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      Progressive Jessica Cisneros Challenges Rep. Cuellar in Texas

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      LAREDO, Texas — Two years ago, a 26-year-old immigration lawyer named Jessica Cisneros came within 3.6 percentage points of pushing out the longtime Democratic congressman here, running aggressively on the progressive vision of the national liberals who had bankrolled her insurgent campaign.This time around, at the ripe age of 28, she’s scorching the already brown earth of South Texas, attacking Representative Henry Cuellar not so much for his conservative policy positions, but for being what she describes as a corrupt politician — rich, out of touch with his poor constituents, and quite possibly a felon.“We’re going after him,” Ms. Cisneros said at a picnic table outside the taqueria next to her campaign headquarters, with the confidence of a seasoned political street fighter. “Everything we’ve been doing has been very intentional.”Texas will kick off the 2022 primary season on Tuesday, launching what promises to be a grueling series of contests that could pull both Democrats and Republicans toward their political extremes, while testing the grips that President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump have over their respective parties.In South Texas, another test is developing over the power of identity politics and whether liberals can answer the fears that conservatives are stoking about “open borders,” “critical race theory” and rising crime. In the primary campaign for Texas’ 28th district, it is Mr. Cuellar’s experience versus Ms. Cisneros’s storytelling: the powerful and connected versus the underdogs, the community, the “pueblo.”There have been many changes here since Ms. Cisneros first challenged Mr. Cuellar, but the most significant may have been the shock for both parties of seeing Hispanic voters lurch toward Mr. Trump in 2020. Zapata County, just south of here, is heavily Latino; Hillary Clinton won it by more than 30 points in 2016, then it went to Mr. Trump by about five points. Ms. Clinton’s 60-point margin in Starr County, which is 96 percent Latino, shriveled to a five-point advantage for Mr. Biden.In response, Ms. Cisneros is running a campaign against the 17-year incumbent that could easily have been engineered by a Republican. She still favors Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, more liberal immigration policies and abortion rights, but those have not been her focus.Instead, she has played up her biography and hit Mr. Cuellar hard on rising prices. She has portrayed him as a Washington insider, greasing his pockets with money from big corporations, and presented herself as embodying the struggling community he left behind.“My medicines cost more, insurance more,” intones an older Latina in one of Ms. Cisneros’s most recent ads, as the woman sweeps the stoop of her modest house and laments that nothing has changed in Laredo. “Now it’s food and gas, but we don’t make more. If you ask me, Henry Cuellar has been in Washington too long.”The mysterious raid last month by the F.B.I. of Mr. Cuellar’s Laredo home and campaign office presented a late, potentially devastating twist that seemed to confirm all that Ms. Cisneros had been saying of the congressman — and she pounced on it.Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a fellow progressive, campaigned recently for congressional candidate Jessica Cisneros in San Antonio.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesJustice Democrats, the progressive insurgent group that has greatly bolstered her campaign, has piled on with a decidedly nonideological advertisement blanketing South Texas that accuses Mr. Cuellar of hitching rides on donors’ private jets, fixing his BMW with campaign cash and drawing that raid by the F.B.I.Progressives have been on a losing streak of late. In August, a hero of the left, Nina Turner, lost a special election in Cleveland to a candidate backed by establishment Democrats. Representative Marie Newman of Illinois, who in 2020 defeated one of the last House Democrats who opposed abortion, is under an ethics investigation, accused of enticing a primary rival out of the race two years ago with a promised job in her congressional office. Democratic leaders have struggled to distance themselves from the sloganeering of “Defund the police,” while Republicans have demonized progressive views on race and gender.A Guide to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Like Ms. Cisneros, liberal organizations are trying to adjust.“We are definitely aware of the Trump swing,” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesman and strategist for Justice Democrats, which helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts defeat veteran Democratic incumbents over the past four years.Mr. Cuellar and his supporters have greeted the onslaught with disbelief. The veteran Democrat may be the last in the House who opposes abortion, and he has taken a tougher line on immigration, border security and law enforcement than many of his colleagues. But that is not what the campaign seems to be about.“They really don’t talk much about what they want to do, except in general terms,” Mr. Cuellar said. Instead, he said, “it’s attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.”He said in January in a video statement on Twitter that the ongoing investigation — which appears linked to a broader inquiry into the political influence of Azerbaijan — will show “no wrongdoing on my part.”Supporters of Ms. Cisneros — and some Democratic thinkers — see in her shift a model for the party in the Trump era of personal politics. Republicans, and to some extent Mr. Cuellar, have created a frightening narrative that feels more urgent than any policy debates in Washington. That story contends that decent, hard-working people are playing by the rules, but strangers are pounding at the door, and neighbors are grabbing all they can from the government.Ian Haney López, a public law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the Hispanic shift in South Texas, said Ms. Cisneros is using identity to try to galvanize support without alienating the white voters who remain the majority nationwide — though not in the 28th district of Texas.Since the rise of Trumpism, with its appeals to white grievance and fears, he said, Democrats have taken two approaches, both of which have failed. The progressive wing has called out Mr. Trump and his supporters as racist, and urged voters to band together to fight white racism.“That identity story casts the majority of Democratic voters as part of the problem,” he said. In addition, 2020 proved that tactic was also not helpful to the Democratic cause with people of color, especially Latinos. “You’re not going to get them to sign on to a story that says you’re on the margins, you’re widely hated, and your children’s lives will be truncated by racism.”Jessica Cisneros hands out campaign flyers in Laredo, Texas. She is supported by the same progressive group that helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts defeat veteran Democratic incumbents.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesMore centrist Democrats, recognizing the perils of that approach, have eschewed identity politics altogether and stuck with dry policy arguments — a strategy Mr. Lopez called “nonsense on stilts.”In Ms. Cisneros’s campaign, he sees an identity-first approach, in which she casually toggles between English and Spanish, speaks of identifying with South Texas and its struggles, contrasts that to the outsiders in Washington, then pivots to issues like health care and reproductive rights.After the Trump shake-up, the region could be ready for a new approach, said Cecilia Ballí, an anthropologist and researcher at the University of Houston who did extensive interviews in South Texas after Mr. Trump’s 2020 gains. For decades, the region has been run by insular political families like Mr. Cuellar’s. His brother is the sheriff of Laredo’s Webb County; his sister is a former municipal judge and tax collector there.Ms. Ballí said that with no real competition between the parties, Democrats have won loyalty with rallies and free food, but no emphasis on issues or retail politics. Mr. Trump’s brand of personality-driven, outsider bombast broke through to many disillusioned Hispanic voters.Ms. Cisneros agreed: “They’ve been voting Democrat for such a long time, and obviously, the poverty rate hasn’t gone down, the uninsurance rate hasn’t gone down. People still have to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet.” she said. Add the pandemic and a shutdown of border crossings that crippled Laredo commerce, “and I think that just led to the perfect storm.”Mr. Cuellar has weapons of his own: an unrivaled network of backers in the political establishment and a seat on the House Appropriations Committee, from which he has plied the sprawling district with federal largess, from $45,520,000 in transportation projects for Atascosa County in the district’s north to $15,142,000 for cattle health in Zapata County in the south.Then there are the fears that a Cisneros victory March 1 would hand newly confident Republicans the seat. Ms. Cisneros insists that she is the answer to the Republican rise, an outsider voice to give hope to the region’s frustrations. Redistricting changes actually made the 28th slightly more Democratic, with more voters from San Antonio’s Bexar County, a potential boon to Ms. Cisneros’s chances — on Tuesday and in November. The district shifted from 76.9 percent Hispanic to 75.3 percent, but a slight rise in Anglo voters could actually help Ms. Cisneros if those new voters are San Antonio liberals.But Mr. Cuellar beat his Republican challenger handily in 2020, with 58 percent of the vote, while Mr. Biden eked out 51.5 percent. Those Trump-Cuellar voters could move to the Republican House candidate that emerges from the seven-candidate primary.“If Henry loses, then they have won this seat,” Anna Cavazos Ramirez, a former Webb County attorney, said of the Republicans.The negative tone of Ms. Cisneros’s campaign has turned off some voters, who speculated that the raid last month — still unexplained — was somehow the work of her supporters. Pastor Tim Rowley, who ministers at one of Laredo’s largest evangelical congregations, Grace Bible Church, said the campaign had left him saddened.“Whether you’re Democrat or Republican, rather than getting up and fully debating the issues, it just seems to be a smear campaign,” he said, suggesting he would likely vote for Mr. Cuellar because “this has to stop.”Miguel Sanchez, 35, was not so quick to dismiss what he called “that incident,” when F.B.I. agents were seen carrying items from Mr. Cuellar’s Laredo home. Mr. Sanchez had come to a rally at Texas A&M International University for Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat running for Texas governor, but the longtime Cuellar supporter was giving the House primary a lot of thought.“Cisneros, she seems to be a breath of fresh air,” he said, adding, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a grassroots-type Democrat.” As for the incumbent, Ms. Cisneros’s message has gotten through.“I don’t know,” Mr. Sanchez said, shaking his head. “We don’t need politicians like that in Washington.” More

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      How the Fight Over Abortion Rights Has Changed the Politics of South Texas

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      In the Laredo region, long a Democratic stronghold, that single issue appears to be driving the decision for many voters, the majority of whom are Catholic.LAREDO, Texas — Like the majority of her neighbors in the heavily Latino community of Laredo, Angelica Garza has voted for Democrats for most of her adult life. Her longtime congressman, Henry Cuellar, with his moderate views and opposition to abortion, made it an easy choice, she said.But as up-and-coming Democratic candidates in her patch of South Texas have leaned ever more liberal, Ms. Garza, a dedicated Catholic, cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2016, primarily because of his anti-abortion views.In choosing Mr. Trump that year and again in 2020, Ms. Garza joined a parade of Latino voters who are changing the political fabric of South Texas. In the Laredo region, where about nine out of 10 residents are Catholic, many registered voters appear to be driven largely by the single issue of abortion.“I’m willing to vote for any candidate that supports life,” said Ms. Garza, 75. “That’s the most important issue for me, even if it means not voting for a Democrat.”With a pivotal primary election just a week away, Ms. Garza is ready to to turn away from Democrats. Pointing at a wall covered in folkloric angel figurines at the art store she owns in Laredo, she explained why: “They are babies, angels, and I don’t think anyone has the right to end their life. We have to support life.”Angelica Garza voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because of his anti-abortion views.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesVoters like Ms. Garza are worrying Democratic leaders, whose once tight grip and influence on the Texas-Mexico border region has loosened in recent electoral cycles. Republicans have claimed significant victories across South Texas, flipping Zapata County, south of Laredo on the bank of the Rio Grande, and a state district in San Antonio. They also made gains in the Rio Grande Valley, where the border counties delivered so many votes for Mr. Trump in 2020 that they helped negate the impact of white voters in urban and suburban areas of the state who voted for Joe Biden.Much is at stake in Laredo, the most populous city of the 28th Congressional District, where Latinos are a majority, and which stretches from the eastern tip of San Antonio and includes a western chunk of the Rio Grande Valley. Since the district was drawn nearly three decades ago, the seat has been held by Democrats. Mr. Cuellar has represented the district since 2005. His moderate and sometimes conservative views — he was the only Congressional Democrat to vote against a U.S. House bill that would have nullified the state’s near-total ban on abortion that went into effect last September — have frequently endeared him to social conservatives and Republicans.But he now finds himself locked in a tight fight against a much more liberal candidate backed by the progressive wing of the party that includes Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Cuellar, whose home was raided last month by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation that neither he nor the government has disclosed, beat his opponent, Jessica Cisneros, by four percentage points in 2020.Should he lose the primary on March 1 to Ms. Cisneros, a 28-year-old immigration lawyer who supports abortion rights, the path to flip the House of Representatives could very well run through South Texas, as Republicans have vowed an all-in campaign focused on religious and other conservative values. More

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      The Democratic Party’s Latino Voter Problem

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      The shift toward Donald Trump by Latino voters was one of the more surprising takeaways of the 2020 presidential election. The findings of recent polls and reports — that Latinos may still be sliding toward Republicans — are even more disconcerting for Democrats. Given the political stakes as well as the stakes for Latino families, Democratic leaders must do better.As 2022 begins, the party so far has no visible, convincingly powerful plan to win over the voters many rank and file Democrats believe are key to November’s midterm elections, the 2024 presidential race and perhaps the future of the Democratic Party. But what happens next, when Democratic candidates fan out across the country trying to shore up support from Latinos who may be slipping away?Some believe that doing better means spending more money on messaging, advertising and outreach. But this isn’t the only lesson to be gleaned from what the data is telling us, and it might not even be the right one. Democrats should more aggressively combat Republican messaging with their own, but the real fight should be over which party has the best ideas on education, immigration, jobs and the economy. This is where Democrats take the Latino vote for granted, but they shouldn’t.Daniel Garza, the president of the conservative group The Libre Initiative, for example, believes that the Republican agenda gives his party the upper hand with Latinos. He scoffed at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announcement last November that it planned to win back Latino and other voters of color by spending at least $30 million to hire organizers, pay for targeted advertising campaigns, combat disinformation and support voter protection and education programs.Thirty million is a lot of money, he told me, but it would be “wasted if the message were about nuanced topics like voter suppression, disinformation and diversity.” The problem for Democrats, he added, is that “GOP ideas are better” because they’re “pro-growth, pro-energy, pro-parent (school choice) and pro-advancement.”Mr. Garza makes several assumptions: that voter suppression and disinformation are nuanced topics that don’t resonate with Latinos; that Democrats aren’t fighting for policies that will make our lives better; and that Republicans are the only party that supports growth and families.Some Democrats have downplayed the importance of policy compared with style and approach. Chuck Rocha, a political strategist, who is in a way Mr. Garza’s liberal counterpoint, called the re-election campaign announcement by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas at a Hispanic Leadership Summit a “brilliant political move,” but said that the Republican Party’s policies prove that they don’t care about Latinos. Mr. Rocha added that Democrats need to “quit taking a policy book” to a “fistfight.” He might be right that Democrats should be ready to fight, but they should absolutely bring their policy book with them.Indeed, one of the main findings of the post-mortem report on the 2020 election published by Equis Research was that Donald Trump made inroads with Latino voters because he and Republican governors kept the economy open during the pandemic, cut taxes, distributed stimulus checks, secured the border and expedited vaccine development. I would add Mr. Trump’s focus on religious liberty and support for charter schools.The report dispelled theories that Latinos supported Mr. Trump because they opposed the term Latinx and defunding the police, or because they aspire to whiteness. The problem with these assumptions is that they caricatured Latinos as motivated primarily by culture wars instead of sincerely held policy beliefs.Or, rather, the term Latinx, policing and whiteness were issues with underlying policy implications that too often got framed as divisive culture wars, and in ways that minimized the real policy disagreements they highlighted for Latinos: generational divides between Latino Democrats over progressive versus moderate policies; whether the border patrol or police help or harm communities; and whether capitalism, however exploitative, or socialism, however invasive, is the best path toward upward mobility and economic security.The notion that Latinos were swayed by disinformation implies that they could be duped into voting for Mr. Trump, or that they could have voted for him only if they were duped. Sure, calling President Biden a socialist is disinformation because he is not a socialist. But it’s also the same line of attack that Republicans have used to brand their opponents for a long time. We should be outraged with the lies, and we should combat them. But by merely dismissing the attack as disinformation we ignore why it has been so successful.It’s not just that socialism conjures ghosts of Latin America’s leftist leaders. It’s also an argument about religion — since conservatives consider socialism a godless philosophy — the ills of government intervention and dependency on government, and education. In a society that cherishes freedom, parents should have a hand in deciding what their children learn.As much as Democrats would like to dismiss Republican talking points — or misinformation, in some cases — they would be better off understanding how they relate to values that in turn connect with policy preferences. Then they can work to persuade Latinos that their policies are better, even on issues such as religion, the economy and education, on which Republicans claim to occupy more solid ground.Latino voters aren’t empty vessels just waiting to be filled with liberal beliefs. The problem with focusing only, or even primarily, on messaging and outreach is that it once again doesn’t take Latinos seriously as political actors, and instead assumes that they’re out there ready to be mobilized for the Democratic cause. That’s just not true.In the end, even if Democrats focus exclusively on policy, they still won’t sway all Latinos to vote for them. But doing so would help them better understand these voters. They should be asking them whether they are paid enough to provide for their families, if they’re satisfied with the schools their children go to, whether they have access to health care, and what government can do to help them reach their goals.The concrete plans they develop in response, especially for families living paycheck to paycheck and worrying about schools and health care, should respect their work ethic and ambitions. Latinos aren’t looking for “handouts,” but rather, leveling the playing field by, for example, making it easier to get loans to start a business, and increasing access to higher education.I dream of vigorous town hall-style debates where both parties engage in arguments over whose policies are best, instead of hurling talking points in our general direction from a distance. What Democrats learn may be uncomfortable if they have to abandon their assumptions. But dissecting our understanding of these voters, long presumed to represent a bloc, will be necessary if we have any hope of reconstituting “the Latino vote” in a way that’s more reflective of Latinos’ hopes, dreams and political aims.Geraldo L. Cadava (@gerry_cadava) is the author of “The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, From Nixon to Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Democrats Find Urgent New Reasons to Worry About Latino Voters

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      Two reports shed light on the issues driving Hispanic voters and why their support of the Democratic Party is eroding.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Of all the 2020 hangovers, perhaps none is as befuddling to Democrats as the party’s eroding support among Latino voters.And Democrats have plenty of reason to worry: For years, they have relied on Latinos as a crucial part of a winning coalition and held fast to the belief that the coalition would only grow along with new voters. Former President Donald J. Trump’s policies and rhetorical attacks on immigrants, many Democrats reasoned, would drive Hispanic voters to their party like no other candidate could.But Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign blew that theory out of the water: Hispanic support for him actually increased in 2020, particularly — but not only — in South Florida and South Texas. And two new reports this week show why Democrats should be worried.The first, by Equis Research, a Democratic-leaning group that focuses on Latinos, relies on polls and focus groups conducted over the year since the election. It found that the economy became the top issue for Latinos all over the country, replacing immigration for many voters.The report also found that fears of Democrats embracing socialist policies drove a large number of voters toward Mr. Trump, and that those fears persist even among Democratic voters.And in new polling by Way to Win, a Democratic-aligned group, the economy was seen as the most important issue among Latino voters. More alarming for Democrats though, is that half of all Hispanic voters polled in four key states said that they believed the country was going in the wrong direction.The poll surveyed 1,000 Latino voters in Texas, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona last month in both English and Spanish, and found that 58 percent of independent voters believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Still, 60 percent of all Latino voters surveyed said they had a favorable opinion of President Biden and the Democratic Party.But that level of support won’t be enough to hold on to the House or Senate in the midterms, said Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win.“To win next November, we need to have Latinos at the 70 mark for Democrats, so we’ve got to move for these folks,” Ms. Gavito said in an interview. “Right now we see the support, but it’s soft.”Kristian Ramos, the campaign manager for Way to Win’s midterm message research project, said: “We could easily lose them to the couch. This administration has done 10 times more on Covid, has done miraculous work on the economy, but Latinos have no idea. And the economic anxiety in this group is off the charts.”Half of those polled by Way to Win said that they trusted the Democratic Party more on the issues of jobs and the economy, while 54 percent said they approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy. Among those who have an unfavorable view of the party, 22 percent say it is too liberal or socialist, according to the poll.Yet the majority of those surveyed said they wished that Mr. Biden could have enacted more change than he has so far, which pollsters tied to “deep anxiety about the economy.”“They don’t really care ideologically, as long as someone is speaking to those pain points,” Mr. Ramos said.The Equis report found that Latinos who may have been otherwise inclined to vote for Mr. Trump in 2016 withheld their support in that campaign because of his hard-line stance on immigration and the “importance of the Hispanic identity.” But by the middle of 2020, neither of those issues clearly differentiated Trump supporters and Democratic voters. Instead, the impact of the pandemic appeared to drive a larger number of voters, and the Trump administration’s approach to reopening the economy was embraced by a majority of them.The Equis research found that Democrats are losing ground to Republicans on issues relating to the economy. Asked which party they find more accurately described as valuing hard work, better for the American workers and the party of the American dream, Latino voters were roughly evenly divided.“The challenge is that 2020 hasn’t ended, the same dynamics haven’t ended,” said Carlos Odio, the co-founder of Equis. If there is a moral to the story, Mr. Odio added, it is that less partisan Latinos moved toward the candidate they trusted more on their top issue. “So competing for the vote can pay off.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      The Words Democrats Use Are Not the Real Problem

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      After Donald Trump and the Republican Party made gains among Black and Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election, a chorus of voices emerged to blame the outcome on Democratic messaging.Democrats, went the argument, were too “woke,” too preoccupied with “identity politics,” too invested in slogans like “defund the police” and too eager to embrace the language of the activist left. Terms like “BIPOC” (an acronym for Black, Indigenous and People of Color) and especially “Latinx” alienated the working-class Black and Hispanic voters who shifted to Trump in key states like Florida and North Carolina.It makes sense that this is where the conversation turned. People who work with words — journalists, commentators and political professionals — are naturally interested in the impact of messaging and language on voters.At the same time, it is important to remember that language does not actually structure politics. Yes, a political message can persuade voters or, on the other end, help them rationalize their choices. And yes, a political message can be effective or ineffective. But we should not mistake this for a causal relationship.The forces that drive politics are material and ideological, and our focus — when trying to understand and explain shifts in the electorate — should be on the social and economic transformations that shape life for most Americans.With that in mind, let’s return to the debate over the Democratic Party’s declining fortunes with Hispanic voters. (In all of this, it is important to remember that even with the significant shift to Trump, who improved on his 2016 total in 2020 by 10 percentage points, according to Pew, Biden still won 59 percent of the Hispanic voters who cast ballots.)Does a term like “Latinx” alienate some portion of the Hispanic voting public? A recent survey says yes. According to a new national poll of Hispanic voters, only 2 percent chose the term to describe their ethnic background, and 40 percent said it offends them either “a lot” (20 percent), “somewhat” (11 percent) or “a little” (9 percent). To the extent that Democratic politicians and affiliated voices used the term — demonstrating their distance from the communities in question — that may have left a bad taste in the mouths of some Hispanic voters. But it does not follow from there that use of the term explains anything about electoral trends among Hispanics. For those, we have to look at the material and ideological shifts I mentioned earlier.It would be too much for a single column to give a full inventory of those changes. But I can point to a few. First, there is the economy. In areas like the Rio Grande Valley of Texas — where Republicans made major inroads with Mexican American voters in 2020 — rising wages for workers in the region’s oil and gas industry helped shift some voters to the right. Nationally, there’s evidence that some Hispanic voters credited Trump with wage growth and rewarded him with additional support. In general, upward mobility and a greater sense of integration into the mainstream of American society has made a significant number of Hispanic voters more open to Republican appeals.Playing a similar role is evangelical religion. As my news-side colleague Jennifer Medina noted in a piece last year, “Hispanic evangelicals are one of the fastest growing religious groups in the country.” Churches remain important sites for political socialization, and evangelicalism is, at this juncture, a conservative force in American culture and politics. It makes sense, then, that Hispanic evangelicals are also much more likely than their Catholic counterparts to vote Republican.According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, “Hispanic Protestants” were more likely than all other Hispanics to approve of Trump’s performance as president, his handling of the economy, his handling of “racial justice protests” and his handling of the pandemic. Hispanic Protestants were also much more likely to say that “Christians face a lot of discrimination.”There is also the longstanding effort by Republicans to mobilize Hispanic conservatives for the Republican Party. “For the past half century,” the historian Geraldo Cadava writes in “The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump,” “Hispanic Republicans and the Republican Party have been deliberate and methodical in their mutual, sometimes hesitant, embrace.” Beliefs about relations with Latin America, about “the United States as the protector of freedom in the world” and about “market-driven capitalism as the best path to upward mobility” have helped Republicans build a durable bulwark among Hispanic voters, one that the Trump campaign built on with focused and sustained outreach.Entangled in these social and economic transformations is a longstanding and potent American ideology that slots some people as “makers” and others as “takers,” to use Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff language to donors during his presidential campaign in 2012. Although traditionally associated with whiteness and masculinity, this “producerism” holds sway and currency across the electorate. That’s part of why candidates in both parties scramble to associate themselves with blue-collar workers and why some Democratic proponents of the social safety net insist that their policies provide a “hand up, not a handout.”I think that a part of Donald Trump’s appeal, especially for men, was the degree to which he embodied the producerist ideal. His image, at least, was of the commanding provider, who generated wealth and prosperity for himself and others. Put another way, the prevalence of producerist ideology in American society helped frame Trump — previously the star of “The Apprentice” — as a political figure, making him legible to millions of Americans. Hispanic voters were as much a part of that dynamic as any other group.The point here is not to write an exhaustive explanation of what happened among Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election. The point is that our constant battles over language are more distracting than not. The whys of American politics have much more to do with the ever-changing currents of race, religion and economic production than they do with political messaging. And no message, no matter how strong on the surface, will land if it isn’t attentive to those forces and the other forces that structure the lives of ordinary people.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Much Are Latinos Shifting Right?

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      So far, the data remains mixed. And the defection of Ryan Guillen, a Texas state lawmaker, to the G.O.P. may not have been driven solely by ideology.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.For years, State Representative Ryan Guillen of Texas was regarded as the most conservative Democratic legislator in Austin. He was one of just a few from the party to vote in favor of carrying handguns without a permit, and the sole Democrat in the House chamber to vote for the state’s new law banning most abortions. He remained popular in his Rio Grande Valley district, winning re-election last year by 17 percentage points.Then came the news this month: He was switching parties.“After much consideration and prayer with my family, I feel that my fiscally conservative, pro-business, and pro-life values are no longer in step with the Democratic Party of today,” Mr. Guillen said.It’s an old saw in politics: I haven’t changed, the party has changed. And in the past, it has been fairly applied to both Republicans and Democrats. Mr. Guillen has portrayed himself as part of a trend of Hispanic voters moving toward the Republican Party, especially in South Texas, where Donald J. Trump made major inroads during the 2020 election. But it’s too soon to tell just how much of a lasting shift the movement represents.The Republican Party has been reaching out to Latino voters for decades, particularly in Texas. Former President George W. Bush famously courted them with his “compassionate conservatism.” And it was former President Ronald Reagan who told his Hispanic outreach director that he would have the easiest job in the world, because “Hispanics are already Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.”Historically, roughly 30 percent of Hispanic voters have chosen to vote Republican in presidential elections, a number that increased slightly in 2020, surprising many Democrats. Republicans, unsurprisingly, celebrated the shift and have portrayed it as a seismic shift that could transform the parties.“Republicans’ enthusiasm and sense of momentum ebbs and flows, and this is a moment of high enthusiasm,” said Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of the book “The Hispanic Republican.” “They want to capitalize on the momentum they feel like they have right now. They really think the energy is on their side, but they have to prove that 2020 wasn’t just a blip.”So far, the data remains mixed. While there was some dampened enthusiasm among Latino voters during the recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, for example, an analysis from the Latino Policy & Politics Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed that Latino-heavy precincts overwhelmingly backed Newsom’s remaining in office.But in San Antonio this month, Democrats lost another State House seat to a Hispanic Republican, John Lujan.Now, many Democrats are openly worried, with some calling Hispanics the new swing voter group.“Democrats have to prove that they can stop their losses, and they have to show these voters they are hearing them and caring about them,” Dr. Cadava said.Of course, perception can drive reality: If Latinos believe that Democrats take them for granted, they are more likely to vote for Republican candidates, according to analysis from Equis Research, a Washington-based firm that focuses on Latino voters across the country.Mr. Guillen, who did not respond to several messages from The Times, has fiercely embraced his new party, appearing with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas during his party switch announcement and welcoming an endorsement from Mr. Trump by enthusiastically recalling how his signs “covered South Texas” during the presidential election. (Four years after Hillary Clinton won the district by 13 percentage points, Mr. Trump won by the same margin in 2020.)“Something is happening in South Texas, and many of us are waking up to the fact that the values of those in Washington, D.C., are not our values, not the values of most Texans,” Mr. Guillen told reporters during his announcement. “The ideology of defunding the police, of destroying the oil and gas industry and the chaos at our border is disastrous for those of us who live here in South Texas.”But ideology may not have been the only driver of Mr. Guillen’s decision, which came after Republican-controlled redistricting turned his legislative district from a Republican-leaning district into one that would most likely be solidly red.Mr. Guillen has brushed aside suggestions that he simply switched parties to stay in office, telling reporters that his 2020 victory as a Democrat showed his allegiance with voters in the district.“I have found that my core beliefs align with the Republican Party,” he said. “I am confident that my switch today is the right decision.”Mr. Abbott, for his part, portrayed Mr. Guillen’s flip as inevitable.“It’s something that has been, candidly, the worst-kept secret in the Capitol,” he said. “Ryan, we’re glad you finally came out of the closet.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com More

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      Republicans Are Going to Use Dog Whistles. Democrats Can’t Just Ignore Them.

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      The Virginia election results should shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics. No candidate would think of entering an election without a winning message on the economy or health care. Yet by failing to counter his opponent’s racial dog whistles, Terry McAuliffe did the equivalent, finding himself defenseless against a strategy Republicans have used to win elections for decades.Crucially, the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, was able to use racially coded attacks to motivate sky-high white turnout without paying a penalty among minority voters. This appears to solve the problem bedeviling Republicans in the Trump era: how to generate high turnout for a candidate who keeps Donald Trump at arm’s length, as Mr. Youngkin did.Before Tuesday night, conventional wisdom held that racially coded attacks could well spur higher white turnout but that those gains would be offset by losses among minority voters. Mr. Youngkin proved this assumption false. He significantly outperformed other Republicans among white voters, especially women: In 2020, Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump among white women in Virginia by 50 percent to 49 percent, but according to exit polls, Mr. Youngkin beat Mr. McAuliffe among them by 57 percent to 43 percent. At the same time, Mr. Youngkin suffered no major drop-off among minority voters — if anything, he appeared to slightly outperform expectations.This should terrify Democrats. With our democracy on the line, we have to forge an effective counterattack on race while rethinking the false choice between mobilizing base voters or persuading swing voters.It will not work to ignore race and talk about popular issues instead. Mr. McAuliffe’s closing message was a generic appeal on infrastructure and other issues that poll well. He was following the strategy known as popularism, which has gained in influence since the 2020 election, when Democrats’ disappointing down-ballot performance was attributed to rhetoric like “defund the police.”In the heat of a campaign, popularism fails because Republicans will not let Democrats ignore race. Mr. Youngkin dragged race into the election, making his vow to “ban critical race theory” a centerpiece of his stump speech and repeating it over the closing weekend — even though in Virginia the prominence of C.R.T., which teaches that racism is woven into the structures of American society, was vastly exaggerated.Some Democrats may resist accepting the centrality of race, pointing to the bearish national political environment and cyclical patterns. This would be a mistake for two reasons. First, C.R.T. helped create the rough national environment, with Fox News hammering it relentlessly; and cyclical explanations, like thermostatic public opinion (a longstanding tendency for voters to drift toward the views of the party out of power on some issues), do not explain Democrats’ loss of support in the suburbs or the strong turnout. Voters in New Jersey, where a stronger-than-expected Republican performance caught Democrats off guard, have been inundated with C.R.T. hype by Fox News, too.Second, the past half-century of American political history shows that racially coded attacks are how Republicans have been winning elections for decades, from Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad. Many of these campaigns were masterminded by the strategist Lee Atwater, who in 1981 offered a blunt explanation: Being overtly racist backfires, he noted, “so you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” C.R.T. is straight out of the Atwater playbook.In recent years, it has become commonplace in Democratic circles to think that our diversifying population has relegated such attacks to the past. The theory goes that Democrats can counteract racist appeals by encouraging high turnout among people of color. This interpretation took a ding in 2016 and a bigger hit in 2020, when Mr. Trump shocked many people by making major inroads with Latinos. Latinos recently became the largest population of color, and Democrats cannot win on the national level without winning them by large margins. Yet from 2016 to 2020, Democrats saw a seven-point drop in support among Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.How did the most racist president of our lifetime outperform a more generic Republican like Mitt Romney with Latinos? Research by Equis Labs suggests that Latinos found Mr. Trump’s populist message on the economy appealing.And as Mr. Trump showed — and Mr. Youngkin confirmed — racially coded attacks do not necessarily repel Latino voters. They may even attract them. One of us, Ms. Gavito, was among the first to flag this disturbing trend. In focus groups in battleground states during the lead-up to the 2020 election, pollsters with Lake Research tested a message that denounced “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Both whites and Latinos found this message persuasive, but Latinos found it appealing at significantly higher rates than whites.This, then, is the Democrats’ problem: The fact that Republicans can drag race into the conversation with ease kicks the legs out from under the idea that Democrats can succeed by simply talking about more popular things. And the fact that racially coded attacks spur turnout among white voters without necessarily prompting a backlash among minority voters undermines the idea that mobilizing a diverse electorate can win elections for Democrats.That’s the bad news. The good news is, we know what a path forward looks like.First, Democrats must separate our (accurate and necessary) analysis of structural racism from our political strategy in a country where the electorate remains nearly 70 percent white — and as much as or more than 80 percent white in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Instead of ignoring race while Republicans beat us silly with it, Democrats must confront it and explain that powerful elites and special interests use race as a tool of division to distract hard-working people of all races while they get robbed blind. Then pivot back to shared interests. The pivot is critical: Without it, Democrats are simply talking past voters, while Republicans play on their racial fears.This strategy is known as the “race-class narrative,” pioneered by Prof. Ian Haney López of Berkeley, the author Heather McGhee and the messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio (whom we have worked with). To be clear, Democrats should not seek to impose a racial-justice frame; to the contrary, research found a focus on racial justice to be less persuasive than the race-class narrative. The strategy we suggest here is a middle way: It is more powerful than a racial-justice-only frame but also more powerful than a strategy that ignores race altogether. Race is the elephant in the room, and Democrats must stop fooling themselves into thinking that they can prevent it from becoming an issue.Second, Democrats must put aside the false choice between the tactics of persuasion and mobilization and embrace them both. By confronting race as a tool of division, and then pivoting to shared interests, Democrats can offer an optimistic, inspiring and even patriotic vision. This is the approach that rocketed Barack Obama to the White House. As an African-American, Mr. Obama was never allowed to ignore race. Forced to confront it, Mr. Obama offered Americans a vision that mobilized a broad, diverse coalition — while also persuading white voters. In 2008, Mr. Obama won the highest share of the white vote since Bill Clinton in 1996.Race has infused American history and politics since our founding. It threads through most aspects of daily life, and stirs up complicated feelings that Americans of all backgrounds find difficult to discuss. But Virginia showed that race is impossible to ignore.The simple fact is that Republicans have long used race to achieve victory, and Democrats are fooling themselves if they think they can avoid it. Democrats have to get real about race, and forge a way to win.Tory Gavito (@torygavito) is president of Way to Win, a donor network focused on expanding Democrats’ power in the Sun Belt, and lead of the Latinx Justice Fund. Adam Jentleson is the executive director of Battle Born Collective, a progressive strategy organization, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and the author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Jennifer Medina Asks Latino Trump Voters Open-Ended Questions

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      Jennifer Medina interviews her subjects multiple times — sometimes spending as many as 50 hours with them — to understand their complex political attitudes.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.From the 2016 to the 2020 elections, Donald Trump improved his performance among certain segments of Latino voters, prompting surprised reactions from many journalists and people who work in politics. But this phenomenon was clear to those carefully tracking Latino sentiment — and few were doing that more diligently than the Times political reporter Jennifer Medina, whose parents are Panamanian.Ms. Medina, who is based in Los Angeles, started working on campaign coverage in 2019, and that September she reported on Latinos attending a Trump rally, some of whom said they felt like political loners among their Democratic friends and family. In 2020, she followed up that work with accounts of Mr. Trump’s macho appeal and why evangelical Latinos considered him a defender of their religious values. She also recently looked at the role that Latino voters played in helping Gov. Gavin Newsom keep his job in the face of a recall election in California.Here, Ms. Medina talks about developing her beat, speaking to hundreds of voters and achieving depth in her conversations. This interview has been edited and condensed.How did you find yourself covering Latinos in the 2020 presidential campaign?The campaign was the first time in my career that I had covered national politics full time. Nobody ever explicitly assigned me the beat of covering Latino politics. I just followed where the story was, and that’s what the story was in 2020.The first Trump rally I went to was in New Mexico. The second was in Miami. In the audience of both rallies, there were tons of Hispanics. Just talking to them about why they supported him, what they thought about his statements against Mexicans and immigration, and how they grappled with that captivated me.On the flip side, when the Democratic primary was happening I was hearing people based on the East Coast saying, “Latinos are never going to support Bernie Sanders because they are scared of communism.” That’s true in Miami, but in Los Angeles and Las Vegas it couldn’t have been further from the truth.There was a lot of room for me to do good, nuanced coverage. That’s partly because Latinos have been largely overlooked by both parties and by the press. It’s only just dawned on people that this is a part of the electorate that can really decide elections.How were you able to characterize popular attitudes among a sprawling, diverse group like Latinos?During the election, I interviewed hundreds of voters. For every one person I quote, I talk to five other people.I’ll use a story on Latino Republican men as an example. I had phone numbers of men who had participated in a poll or men I had met reporting throughout the campaign. After I had spoken to 40 people, I started to see trends. I want to hear something over and over again before I describe it in The Times as a generalization.I’m also relying on conversations with political strategists and pollsters — not taking what they say at face value, but also not making generalizations without having other information to back them up.What does it take to achieve depth in these conversations?My approach with Trump supporters was the same as with any other voters: open-ended questions. “When did you first start to think this way?” “Would you talk about politics as a kid?” When you ask people questions like that, most are really eager to respond. People like to talk about themselves.There’s a pastor I interviewed who has a dear place in my heart. I became convinced that Latino evangelical churches were among the only places where Trump supporters and Democrats were interacting with each other on a regular basis. I set off to try to find a church I could profile, and I came across the Church of God of Prophecy in Phoenix and its pastor, Jose Rivera. I envisioned spending weeks there in person, but the church was the very last place I went last March before the shutdown.I knew I couldn’t spend time there the way I wanted to, but I called the pastor once every week. I realized he illustrated the support for Trump among Latino evangelicals, though he himself was not voting for him. He felt upset with his flock.I must have spent 50 hours on the phone with him.50 hours?Is that crazy?What do you learn in 50 hours that you couldn’t learn in 30?I was better able to articulate where Pastor Rivera was coming from, what he represented and what he didn’t represent, the more often that I spoke to him. He said different things at different times. There was one moment where he thought he might vote for Trump. He had these tortured conversations with his wife about why she was going to vote for Trump. I heard his thinking evolve and develop.This is like asking, “What do you learn in 50 years of life that you can’t learn in 30?” More