{"id":8893,"date":"2025-05-13T13:03:12","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T13:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/?p=8893"},"modified":"2025-05-13T13:03:14","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T13:03:14","slug":"democrats-pivot-to-talk-more-about-the-economy-and-less-about-immigration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/?p=8893","title":{"rendered":"Democrats pivot to talk more about the economy and less about immigration"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — <\/span>Democrats have long focused on immigration when courting Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada, New Jersey, and Florida, where generations of Mexican, Cuban and other Latin American immigrants have settled and gained permanent legal status. <\/p>\n

But Donald Trump’s victory<\/a> in the 2024 presidential election and the rightward shift of Latino voters<\/a> have some liberals reconsidering traditional wisdom.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople do care about it, but they don\u2019t vote on it. They vote on the economy,\u201d said Patricia Campos-Medina, a labor activist who ran for the U.S. Senate last year in New Jersey and is now advising U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, one of the Democrats running for governor in next month\u2019s primary. <\/p>\n

Liberal strategists, organizers and some politicians are urging Democrats to focus on the economy in this year’s elections rather than on immigration. Some argue a broad economic message would be more effective with the wide range of nationalities and experiences in the Latino community rather than customized efforts based on perceived cultural or political interests. <\/p>\n

Last year, Trump, a Republican, made inroads<\/a> in heavily Puerto Rican areas of eastern Pennsylvania and turned South Texas\u2019 Rio Grande Valley while improving his numbers along Florida\u2019s Interstate 4 corridor. His message to Latinos focused heavily on the economy and border security.<\/p>\n

\u201cLatino operatives have been saying, \u2018Don\u2019t treat us all as a monolith,\u2019\u201d said Tory Gavito, who co-founded Way to Win, a progressive group formed after Trump\u2019s 2016 win that recently conducted focus groups with Latinos who skipped the 2024 election. \u201cThey were pretty monolithic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inflation was top of mind for nearly half of Latinos who voted last fall, according to AP VoteCast<\/a>, a wide-ranging survey of the 2024 electorate. About three-quarters of Latino Trump voters were very concerned about housing costs in their community, compared with about 6 in 10 white Trump voters.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere we fell short was failing to fully appreciate the bread-and-butter economic issues that were driving them,\u201d said Tom Perez, a former Democratic National Committee chair who served as adviser to President Joe Biden. \u201cMany folks felt like we were too focused on identity politics and not focused enough on the cost of eggs, the cost of gas, the cost of living.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alex Berrios, co-founder of the organizing group Mi Vecino, which mobilizes Latino voters in Florida, Arizona and Maine, said Democrats focused too much on using buzzwords and trying to micro-target specific nationalities. The result, he argues, left voters feeling as though the party’s message was staged.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like they were saying, \u2018Let me get my Venezuelan script out,\u2019\u201d Berrios said. \u201cNo. The first thing is just be relatable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chuck Rocha is a Democratic strategist who mobilized Latinos for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’<\/a> presidential bid in 2020 and for U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego<\/a> last year and started a super political action committee, or PAC, to reach out to Latinos in key races. He argued that Democrats \u201cmess up by bringing a policy book to a boxing match.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about three things: affordability, affordability, affordability,\u201d he said. \u201cAffordability is the only thing that they care about because that\u2019s what\u2019s hitting them in the face every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

New Jersey’s primary for governor is an early test of the different Democratic points of view. Last year, Trump flipped two Hispanic-majority towns that he had lost by more than 30 and 50 percentage points in 2016. Democrat Kamala Harris<\/a> won a traditionally blue state by just 6 percentage points, the closest presidential contest there since 2004.<\/p>\n

Sherrill, who flipped a longtime Republican district in winning her House seat in 2018, has focused on her biography and her military service while also arguing she will stand up to Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk. One of her ads promises she will \u201cdrive down costs from health care to housing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her campaign manager, Alex Ball, outlined during the weekend in a memo that one of its goals is meeting in person Hispanic voters from two suburban counties who have voted in three of the four past Democratic primaries. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a real risk of a Republican winning in November, but Mikie is the candidate who can win just like she has won tough elections before, even driving out a long-time Republican incumbent in a Trump district \u2014 something no one thought was possible,\u201d Ball wrote. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has frequently campaigned against U.S. immigration authorities’ plans to open a detention facility in his city. The mayor was arrested by immigration authorities<\/a> on Friday while demonstrating outside, with video of his detention and release spreading widely and leading to his competitors in the Democratic primary rallying to his side. <\/p>\n

A May AP-NORC poll found that 38% of Hispanic adults approve of Trump\u2019s handling of the economy, which is roughly in line with U.S. adults overall. <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s growing unease as Trump\u2019s plans to revive manufacturing and reshape the global economy have been rolled out with constant changes, creating uncertainty and sparking concerns of prices rising and products disappearing from shelves. From January through March, the economy shrank for the first time in three years as businesses were disrupted by Trump’s trade wars<\/a>. Trump fired thousands of federal workers, with impacts felt outside of Washington.<\/p>\n

The Libre Initiative, a Koch Network-affiliated conservative group, is running ads targeting Latinos in support of tax breaks<\/a> approved during Trump\u2019s first term that may expire at year\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

Daniel Garza, president of the group, acknowledged \u201cnervousness\u201d among Latino voters, with some wondering if maybe Trump took on too much and too fast. But Garza said that it\u2019s too soon to make a fair assessment of his second term, which began in January. <\/p>\n

He argues voters should wait and see how Trump negotiates trade and whether the Republican Party can pass his \u201cbig, beautiful bill\u201d<\/a> with both tax breaks and spending cuts and promises he made such as exempting tips, overtime and Social Security from taxation.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy sense is that Latinos are a very patient lot,\u201d he said. \u201cAguantamos mucho.”<\/p>\n

That is Spanish for \u201cWe put up with a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press Polling Editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Democrats have long focused on immigration when courting Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada, New Jersey, and Florida, where generations of Mexican, Cuban and other Latin American immigrants have settled and gained permanent legal status. But Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election and the rightward shift of Latino […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8895,"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8893\/revisions\/8895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}