President Joe Biden isn’t very popular with Hispanic Americans.
Although Biden won the majority of Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election, his approval rating with them is abysmal. It’s just 26%, according to a newly released Quinnipiac poll. The poll also found that just 12% of Hispanics strongly approve of Biden. Democrats should take those poor marks as a warning: Moving too far to the left on social and cultural issues is a great way to alienate voters.
While Hispanic Americans tend to vote for Democratic candidates, the party often doesn’t reflect their values.
Abortion is a perfect example. The Democratic Party is a global outlier on abortion. Many Democrats don’t support any restrictions at all on abortions, including restrictions with overwhelming public support. While only seven countries allow for elective abortion after 20 weeks, many Democratic politicians want no gestational limit at all. So much for safe, legal, and rare.
With nearly half of Hispanics identifying as Catholic (76% Christian), Democrats are out of touch. While white liberals in Seattle, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, might agree with the new Democratic orthodoxy, those voters are in states that the party already has locked up. The party’s insistence on woke gender ideology, including in public schools, also probably isn’t helping them with Hispanics.
Nor will putting the gender unicorn in schools and men in women’s sports likely be winning issues with Hispanic voters. White liberals might think that stuff is great, but many others don’t.
In 2018, for example, the overwhelmingly Hispanic city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, voted against making gender identity a protected class in Massachusetts, even as the state voted 68% to 32% to make it happen. It was one of the only areas in the state with many Sen. Elizabeth Warren voters who didn’t want biological men in women’s only spaces such as restrooms and locker rooms.
Lawrence was also one of the few areas where Republicans made gains in the 2020 presidential election in Massachusetts. Democratic calls to defund the police and defense of rioters smashing windows and burning cities helped Republicans with Hispanics nationwide that year.
Even though it’s not a policy, the “Latinx” issue shows how Democrats fail to connect with Hispanic and Latino voters. It’s a woke term used because the Spanish language has gendered nouns. Latino is a man and Latina is a woman. However, liberals have decided that they need to introduce woke gender ideology into the Spanish language and call people Latinx since some people identify as nonbinary genders.
One problem: The term “Latinx” is unpopular among Latinos. About 3 in 4 Latino adults say they have never heard the term, according to Pew Research. Only 3% of them use the term “Latinx.”
If Democrats want to reverse their losses, they should stop letting the ultra-Left hijack their party on social and cultural issues.
Tom Joyce ( @TomJoyceSports ) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
