12/16/2022
Despite the GOP’s modest performance in the 2022 midterms, the party’s Consultant Class will certainly continue minority outreach, particularly toward Hispanics. With some gradual improvement among Hispanics this year, the GOP now has further justification to pander, even though the numbers don’t justify it. And get this trope that began before the election: Hispanics are just like the Catholic ethnics who landed at Ellis Island or elsewhere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: they fully assimilated, joined the middle or upper class, and had children who were the likes of Lee Iacocca. As a Venezuelan immigrant and Hispanic dissident, here’s my answer: Not so fast. Hispanic demographics, poverty data, economic achievement, and, of course, voting patterns, suggest otherwise. Michael Barone, who used to believe this, recanted as early as 2014 [Why Has Immigration Shifted?, RealClearPolitics.com, September 23, 2014].
While the midterms were not an unmitigated disaster for Republicans, because they took back the House, the contest exposed various flaws in their political messaging and approach to voter targeting. In a tiresomely predictable manner, conservative pundits made the usual noises about Republican gains with Hispanics.
Florida Democrats are coming to terms with devastating Election Day losses, particularly among Latino voters who turned out solidly for Republicans in statewide contests. https://t.co/BC0UXkGCHp
— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 16, 2022
Credit where it’s due: The GOP did improve with Hispanic voters. Per exit polls from Fox News, Republican congressional candidates picked up 38 percent of the Hispanic vote, while Democrats received 56 percent of the Hispanic vote [Fox News Voter Analysis: Republicans make significant inroads with Hispanic voters, by Thomas Catenacci, November 9, 2022]. To put things in perspective, in 2020, 63 percent of Hispanics pulled the lever for Traitor Joe Biden, while 35 percent voted for former president Donald Trump [Fox News Democracy 2020]. It was a solid increase to say the least — a whopping three percentage points.
At the state level, the results were even more interesting and, to some degree, impressive. Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis performed exceptionally well among Hispanics with a whopping 58 percent of their vote [Why Florida Latinos turned out in favor of Republicans by Carmen Sesin, NBC News, November 15, 2022].
Gov. Ron DeSantis won 58% of the Latino vote, including 68% of Cuban Americans, 56% of Puerto Ricans and 50% of all other Latinos combined, according to the NBC News exit poll. https://t.co/V3xLFrk5Or
— NBC Latino (@NBCLatino) November 15, 2022
Even Arizona’s America First firebrand Kari Lake picked up 47 percent of the Hispanic vote [Arizona Governor Election Results 2022: Hobbs defeats Lake, NBC News, November 21, 2022].
While those gains were solid, here’s the problem. Republicans have yet to consolidate a strong majority of the white vote, much less monolithic white support akin to that of the black vote for Democrats. Consider the numbers. Whites constituted 72 percent of the vote this time around but not much more than half of them (just 58 percent) voted for Republicans. Blacks were 11 percent of voters and more than four-fifths of them (83 percent) voted Democrat [How We Voted in the 2022 Midterm Elections, by Brian McGill and Chad Day, Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2022]. Yet the GOP allocated significant resources toward promoting non-white candidates and conducting non-white voter outreach.
VDARE’s Paul Kersey explained why Florida went solid red. White voters made up 64 percent of Florida’s vote, and DeSantis defeated Democrat Charlie Crist by snaring two-thirds (65 percent) of that white vote. DeSantis in effect implemented the Sailer Strategy. But again, that datum will be lost on the GOP Ruling Class.
Thus GOP–Conservatism, Inc. mass immigration boosters are recycling an old argument to justify their civilization-destroying Great Replacement project: comparing Hispanics to Catholic ethnics, such as previous generations of Irish and Italian immigrants.
“Would it be useful to talk about how Americans of Italian heritage planned to vote this fall?” The American Enterprise Institute’s Chris Stirewalt asked a few weeks before the election:
I mean useful in the sense that it could tell us much about either the midterm elections or the condition of Italian Americans today.
The answer is pretty obviously “no.” Indeed, there are no polls that even consider the question because no one would bother asking it. …
Which… brings us to the following headline in The New York Times: “Majority of Latino Voters Out of G.O.P.’s Reach, New Poll Shows,” and this one from the Wall Street Journal: “Latino Voters, Once Solidly Democratic, Split Along Economic Lines.”
Let’s for a moment replace “Latino” with “Italian.” While the massive and interesting poll by the NYT and Sienna College reveals that there has been a considerable shift to the right among Latinos, it fails in one important way. The Census Bureau data say that average income for Hispanic households trails the national average considerably. How would a poll of Americans earning about $11,000 below the national average register? I don’t know for sure, but I bet if you just did the survey by economics instead of ethnicity, poorer households would probably be “more likely to see Republicans as the party of the elite and as holding extreme views.” How would Italian Americans answer that one?
And as for the WSJ’s “split along economic lines”: Who isn’t? I appreciate the point that the reporters skillfully made, but the point itself undercuts the value of the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” entirely. Every group is split along economic lines.
[Stop Treating Hispanic Americans as Outliers, The Dispatch, September 19, 2022]
Several problems jump out from this analogy. First, Hispanics have largely leftist mass media such as Univision and Telemundo that provide not only coverage in Spanish, but also commentary that encourages Hispanic viewers to cling to their culture and not fully assimilate. That wasn’t the case when Irish, Poles, and Italians landed here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Secondly, as far as economic success and the accumulation of wealth go, Hispanics are not following in the footsteps of other Catholic ethnics. Many of those who have been here ages are still poor.
Thus the state with one of the highest poverty rates in the country, New Mexico at 18.2 percent, has long absorbed Hispanic immigrants, although their arrival has tapered off in the last 150 years until recently. New Mexico’s population is nearly 50 percent Hispanic. It’s the most Hispanic state in the Union. That means Hispanics contribute significantly to the state’s poverty. And neither blacks nor Indians are helping matters.
On a national level, the poverty rate for Hispanics grew to 17 percent between 2019 and 2020 [National Poverty in America Awareness Month,United States Census Bureau, January 22].
Third, while Hispanics’ casting more votes for Republicans might hold true for those with European blood coursing through their veins, most tend to be nonwhite — either black or American Indian. They tend not to succeed economically the way white Hispanics do or those early white Catholic immigrants did. And they won’t vote that way, either.
Consider just who has been showing up here for the last decade or more. Mexican immigration has dropped off in recent decades and been replaced by nonwhite immigration from the Northern Triangle and elsewhere [Mexican Immigrant Population Drops to Lowest Level Since 2004, by David J. Bier, Cato Institute, September 28, 2020; Rise in U.S. Immigrants From El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras Outpaces Growth From Elsewhere, by D’Vera Cohn, Jeffrey S. Passel, & Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Pew Research, December 7, 2017]. These immigrants are Amerindian, and some are likely of African extraction.
Granted, European groups differ from each other, for example those of Nordic, German, and Mediterranean extraction. But Mediterranean immigrants eventually succeeded economically enough to assimilate into the American middle class. The same cannot be said about immigrants from the Third World invited here by the Hart-Celler immigration bill of 1965, particularly those who arrived recently.
As far as some of the non-Cuban Hispanic shifts are concerned, some Mexicans, especially those with pre-Hart-Celler ancestors, are much more hesitant about mass immigration as they experience downward pressure wages and the overall quality of life. Some aren’t very interested in embracing Third World cultures and want to go on with their lives like many normal white, working-class Americans. Some of these Hispanics have been here for centuries, as I’ve stressed before. They’ve cultivated a unique Hispanic-American identity that makes them somewhat receptive to joining non-Hispanic whites in combating the multicultural, Treason Lobby Left.
Then again, I’ve encountered many Hispanics with impeccable English and who “assimilated” into America’s lifeless consumer culture, yet care little or nothing about preserving the Historic American Nation, much less fighting against the very forces who labor to accelerate the dispossession and replacement of American whites.
When push comes to shove, Hispanics will not save us from the communists who have seized power or the globalists who support them. Their voting behavior, even with marginal improvements here and there, shows that.
That does not mean Hispanics should be ignored. Countless Hispanics understand what’s going on. But realism is the order of the day. That means recognizing the limits of minority outreach. Last time I checked, the majority of Hispanics still vote for Democrats, the party of Anti-America and the Great Replacement.
I’ve repeatedly explained here, recent GOP gains among Hispanics gains are solid but still nothing to write home about. Hispanic voting trends during the past 40 years show that the GOP still faces an uphill struggle in increasing its share of the Hispanic vote, much less attaining a majority of it.
Republicans who obsess about Hispanics should support an immigration moratorium if they genuinely desire assimilation. The 1924 immigration bill that greatly curtailed immigration helped all those Catholic ethnics of yore assimilate.
With the immigration spigot turned off, Hispanics would be compelled to interact with the rest of the population, instead of confining themselves to a massive ghetto — which includes a blaring, revanchist media megaphone — that provides no incentive to assimilate into the broader white American society, or even to protect their jobs and wages from a never-ending stream of cheap labor.
Of course, immigration patriots should take whatever Hispanic support they can get. But in a time when the white working class vote still needs to be fully consolidated, doing outreach to nonwhites is the epitome of political malpractice.
The U.S. was built for and by the Historic American people. It was not meant to be a multicultural tower of Babel, a “tangle of squabbling nationalities,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it. It was meant to be a country of “one united people,” as Founding Father John Jay said, “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”
Enough with these insipid calls and multicultural fantasies from the Republican consultant class.
It’s time to put the Historic American Nation first.
Pedro de Alvarado is a Hispanic dissident who is well aware of the realities of race from his experience living throughout Latin America and in the States.
As a native of lands conquered by brave Spaniards but later subverted by centuries of multiracial trickery and despotic governance, Pedro offers clear warnings to Americans about the perils of multiracialism.
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