The freak-out is real. Never Trump Republicans and their fellow travelers on the left cannot accept the trend that former President Trump is gaining support among Latino voters.
The worst critics are the strategists and pundits who once made a living off the Republican Party. Trump effectively made them irrelevant in 2016. Professional traditional Republicans held no sway with Trump. He went his own way.
For advisers like Ana Navarro, the gravy train was over. She, like others, switched sides and threw in with Democrats to remain relevant in some circles. Grifters are gonna grift.
Navarro was a longtime adviser for Republicans like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in Florida. She was frequently on political shows as a Republican commenter. She became one of a group of former Republicans who decided to cash in on their hatred of Trump. She was rewarded with a co-hosting gig on The View and she is a CNN contributor. She is the type of Republican that curries favor with Democrats and they tolerate her.
An odd thing is happening now. The presidential election is coming in November and Trump’s approval ratings among minority voters continue to rise. Latino voters and black voters are shifting to Trump. Biden and other Democrats still receive the support of a majority of those voters but the rise in their support of Trump is notable. Democrats, especially the Biden campaign, are panicked.
Navarro supported Biden in 2020. She frequently comes to his defense. As she spoke about Trump’s big rally in the Bronx, she made the mistake of calling Latino supporters of Trump “very stupid.”
“There are some Latino immigrants who forget they came here as immigrants and who want to shut the door behind them, and who think being anti-immigrant somehow is going to make them pass as more American, pass as whatever,” Navarro said on CNN, where she is a commentator. “And that’s a very stupid attitude to have.”
She is doing what she once criticized Democrats for doing – taking minority voters for granted. She hasn’t bothered to understand the appeal of Trump to voters. She is reverting to belittling Trump voters. She is having a deplorables moment. How did that work out for Hillary Clinton? It happened on the same day that the Democrat governor of New York called the people who showed up for Trump’s campaign rally in the Bronx “clowns.”
Trump is receiving enough support in polls from black voters, for example, that if the numbers hold, it will be a big factor in his re-election victory. Democrats can’t win without strong support from black and Hispanic voters. The problem is that the political pendulum appears to be swinging back to more conservative governance. Voters are growing weary of woke politics and Democrat pandering to buy votes using government hand-outs instead of working on policies that change lives.
She went on to reach back to 2019 and a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso. A deranged racist targeted Hispanic shoppers in that shooting.
“What folks don’t realize is that when the guy drives thousands of miles to go hunt down Latinos in a Walmart in Texas, he doesn’t care when you came here. He doesn’t care what your accent is,” she said. “What he’s looking for is, does it look like me, does it sound like me? That’s what he’s looking for. So, you know, when people are anti-something, they’re not asking for your papers, they’re just anti-that group.”
It was a strange justification for her argument that Latino voters should stay in their place and vote for Biden in November.
Hispanic business owners are supporting Trump in greater numbers than Biden. A majority of Hispanic workers are sticking with Biden. A recent survey by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council (USHBC) shows a double-digit advantage in support of Trump by the group’s business owners.
Forty-six percent of respondents who own businesses said they’d cast ballots for Trump if the election happened today, compared to 30% who said the same for Biden.
However, 52% of the organization’s non-business-owning members said they’d vote for Biden. Just 31.5% preferred Trump.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) said, “We hold the same values as everyone else.’ on television this morning. Hispanic voters are socially conservative though they typically vote Democrat. Trump is doing what former President George W. Bush did to win Hispanic support – he speaks directly to them. Trump went to the Bronx to appeal to Hispanic and black voters, something that a Republican presidential candidate has not done since the 1980 presidential election. Ronald Reagan ended up winning New York. I don’t think Trump will win New York but I think he will do much better there than Democrats are taking for granted.
Voters don’t want to be taken for granted. What has Joe Biden done for minority voters? There is a Trump nostalgia in America – voters are looking back and remembering that Trump’s economy benefitted all Americans. A rising tide lifts all boats. Trump’s tax cuts raised the incomes of Americans across the board.
The border security policies during the Trump administration worked. The dirty little secret is that immigrants who come here legally resent those who invade our country. Legal immigrants play by the rules and know how deeply unfair it is for illegal aliens to be allowed to remain in America and receive a long menu of benefits paid for by taxpayers, including them.
Ana Navarro makes the mistake of repeating DNC talking points in her criticism of Trump. She claims he demonizes immigrants. He does not. He speaks out against illegal immigration and those who invade our country by not using legal ports of entry. To deny that criminals are coming across the border is dishonest and cynical.
Navarro responded that there are multiple factors, including the public forgetting the “stupid stuff” Trump says as he remains largely sidelined by his various legal issues.
“People already know the guy’s a misogynist, they already know he‘s a racist, they already know he says divisive things, and they seem not to take him literally or seriously,” she said. “They think it is part of a clown act entertainment.”
Clown is a popular word right now, I guess.
It’s a mistake. Hillary Clinton found out the hard way that when a candidate insults a large segment of the voting population on a personal level, they turn away. Trump appeals to regular voters because he talks to them, he goes into their communities. He shows up.
Trump’s economic success when he was in office and his border hawk policies are what voters are looking for now. The economy and illegal immigration are the top two issues with voters this cycle. Biden has failed spectacularly on both those issues. The minority voters moving away from Biden and toward Trump aren’t clowns or stupid. They are realists. Trump has turned the Republican Party into the party of working Americans.