Alongside the narrative that the Republican Party is a white supremacist party, we hear a narrative that Latino voters are shifting toward Trump. This matters because they make up about 15% of U.S. voters. I’ll share a few thoughts:

• First, the U.S. Census has revised how it asks people if they identify as Latino over the years, and is considering revising it again. This makes it a little hard to track over time. It occurs to me that it is just a very broad group with some very disparate people, ranging from Puerto Ricans to people with Cuban ancestry to South American ancestry to Spanish ancestry and newly arrived immigrants to families who have been in the U.S. for many generations. So I am just not sure how predictive this category is of how people are going to vote.
• For people who have immigrated legally and recently, not all are going to be sympathetic to undocumented immigrants. It may seem unfair when you feel you have followed the rules to see that others have not. People also may see newly arrived immigrants as competing for jobs, whether this is really borne out by the facts or not. So Republican anti-immigrant messaging may appeal to some, although the ads we are seeing in Pennsylvania right now are just blatant racist lies, in my opinion.
• People who view themselves as succeeding through hard work resent any sense that the government is taking their income and redistributing it to people who do not work hard. So the Republicans can trot out their decades-old anti-tax and “welfare queen” messages and they are going to resonate with some people, sometimes.
• This may be a sensitive topic, but there is some anti-black racism among some Latinos, sometimes, and so even blatantly racist messaging from the Republicans is going to reach some people.
• For approximately 50 years, the Democrats have made promises to the working class and middle class and failed to deliver them, time and time again. The Republicans don’t offer solutions, but they can just keep pointing out that the Democrats have failed to deliver, and offer us people to blame. This message reaches a lot of people of all races who are hurting in this country.

So those are the problems. Now our politicians can just put on their thinking caps and come up with practical solutions, right?