The New York Times - USA (2020-11-09)

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020 N P5

ELECTION NIGHT PLAYEDout as one more anxious
chapter in a year characterized by bitter partisan
rancor and successive national crises.
As states flickered between blue and red on
projection maps, and as vote-counting extended
through the week, tensions only rose. In sheer
numbers, more people voted in 2020 than ever
before, but the results seemed to crystallize the
deep divisions in the country — on the virus, the
economy, issues of race, and even how to properly
count the vote.
For anyone seeking to understand the will of
the people, the past week offered little clarity. The
only common ground, it seemed, was the sizable
majority who told exit polls they felt the country
was heading in the wrong direction.
And yet. The vote is fundamentally an instru-
ment of optimism, a chance to shape the future of
your community and your country. On Tuesday
and in the days leading up to the election, Ameri-
cans waited in line in record numbers to cast their
vote.
We talked to them about their hopes for the
country — whatever the outcome of the election.
What did they want for America? They spoke
about equality, opportunity and coming together
as a nation. Here are some of their answers.

“My hope for America is all about the

children. They need to get back to school.

They are our future. They need to see a

more respectful and responsible leader.”

Tyra Jackson,51, Franklin County, Ohio

“It seems like there’s so much chaos going

on right now with the pandemic, and it

seems like there’s so much racial

differences. I think we need the right leader

to bring us together versus separating us or

dividing us.”

Brandon Dougherty,21, Bethel, Maine

“I’d just like to see us come back together,

you know? And be one people and get

along together.”

Wayne Metcalf,70, Candler, N.C.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES HILARY SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES JUAN DIEGO REYES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

As Election Ends, Voters Look to the Future

CONTINUED ON FOLLOWING PAGE

Gabriella Angotti-Jones, Ruth Fremson, Kathryn
Gamble, Brittany Greeson, Tamir Kalifa, Calla
Kessler, Maddie McGarvey, Lynsey Cameron
Pollack, Juan Diego Reyes, Hilary Swift, Lynsey
Weatherspoon and Adriana Zehbrauskas
contributed reporting.

Election

closer to one-third this year, ac-
cording to exit polls and voter sur-
veys.
Democrats lost in Florida, in
part because of lackluster support
among Latino voters. They did ba-
sically no better than they nor-
mally do in Texas, in part because
Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande
Valley moved decisively toward
the G.O.P. But in Arizona, Barry
Goldwater’s home state and a
once-conservative stronghold
where Mr. Biden has a slim lead,
Democrats will claim both of the
state’s Senate seats for the first
time in decades, fueled by young,
progressive Latino voters.
For years, many Democrats
have presumed demography as
destiny, believing that Latinos
would come to vote for them with
the same kind of consistency that
Black voters do. A growing Latino
population, they hoped, would
transform the political landscape
and give the party an edge in the
Southwest.
That dream ran into reality in
this election, in which the results
confirmed what was evident from
conversations with hundreds of
Latino voters in dozens of settings
from the early days of the Demo-
cratic primary until the long bal-
lot-counting hours in Arizona over
the last week: The Latino vote is
deeply divided, and running as
not-Trump was always going to be
insufficient.
At a Trump rally in Rio Rancho,
N.M., last fall, Martha Garcia was
part of the largely Hispanic crowd
— many members of which wore
Make America Great Again hats
— waiting hours in the blazing sun
to hear the president speak. She
said she agreed with his harsh lan-
guage on immigration: “We need
to take care of the people who are
already here.”
In east Las Vegas and Los An-
geles, young progressives dis-
traught over the Super Tuesday
losses by “Tío Bernie” — Senator
Bernie Sanders — remained polit-
ically active for the first time. At a
Spanish-speaking evangelical
megachurch in Miami, the pastor
offered the president a blessing
for re-election campaign early
this year. And in South Phoenix on
the eve of the election, grandfa-
thers gathered last weekend for
“Low Ridin’ With Biden,” showing
off their custom Impalas.
For Latinos, this was an elec-
tion that turned on feelings about
Mr. Trump above all else.
That just didn’t mean what
Democrats, and the Biden cam-
paign specifically, assumed it did.
“We went in the wrong direc-
tion, and we want to make sure
that does not happen again,” said
Julián Castro, the only Latino can-
didate in the 2020 Democratic
presidential primary.
For months, he said, he had
been publicly warning of the com-
ing risks for Democrats from un-
derinvesting in Latino voters, par-
ticularly in Texas. He said he was
worried that even with a Biden
victory, the party would find itself
“winning the battle but losing the
war.”
On Saturday, Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New
York Democrat and one of the
most prominent Latina members
of Congress, spoke critically of her

party’s efforts at connecting with

Latino voters. “I don’t think that

our party has ever seriously done

the work,” she said, describing

what she saw as concern only

around election years. “That’s not

acceptable for any community. I

don’t know why it’s acceptable for

so many communities of color.”

Both candidates in 2020 knew

that Latino voters had the power

to be decisive, and both cam-

paigns went after them, at times

with little sophistication. After the

Democratic primary began with

several candidates speaking

Spanish on debate stages, the gen-

eral-election approach — or as

some critics call it, “Hispander-

ing” — took a musical turn. Mr. Bi-

den played the hit song “Despac-

ito” on his cellphone speaker, and

the Trump campaign commis-

sioned a salsa music video played

over Mexican folklórico dancers.

Fellow Democrats complained

about the Biden campaign’s slug-

gish Latino outreach for months,

though the campaign eventually

spent a record $20 million on

Spanish-language television and

radio advertising, more than dou-

ble the Trump campaign’s $9 mil-

lion, according to Advertising An-

alytics, an ad tracking firm. And

both campaigns tried to target

voters based on regional and na-

tional origin — there were adver-

tisements featuring Cuban,

Puerto Rican and Mexican ac-

cents.

Indeed, the regional differences

illustrate both political shifts and

the way Latinos see themselves.

In Arizona, for example, a histori-

cally Republican state shifted be-

cause of young Latinos who were

politically activated by Senate Bill

1070, a 2010 state measure that

was known as the “show me your

papers” law and that critics called

legalized racial profiling.

“People pretty much tend to at-

tack us,” Alma Aguilar said at a

small Black Lives Matter demon-

stration in the Phoenix suburbs

this summer. “We are not treated

the same way as white people.”

Even as votes were still being

counted, many Democrats cred-

ited young Latinas such as Ms.

Aguilar for their success in the

state. Local activists noted that

while the Democrats celebrated,

organizing voters began long be-

fore the national party invested in

the state.

“We did this,” said Alejandra

Gomez, the co-executive director

of Lucha, a voter engagement

group that was established in re-

sponse to anti-immigration state

policies a decade ago. “We orga-

nized when nobody else was pay-

ing attention. It’s weird to say, but

without that, I am not sure we

would have flipped the state.”

Yet one lesson of Arizona — that

political identity is often built in

the face of persecution — did not

bear out in Texas, where over a

year ago a gunman killed 22 peo-

ple in El Paso, the largest anti-La-

tino attack in modern American

history, after the authorities said

he wrote a manifesto that echoed

much of the president’s language.

Texas didn’t even come close to

flipping to the Democrats this

year. Roughly 25 to 30 percent of

Latino voters nationally have cho-

sen Republican candidates for

decades, but many Democrats

said they were particularly

alarmed by the loss of support in

the Rio Grande Valley, where Mr.

Biden won some border counties

by significantly smaller margins

than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

“More people are waking up,”

said Kelly Gonzalez, who attended

a Republican election party in

Harlingen, in South Texas, with

her husband, her 1-year-old

daughter and her 7-year-old son,

each of them clad in Trump gear

from head to toe. In the once reli-

ably left-leaning region, Ms. Gon-

zalez said her opinion of liberals —

particularly young ones — had

changed in the last four years.

“It’s like, ‘Give me this, give me

that,’ and they don’t want to work

for it,” she said.

Minerva Simpson, a district

leader for the Texas Federation

for Republican Women, who was

one of the hosts of the party, said

the president was critical to the

energy she saw.

“We’ve seen the Latinos come

out in a very strong way,” she said.

“I’ve never seen a movement like

that in my culture, and it’s all for

Trump.”

Democrats also did not seem to

account for how effective Mr.

Trump’s efforts to tie their party to

socialism would be, especially

among Venezuelan- and Cuban-

American voters in Florida.

“If Biden gets elected, America

will go down the rabbit hole of so-

cialism into communism within

the next year,” said Gilbert Fonti-

coba, an internet marketer, who

stood with a group waving Ameri-

can and Trump flags in front of a

polling place in the city of Hialeah

outside Miami on Tuesday. He

said he became unemployed after

his social media accounts were

disabled because of his views as a

member of the Proud Boys, a far-

right group, adding that his par-

ents had fled Cuba.

Mr. Fonticoba blamed the coun-

try’s polarization in part on the

news media. “Millennials are

brainwashed,” he said. “There’s a

lot of dumb people that live in this

country that believe the fake

news.” Then, unprompted, he

brought up the Proud Boys, deny-

ing that they had ties to white su-

premacy. “Proud Boys are for

America, keeping America the

way America was created,” he

said. “The West is the best.”

The Biden campaign did recog-

nize its potential weakness with

Cubans and Venezuelans, but

hoped that support from younger

Latinos, particularly Puerto Ri-

cans, might make up the differ-

ence. To make its case in Florida

and elsewhere, the campaign em-

phasized the reality that Latinos

were contracting and dying from

the coronavirus and suffering eco-

nomically at disproportionately

high rates, and that the president

had mishandled the pandemic.

One of the final ads the campaign

ran in battleground states, includ-

ing Florida, Arizona and Nevada,

focused on the Trump administra-

tion’s family separation policy.

But the fact that Mr. Biden is

heading to the White House is not

cause for a victory lap when it

comes to engaging Latino voters,

according to those who work on

that issue.

“We were not choosing our sav-

ior, we were choosing our oppo-

nent,” said Marisa Franco, the ex-

ecutive director of Mijente, a Lati-

no civil rights organization that

originally backed Mr. Sanders, ex-

plaining her group’s work in 2020.

“The Biden campaign may have

chosen not to spend time in work-

ing-class, immigrant and people-

of-color neighborhoods, but that is

exactly where his victory is com-

ing from and where the solutions

he’ll need to champion will have to

start.”

Most Latino groups have not

expressed surprise at the elec-

tion’s results. They have long

noted, for example, how little con-

servative religious South Ameri-

can voters in Florida backing Mr.

Trump have in common with pro-

gressive young Mexican-Ameri-

cans in Arizona turning out for

Democrats. But the groups’ lead-

ers also argue that without push-

ing the idea of a pan-Latino politi-

cal identity, Latinos in any one re-

gion might never get sustained at-

tention from national candidates.

In September, a nonpartisan

group called the Texas Organizing

Project released a report based on

interviews with more than 100 La-

tinos in Texas that offered a pre-

view of how 2020 might go.

“The majority do not feel there

is a singular ‘Latino Vote,’ the re-

port concluded. “Though they see

its potential.”

Reporting was contributed by
Caitlin Dickerson from Harlingen,
Texas, Patricia Mazzei from Hiale-
ah, Fla., Astead W. Herndon from
Dallas, and Giovanni Russonello
from New York.

From Page A1

Evolution of the Latino Vote Presents Challenges to the Political Parties

A DIVIDED DEMOGRAPHIC

President Trump gained support among Cuban-Americans in the Little Havana neighborhood of

Miami, top, by successfully linking the Democrats to socialism. The president-elect, Joseph R. Bi-

den Jr., had more luck energizing young Latino voters in once-conservative Arizona, above.

SCOT T McINTYRE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Once reliably left

leaning, but now

open to the right.