure assholes, well that raises a lot of questions about what the punditry has enabled these last several decades by embracing these various myths.
Martin
California has more lattinos than whites. That it’s the 2nd most solidly blue state in the country tells you exactly one thing: stereotyping latinos gets you exactly nowhere.
Martin
I’ll also add, if Latinos were a reliably R vote, they wouldn’t be among the most voter suppressed population in the US down in South Texas.
Suzanne
@Martin: Arizona — which is getting bluer — is also getting less white.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: The Californian experience was precisely what convinced liberals that Trumpism was going to drive Hispanics into our camp nationwide–it was Pete Wilson’s xenophobia writ large. But that couldn’t be extrapolated. I think that in hindsight, Spanish-speaking Californians were much more likely to be offended by the persecution of undocumented immigrants than, say, the average Spanish-speaking Texan or Floridian.
MattF
@Eolirin: I wasn’t able to get the DKOS link to work… but my iPad podcasts app has a ‘Velshi’ podcast that has the Jen Rubin rant. She’s not mincing words here.
Chris
@schrodingers_cat:
Both Republicans and too-cool-for-cool sophisticated “centrists” really don’t grok the fact that the average native-born Democratic voter is patriotic as hell, that most ordinary people who meet them are going to be aware of that fact pretty soon, and that that is in fact a thing they and the majority of immigrants who vote Democrat have in common and will bond over.
Like, when they say “of course I love my country, I’m just not blind to its flaws and I don’t think it can’t do better,” they’re not spouting bullshit because they’re trying to get elected (which 99.9% of registered Democrats will never have to think about in their lives). It’s literally true. When they tell immigrants “we believe that people like you helped make America great and that’s why we want to continue welcoming you,” that’s literally what they feel. But the discourse just has an absolute mind block against believing that Democrats (unless they’re “swing voters” whose occasional defection to Nixon or Reagan or Trump can be used to bash the party) are actually like this, because it’s always 1972 and the average Democrat is always a flag-burning anti-war hippie (which wasn’t an accurate depiction of hippies, the anti-war movement, or the New Left even in 1972).
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: If I recall correctly the South Texan population, while still majority Democratic, became dramatically less so in 2020, which is one of the things that sparked a lot of this concern.
Subsole
@The Moar You Know:
So who do we throw overboard in exchange for these folks? The gays, the blacks, or the broads?
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
California and Arizona have a lot more recent immigrants, especially from the northern part of Mexico (which many Mexicans regard, uhhhhh, the way we regard the south part of the US). New Mexico and Texas have more immigrants who came earlier. Florida has fewer Mexicans, and more Cubans and Venezuelans.
FlyingToaster
I’m going to pose an uncomfortable question:
Is the influx of people to southwest florida not a big factor in the red-shift to Florida’s politics?
My mom down in Lee County notes that all of the new people seem to be a) white b) bible belters, and c) bigoted out the wazoo. Mom also claims that they’re “dumb as stumps”, but she thought that about most of my HS class in KC, so weigh that opinion accordingly.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: I do know liberals who are reluctant to call themselves “patriots” because they’ve been burned by the association of “patriotism” with bigotry, and aggression, and arbitrary symbolic obsessions about flags and anthems and such.
I swing between thinking we need to find a way to take the concept back and thinking it’s a mug’s game.
Jay
@Suzanne:
New Mexico and Texas have Latino communities that have been there since the 1600’s. Same in California
It seems that at some point in time, the border moved.
Another Scott
I don’t quickly know the baggage of this “center-left think tank”, but FWIW – ThirdWay.org (from March 16):
(Emphasis added.)
We know the GQP does the things it does – making voting harder, making people afraid to vote, etc. – because it sees the electoral advantage in doing so. We need to work harder at countering their monstrous actions, and that means getting our voters to turn out. Finding out why Latino turnout was so bad in Florida, and so good in New Mexico, is part of the work that needs to be done.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
I don’t know why you guys think the GOP is pessimistic about America. All of their pessimism is about what they think libs are doing to America. They don’t see us as part of real America, and they think the country would be better off if we were defeated or eradicated.
That to me is different from the liberal pessimistic rhetoric we often see online, which is often directed at the country itself rather than what the right wing is doing to the country.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Richard Rorty has some interesting things to say about the Left being proud of being American.
If it wasn’t so hot, I’d get up and walk over and get my book off the shelf. But…. hot. So take my word for it.
Subsole
@tokyokie:
Yeah. That is an excellent point. The RGV is farm country. It is rural. They can keep their head down and hope to tough it out. (Or at least they think they can.)
In the cities? The GOP is why nothing ever works. They’re a bunch of control-freak busybodies who just. cannot. stop. shoving. their nose into your business.
Totally different populations.
Suzanne
@Jay: Yes, the Gadsden Purchase was the last part of the continental US expansion, and it bought some areas that are now heavily Latino (and it essentially cut existing communities in half…. the border is in a dumb place).
Yes, Cali has some old Latino communities, for sure. But there’s also a higher percentage of recent immigrants in southern CA, as well as in southern Arizona.
Eduardo
@Chris:
What OldFroth said is not grossly oversimplified it is downright funny, beyond stupid, uniformed stereotypes funny, but I got a chuckle reading it. How many “sugar and tobacco owners and mafia gangsters” could be in Cuba in 1959? And did they reproduce like rabbits?
I mean, 4% of the population came via Mexico in the last 2 years only. Those are the grand and great-grand children of the people who stayed to build the workers’ paradise where, of course, there are no “sugar and tobacco” plantations. Just LOL.
Point to you for having a sense of numbers with regards to demographics.
But you, too, are funny, with that crap that the “civil institutions of the Cuban American community are controlled by the plantation owners and the gangsters”. Good flying spaghetti monster! It is fine to swallow commie propaganda but it has been decades since even the commies haven’t talked about the plantation owners and the mafia lol.
And nobody has to defend anybody. If you are an adult, you are responsible for your vote no matter what. If you are Cuban and vote for Trump or DeSanctis, you are voting for fascists and are responsible for it no matter what.
That the Venezuelans are following the same path (Colombian too and by the way and let us pray that Petro doesn’t win, he is a total commie) has to say something to the half death Florida Democratic Party. But I think that train left the station probably decades ago. Sigh.
En fin, el mar.
(“En fin, el mar” is a Cubanism, an expression we use to end conversations about things that have no solution.)
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
I’d start with, “as a matter of fact, yes, we ARE way more patriotic than those motherfucking seditionists that own the GOP.”
And we are. No question about it.
Suzanne
@Baud:
Evangelicals and right-wing Christians are all about the idea that we’ve been in “Negative World” for about ten years. They are freaking TF out about America becoming less religious and the birth rate falling. Hence the push for women to get back in the kitchen, pushing out the babies, and men to control the money!
Martin
CA travel update:
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlyingToaster: I don’t know the political geography of FL– The Villages is No Central?– but I’ve seen a lot of people say that the snowbirds who settled permanently used to come from the NYC/Tri-state area, and now they tend to come from the upper midwest. My CPD/CFD uncles never moved, but a lot of their friends did (mostly to the Sarasota area, AFAIK). My Rubio-loving, Trump-hating aunt votes in Marco Island, her now deceased husband, blue-collar boy who “did well”, as we say, would’ve loved trump.
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: I would argue that California latinos might be more optimistic about Democratic leadership since they’ve benefitted more from it at the local level.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I interpret that as, they are upset about how liberals are changing the country and are optimistic that they can use the government to defeat us and install their ideal society with everyone in their proper place.
Subsole
@Baud:
That’s because we have not made the logical step from “Republicans are assholes…” to “…and they deserve to be shot.” They crossed that logical bridge well before us, and went insane.
A lot of our pessimism comes from the fact we are not willing to take this step.* And it is very, very hard to see how we are going to peacefully debate our way out of this.
So violence is off the table, and logic, reason, empathy, and the things that make us human are demonstrably ineffective with these folks.
That can be a dispiriting place to live.
*To be clear: the fact we are unwilling to cross that threshold is to our credit.
Eduardo
@Baud:
’ll say something which may or may not be true: The vast majority of immigrant citizens are thrilled to be in America and can be turned off by liberal pessimism and cynicism about the country’s future, and this hurts our ability to grow our coalition at the margins.
I have no proof and YMMV.
This is true. For Cubans specifically, America as “the shining city on the hill” is a reality. Most of us are not that stupid and I certainly can talk for a couple of hours about all the bad things in America, what needs to be done to fix them, etc. But man, it is paradise comparatively.
I have to take deep breaths sometimes with liberal talking like this is some sort of dystopia etc.
Not to talk to people making false equivalences between Cuba/Russia/China etc and the US. I can understand the impulse but we are not gonna be close friends for sure.
Chris
@lowtechcyclist:
The 1/6 riot literally had them tear down an American flag in order to hoist a Trump flag.
Every Democrat running in every county of this country should have at least one ad that’s just that.
Geminid
My first hand experience with Hispanic Americans is limited to the first and second generation Mexican immigrants I worked alongside in masonry jobs, and still encounter in service jobs like at my auto insurance office or the store that I frequent. My belief is that they want what any intelligent working class person wants: good jobs with good pay, decent health care, and good educational opportunities that enable theirs and their children’s upward mobility. These are issues Democrats should center if they want to maintain and increase votes from Hispanic communities.
Democrats also need to make sure these communities have visible representation. I was glad when Katie Hobbs won the race for Governor in Arizona, but I was especially glad when Adrian Fontes won the Secretary of State race.
This is one more reason I’m glad that Ruben Gallego is running a strong Senate race. Historically, Arizona Hispanics have lagged behind their Anglo counterparts in voting participation. They are closing the gap though, and Fontes and Gallego* can help forge a lasting majority coalition in the Grand Canyon State.
* Fun Gallego/Fontes facts: Ruben Gallego’s mother emigrated to this country from Mexico; Adrian Fontes’ family has lived in what is now Arizona since the 1730s. And they both are Marine Corps veterans.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
Back when I used to spend time with evangelicals, they used to laugh at the ‘lamestream’ denominations like the Presbyterians, Methodists, etc. which the evangelicals considered spiritually dead, and would quite deservedly (in their opinion) fade from existence.
Apparently that distresses them now. Ah well.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Okay, but regardless of the cause, Repubs are claiming the country is a crime-ridden, failing hellscape where decent families are constantly under attack and the world is laughing at us right now. That’s pretty pessimistic, even if the supposed solution is simple.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I agree they’ve gotten worse about it since Trump. And maybe that’ll have an effect long term. But other than being less reality based, I’m not sure their their rhetoric sounds more pessimistic than our side’s rhetoric to the normie immigrant.
I also think we have been less likely to counter their pessimistic rhetoric than they have been in countering ours, although that’s something else that may be slowly changing.
tobie
I have no statistical information to back this up, so I could very well be wrong, but my sense is that many Latinos who became citizens have gone on to work as tradesmen since you don’t need to be fluent in English to do these jobs. Many have started a small business, and like every other small business person before them, they resent taxes, regulations, and bureaucrats. They believe they work harder than everyone else and everyone is living off the sweat of their brow. The irony that they declare a good portion of their income as a business expense to avoid paying taxes doesn’t occur to them. This is a caricature, I know. Still, I remember thinking this ages ago when McCain coined “Tito, the Builder” to go along with “Joe, the Plumber.”
Chris
@Suzanne:
A little while ago, somebody showed me an entire thesis by some conservative intellectual whose name I forget who was advocating for the wholesale dissolution of the United States and various other countries and their replacement with some sort of Catholic-theocratic-monarchist Holy Roman Empire for the Americas.
It is not hard to find American conservatives out there who want to burn the United States to a crisp in favor of some new racial or religious utopia, and will say so in terms as stark, cartoonish, and unambiguous as anything that was ever scripted into Cobra Commander’s mouth.
MattF
@Betty Cracker: So, what’s that solution, besides ‘exterminate all the brutes’? This was the point Jen Rubin made— that the problem is racism, not economics— and there is no democratic solution to that problem.
Kay
They say they have 700k signatures to get reproductive rights on the ballot in OH
about 2x what’s needed :)
Suzanne
@Chris:
This is absolutely true. They call it integralism. It is exceedingly fucked up. This is not a freaky fringe part of the GOP, either.
NutmegAgain
@MattF: no kidding! I only took one year of HS Latin, and it didn’t stretch to those recreations
FlyingToaster
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: From what Mom is seeing for Lee (Fort Myers) and Collier (includes Marco Island) is that the immigration source is both younger and more conservative than the traditional upper midwest, which predominated when she arrived about 30 years ago.
Many seem to be attracted by being not nearly so far from their retired parents, plus low winter heating bills, plus no income tax. However, they aren’t the “retirees buying up properties” types, but are, frankly, hourly labor. And right now, that’s great, because Lee and Collier are in a massive rebuilding cycle from last year’s hurricane. It’s not fertile field for Democrats, alas.
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud:
According to Ballotpedia, there are 22 Republican trifectas where legislators and governors have given their voters exactly what they want…lax gun laws, abortion restrictions, religious accommodation, LGBTIA bashing, Medicaid denial, etc. Liberals aren’t changing their environs.
Baud
Basically, I think we liberal Dems have a good story to tell to immigrants and nonimmigrant alike, but we could do a better job at telling it. And perhaps I’m overly influenced by online the rhetoric, but it does carry some weight, even if small, and regular folks aren’t watching Biden live on YouTube every day, so secondary information sources are important too.
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
The federal government does still have some influence in shielding red states from the worst of the worst.
Baud
@Kay:
👍
Anyway
Don’t forget New York City — it has a substantial Hispanic population too.
Betty Cracker
@MattF: I distrust all theories that attribute the problem to a single cause. It’s way more complicated than that, which means the solutions are more complex and elusive.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I agree — it has shifted.
Geminid
@Sure Lurkalot: Virginia Democrats changed their environs in 2020, after they finally won a trifecta. A $15/hr minimum wage and 6 gun safety laws were just some of the progressive laws they passed. Democrats will likely win a trifecta again in the 2025 elections, and then they will pick up where they left off
Michigan and Minnesota Democrats are changing their environs now.
Baud
Frankly, in an idealized polity, at least one with two major parties, the GOP should be doing better with non-whites, and we should be doing better with whites. The fact that we currently have partisan racial polarization is not a good thing.
Betty Cracker
@Eduardo: “En fin, el mar” is a useful conversation closer in a joint like this — thank you!
Another Scott
@Baud: Rhetoric matters, a lot.
But actions matter a lot too. Democrats need to enact their policies when they are in power, and need to crow about their successes. Progress won’t be linear, but moving the ball forward is what matters.
That means self-reflection, also too.
E.g. Nature Guest-edited issue on racism in science:
People in power, and people who develop policy solutions, have to constantly look at their priors and understand where people in different situations are coming from.
I think a big part of the problem we have with “normies” is that most people actually don’t think about politics that much. Contra the III%ers, most people driving to work or working in their office or driving home and helping their kids with their homework before sending them to bed aren’t worried about black helicopters and ATF breaking into their homes to take their guns. They’re Democrats or Republicans and that’s the way they vote (if it’s not too difficult to vote). Independents usually aren’t. Government is [wave hands wildly] out there [/whw], unless something bad happens.
People mostly don’t like change, if things are going Ok. They like things to be predictable. They like knowing how systems work and how to exist within them without being squashed or having to spend too much time and effort on them. Talking about remaking the healthcare system, or the economy, or transportation, or whatever, can be scary. “I’m going to keep things just as they are” is appealing. But, of course, change is always coming whether we like it or not, and it’s better to guide the change than to let the oligarchs do it for us…
The GQP doesn’t campaign on what they are going to do in power, or [Sec Pete] who they want to help [/Sec Pete], they campaign on tribal identity and riling up lizard brains. “Those other guys hate you and hate America. Vote for me.” We need to have compelling rhetoric, while also hammering the GQP on all of the horrible things they have done…
A big thing is, IMHO, that we need to find a way to keep from wasting our time on whatever nonsense they want to talk about. A big part of their power is controlling what people in the media and elsewhere talk about.
We need to talk about what we’re going to do to make life better, and to keep the world from getting worse, and do those things.
[/soapbox]
Cheers,
Scott.
tobie
@FlyingToaster: I just spent a week with my mother in the one Jewish senior living center in Sarasota. I didn’t meet a single Republican resident. Most were moaning about the latest Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action, student loans, and the now sanctioned bigotry of evangelicals in public life. But 90 year old Jews who still feel attached to the plight of immigrants may not be a representative sample of Florida’s elderly population.
Baud
@Another Scott:
We’re basically competitive currently. The goal is to not backtrack and to essentially become a super majority, given what republicans have become, and because of the nature of our electoral system.
Uncle Cosmo
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: And what, pray tell, is “CPD/CFD”supposed to mean?
eclare
@Kay:
Totally agree. Back when The Colbert Report was on, Colbert had a bit with Esteban Colberto and his chickas, making fun of the hyper masculinity of a lot of Latino men. And every joke has a bit of truth. TFG appeals to this.
JPL
@eclare: Yup.
tobie
@Uncle Cosmo: I thought it was Chicago Police Department/Fire Department but I’m just guessing.
Jay
@Suzanne:
here, we have 4 distinct Sikh communities.
One group, was imported as labour in the mid 1800’s, and are scattered all through the province. When the Exclusion Acts hit, they got to stay. They have done well.
The second group came here in the 1950’s. They have also done well, but mostly cluster in particular areas. Richmond and the valley cranberry, and other berry farms are their product.
The third group, are refugee’s from the Punjab. They are not doing so well, mostly work for the earlier immigrants, and many still dream of an Independent Punjab.
The fourth group are Internationals, came here as a student, from upper class families in India, starting in the 90’s, arn’t going back, but are dismissive of the earlier immigrants, because the earlier waves are labourer’s, farmers, then labour again, while they “are” engineers and doctors, ( which is what most of the kids of the earlier waves are).
Shuraz Patel dropped by the Orange one day, just to say hi. Ashpoaga, one of the International students the Orange now uses to fill out staff in Tool Rental, who doesn’t know which end of a hammer to use, dissed him after he left as a “farmer”. Shuraz has a Law Degree, passed the bar, has several Masters, and just recently, was put in control of Patel LLC. They are a billion dollar company with gas stations, ( Shuraz’s marriage to Amina), thousands of acres of cranberry farms, an Ocean Spray processing and bottling plant, and about a dozen bakeries and restaurants.
But to Ashpoaga, because Shuraz’s grandfather was a farmer in the Punjab, Shuraz is “just a farmer” while Ashpoaga’s family has been Bhraman’s for generations, even though they have a fraction of the wealth the Patel’s have generated.
They arn’t a monolith. There is no “one neat trick” to get their votes.
Sure Lurkalot
@Geminid: I didn’t word my comment well. I meant that liberals aren’t changing the environs of the Republican trifecta states so the Republican denizens there shouldn’t bitch about democrats if they’re unhappy.
I live in a D trifecta with D SOS and AG. Lots of disgruntled republicans in Colorado. Sad, really, not.
Mai Naem mobileI
When I first heard about Jack Texiera, the soldier arrested for sharing US defense secrets online, I did wonder I’d there was some kind of family connection, even very extended, to Ruy Texiera. I know this doesn’t necessarily mean anything but they actually look physically similar. The only thing I remember about Ruy Texiera was in the mid 2000s DKos used to talk about Texiera’s research about the coming demographic change and how that was going to bring about a Democratic majority.
Princess
Lots of stupid media takes on “Latino” voters after the Chicago mayoral election but the fact was, Puerto Ricans and some younger, more activist oriented Mexicans voted for Johnson while the bulk of the Mexican community went for Vallas. It was clear from the precinct maps. They don’t live together, side by side, and they don’t think of themselves as a single community. The more Dems stay lazy and think of these voters as a “block” to be “won,” the worse they will do.
Bill Arnold
@Uncle Cosmo:
Had to look that up (Chicago Police Department / Fire Department – I realize that you’re making a point about acronyms.)
NY City can get away with this; e.g. there are many many more songs about New York than about Chicago. (Not dissing Chicago, here.)
JaneE
A large portion of Hispanics in Florida are Cubans who fled Cuba or their descendants. Not all the anti-Communist Cubans were pro-fascist dictator loving Battista supporters, but a good many of the earliest cohorts were. Even the moderate anti-communists tended to be right leaning. And they are now the Americans who are being “displaced” by the unwashed hordes from Mexico/Central/South America, some of whom are Native Americans who don’t even speak Spanish. Because they were anti-Communist they were hailed as heroic refugees and provided all the things their kids and grandkids want to ship the current refugees off to other states to get.
Florida’s Hispanic population may well be turning Republican, even the Trump/DeSantis version of Republican. The current version of the GOP bears about as much resemblance to the old GOP as Evangelicals bear to the old mainstream Christianity.
gene108
One thing that’s routinely overlooked about Trump’s 2016 campaign is they used a lot of data mining to micro target online ads to certain demographics social media feeds. Pete Thiel, and others, worked to set this operation up.
The Republican Party has adopted this data mining and micro social media ad targeting to try to get more Hispanic votes in 2020 and 2022.
I don’t think Democrats have any infrastructure to compete with it.
Geminid
@Sure Lurkalot: Thanks, sorry I misunderstood you.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: It would also be rewarding Musk’s bad behavior.
sab
@Mai Naem mobileI: There are also baseball players named Teixeira. I don’t think it is that rare a name.
way2blue
Betty C. I know nothing about Florida politics except for Rick Wilson’s pointed criticism of the Democratic party structure (albeit he seems to like the person who is now in charge). Nonethheless, I skimmed an interesting article last week that might be of interest, apparently written by a Democratic party insider. Take a look if you’re so inclined—and let me know what you think »
Anatomy of a Murder: How the Democratic Party Crashed in Florida
Donors wanted “long-term progressive infrastructure” in the Sunshine State. It killed the Democratic party. STEVE SCHALE [JUN 1, 2023]
https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/anatomy-of-a-murder-democratic-party-florida
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: Adrian Vermeule? He’s a real piece of work. And a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. Who literally wants to dissolve American democracy and replace it with a Catholic theocracy one bit at a time.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s the gent! Thank you!
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: @Chris: There’s also Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and others on that crazy train. Eric Metaxas.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Did you ever read this bit of psychosis? It is 100% about establishing a Christian dominion.
“National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles”
Another Scott
@way2blue: That’s excellent. Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
@Suzanne: Before the American Revolution our governmental ancestors persecuted and prosecuted Catholics and Evangelicals, believing that they were detrimental to stable governance.
ETA Our Founding Fathers decided in the interests of Tolerance to cut them some slack.
Clarence Thomas: Our founding fathers didn’t like you or your co-religionists. They decided to tolerate you.
evodevo
@Geminid: Yes…this is what I was talking about…Dems have to figure out an appeal to small business owners and parents of college age children…coincidentally this would appeal to a large segment of Latinos, in TX and FL. But this stuff has to be targeted and relentless to counter the loud and constant blaring from winger media…and needs to be continued OUTSIDE of the usual pre-election rush, when everyone gets tired and no longer listens to overtly political ads. Community grassroots organizing is where our money should go…not to TV ads