She won't make a dent in the hispanic vote. She is white and doesn't speak Spanish. She didn't have a relatable upbringing as her mother is Italian and she is third-generation; her grandfather immigrated here in the 1930s.
Although I'm not the biggest CCM fan, that doesn't take away her hispanic identity, nor her appeals to our interests. Try to disengage from Mexican-American stereotypes. We're a diverse group and our roots span continents. Not all of us speak Spanish and our native blood doesn't always dominate our phenotype.
Sure -- but that's why it's a mistake to assume that CCM on the ticket will be helpful with the Hispanic/Latino vote writ large.
It's a mistake to assume a hispanic couldn't appeal to hispanics? If you're a latino/a, you don't hate her policies, and identity politics factor into your voting habits, she has appeal to you. That's not a negligible amount of people, and said people are concentrated in states that can make or break this election.
Correct! Sarah Palin didn't appeal to women. Julian Castro didn't make any kind of dent in the Democratic primary among Latinos. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris gained no traction among Black voters.
And even if you believe identity politics makes a difference -- I think it can, on the margins, but it's not usually decisive -- I think it's perfectly valid to think of things through the frame of what will appeal to Mexican-American voters. They make up two-thirds of the Latino population in the US, and represent an even higher share of Latinos in the key states of Arizona and Texas. Someone being nominally Hispanic but not sharing a comparable experience to the vast majority of Latinos in the US might be a
little helpful, but I fail to see how it would be more motivating than, say, Beto O'Rourke speaking Spanish and growing up in El Paso. The identification is no less tenuous.
