Democrats and Hispanics love affair -- is it based on income?

[hopper]

As the child of a fairly recent immigrant from a developing country, I don't think white Americans with no recent foreign roots understand that if you are someone who cannot afford food for your family, can't afford a roof over your head and can't find a job, you're going to vote for the candidate who will give you those things and you'd be a fool if you didn't. And if you have food on the table, a roof over your head and some sort of employment, you're going to be fine with that person staying in office. Even if he's corrupt. Even if he shoots political enemies in the back of the head in dark alleys. Even if he suspends the constitution and makes himself President For Life.

It's beyond most Americans' frame of reference for why people like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro or Muammar Qaddafi or the Shah of Iran would be able to stay in power for so many years. If your life precludes being able to take basic things like food, clothing and shelter for granted, those are your overriding concerns. Not free speech. Not government transparency.

I'm not trying to compare Barack Obama to a third world despot. I'm simply trying to get you to understand that even if Hispanics did agree with Republicans on abortion or family values or foreign policy, they're not going to vote for a party whose policies would threaten their economic security and make it harder for them to obtain things like education and healthcare. They're not far enough removed from severe poverty and scarcity to buy into the poor white mentality of "I don't need no health insurance as long as I have mah guns and mah freedom!"

Economic Security-I might agree with you since the hard right took over the party after 2010 especially after the re-election of Obama in 2012.

How do the Republicans threaten access to education? Its the Dem Base of Unions that threatens progress in the education system not the Republicans.

Healthcare-no way ObamaCare can be fixed unless the Dems get out of their idealogy of not wanting to fix the flaws of ObamaCare. Republicans have to stop wanting to repeal Obamacare as well since its never going to be fully repealed. Both parties are wrong on healthcare.

That's cynical or extreme to think that whites think as long as they have their guns or freedom that they don't need any healthcare. I am white and I don't think that way. Maybe its because I live in the Northeast I don't think that way.

[hopper]

Also, people seem to think the surge of Asian immigrants (more coming in than Hispanics now) are the Japanese/Chinese/Korean ethnicities. In actuality, they're mostly Muslim immigrants from Asia... so I don't think the GOP will be doing that good of a job of attracting them either.

Most of the Asians live on the West Coast and Northeast which is the Dems base so its not surprising that they vote like they do for the Presidency the last 3-4 Presidential cycles.

 

[hopper]

It can't be entirely income-based, because then Asians, who out-earn whites(especially Indian-Americans), vote heavily Democrat as well. Ditto with the gays and Jews.


Income is a big part of it, yes. But social issues and the perception that the Republican Party is nothing but a hate-fest sure isn't helping

There are many Hispanics who weren't born here and don't yet understand the bias of the liberal media. They come here and become poorly informed and poor information leads to voting for Democrats.

That's true I work I was working Security in 2004 and one of the cleaners who was Hispanic he was like you like Bush W. he is for the rich. I'm like what are you talking about? At that time I didn't understand the liberal bias of the media because I didn't follow politics that often. Now had it been now I might have agreed with the cleaner in 2004 because the hard-right really didn't exist and nobody heard of the tea party.

On another note NBC does own Univision(a Hispanic network.)

[hopper]

Here Hispanic PVI in Presidential Elections since 1972 compared to the average:

1972: D+27
1976: D+27
1980: D+17
1984: D+22
1988: D+23
1992: D+18
1996: D+23
2000: D+15
2004: D+8
2008: D+15
2012: D+21

Source: Sean Trende.

[hopper]

Hispanic PVI in Congressional Elections since 1982:

1982: D+18
1984: D+17
1986: D+20
1988: D+22
1990: D+18
1992: D+18
1994: D+15
1996: D+23
1998: D+14
2000: D+15
2002: D+14
2004: D+5
2006: D+20
2008: D+14
2010: D+14
2012: D+18

Source: Sean Trende. I couldn't post a graph so...

[hopper]

Those number show something interesting; that hispanics have traditionally voted pretty convincingly democratic for the past forty years (with the exception being 2004), and despite all the blowback from Mitt Romney's anti-immigration remark, his numbers amongst hispanics stayed relatively close to the median.

however, I am surprised at Obama's sub-par performance among hispanics in 2008, with the first minority candidate being on the ballot. It seems like the GOP may have been making progress with hispanics until the most anti-immigration wing of the republican party took over circa. Bush's second term.

No immigration wasn't a big topic in the 2008 Presidential Election it was more about the wars and the economy. Immigration took a back seat to those 2 issues.

2012: Like I said before the "self-deport" comments hurt Romney bad but the debates except for the 1st one Romney positions on issues hurt him(running to far to the right) especially Obama making him look worse than Bush W. Remember the  question when the moderator asked  both Obama and Romney to compare Romney to Bush W.

[hopper]

The perception is that Democrats are more sympathetic to their lives.  Let's put it this way, the GOP offers Hispanics NOTHING as of now to cater to their lives.

Your probably right the R's just don't offer Hispanics policy's currently that they can be for because of the hard-rights influence  I think.

[hopper]

What used to happen was that along with economic assimilation into the middle class (typically the result of formal education, entrepreneurial activity, and entry into skilled trades) came a tendency for people to vote increasingly for the conservative party (typically the Republican Party outside the South, the South long receiving rather few immigrants) out of self-interest -- tax cuts and deregulation. So it remained as long as the Republicans chose to pander to poor white people left behind by economic change (especially in the Mountain and Deep South).

But by pandering to mass ignorance and anti-rational religion, Republicans offended people who thought that such anti-intellectualism was an assault on the very thing that made themselves successful. Republican budget cuts have often been directed at education and research that heavily employ highly-educated people. That is one way to lose many people with advanced degrees -- and of course college students.

The Hispanic middle class sees its position shaky in America because much of it is new to the middle class. Any threat to its economic security, including ideological attacks upon its means of success, suggests a return to poverty. Republicans have thrust most educated Hispanics into a position in which they become loud and effective proponents of the Democratic Party.  They are able to enlist not-so-rich Hispanics into voting Democratic.

Note well that white Anglo prejudice against Hispanics has never and nowhere approached white prejudice against blacks. It is safe to say that much of the Hispanic middle class has white Anglo friends, and it is able to reach out to them on political issues. It is able to offer the message that what is bad for the Hispanic middle class is also bad for the white Anglo middle class -- personally. Cultural assimilation goes both ways with Anglos and Hispanics, and some of it is political.  

  

So what you're basically saying is that Republicans pushed Hispanics away by pandering to social conservatives who tend to be prejudice?

That is a small part of it. Republicans have doubled down in Arizona on "anti-illegal-immigrant" agendas, but even worse -- they have pushed economic policies intended to help only those who are already super-rich. But that is one state, and the Republicans could face a political implosion in Arizona and still win the Presidency if they get compensation in Rust Belt states that become disgruntled with bad economics and begin to vote for lower wages and harsher working conditions for economic growth.  

The big ones are that the Hispanic middle class has nothing to gain from GOP economics -- and that the Republican Party has endorsed a severe anti-intellectualism likely to hurt children. By pushing pseudoscience and falsified history with reactionary economics as 'education' the GOP/'Tea Party threatens to worsen education. Likewise one is not going to get better schools by cutbacks to education.

The Republicans offer Hispanics the sorts of economic realities that they or their recent ancestors fled -- a heritage of extreme inequality in which those not born into the Right Family had no chance except to be a farm laborer  or domestic servant. One can work, but with a travesty of pay.  

I despise it when liberals talk about the GOP "War on Science".  The kids who have the worst science education, by far, would come from the horrible urban public schools.  Those kids don't have the reading skills to even understand a concept when it's presented.  I guarantee you, if you go to a Chicago public school and ask 12th graders "If an element has a mass number of 13 and has 7 protons, how many neutrons and electrons does it have?", 80% at least would get that basic question wrong.  And liberals are blocking school choice to make things better for people in these areas.

EDIT:  Here's an example of ultra-liberal urban public schools with horrible science scores.  
http://www.uft.org/news-stories/test-results-science-neglected-urban-schools

The conservative parts of Upstate New York have much better science scores than the city itself.

I do not deny the poor performance of children in core-city public schools. There may be more than 'liberal teachers' unions'. Consider what I learned from one school principal about underperforming children in his school:

"They go home".

The reference was not to poverty, but it was to the households of those kids. Many of the kids have a single mother as the head of household, and she is often grossly immature even if she is 40 years old. Their apartments are crowded and loud, allowing none of the solitude that allows one to read and problem-solve without distraction. Mass low culture permeates their world. Children need to see the Adult mode of behavior if they are to model it, a mode that one associates with people who promote learning for its own sake, eschew drugs and drunkenness, expect that household chores and homework be done before the electronic entertainments are turned on, negotiate disputes instead of going to blows, has a critical attitude toward mass media, put adding to the college fund a priority at the expense of buying flashy clothes for themselves and their children, and watch their kids instead of going to the nightclub or casino. Such is very different from what that school principal saw as my middle-class assumptions. That Adult mode can make poverty a chrysalis for the middle class. Anything less with poverty creates a 'loser' tradition.

Much of America's current middle class descends from the harsh slums of Little Italy, Chinatown, and "Russian" Jewish and Polish neighborhoods. Many Latinos and recent Asian immigrants (another parallel) now fit the pattern. Maybe some people can select how their kids assimilate to American life... and they succeed.  But for them to succeed they need to show that work itself pays off.  The idea of a permanent underclass of people who toil to exhaustion for starvation wages so that some distant elite can live in unimaginable indulgence is not consistent with the hopes of many Latinos.  

 

Even Romney won Arizona. Dems winning Arizona these days is like Republicans thinking they were gonna win Minnesota in 2012.