While Democrat O’Rourke’s name doesn’t sound one latino’s should be voting for against Ted Cruz?
The fact is O’Rorke has MORE to offer Latino’s in the state as a possible US Senator than Cruz who votes in Congress solidly for Donald Trump’s anti-immigration and latino agenda….
O’Rourke is trailing Cruz in a Red State that hasn’t voted for a statewide Democratic candidate in a LONG TIME…
Can latino’s come out and tip the scales for the Democrat O’Rourke?
Can a last minute ‘get out the vote drive’ for latino’s work?
Beto O’Rourke, the hottest candidate that Democrats have put up for statewide office in Texas for the better part of two decades, needs exactly these voters to turn out if he is going to beat Ted Cruz and win a Senate seat. But with Election Day a few weeks away, the Beto campaign faces the same problem Democrats always face in this state and across much of the country: how to drive Latino voters, who skew Democratic when they vote, to the polls.
Progressives hope that hostility to Trump will motivate Latinos to vote in greater numbers this year. But that hope should be tempered by the reality that activists like Diaz face: This is the work most likely to make a difference. It’s slow. It’s often unsuccessful. And in Texas, it’s only just beginning.
Slow Work
Cambio Texas is one of several groups trying to mobilize the Latino vote in Texas, and it’s far from the largest. But Diaz, the son of farmworkers and a longtime community activist in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, believes the group he co-founded in Hidalgo County has some of the key ingredients for success.
Low Latino voter participation rates have become an existential threat to the Democratic Party in a majority-minority state whose demographics actually favor them. Republicans hold the governorship, majorities in both houses of the state legislature and haven’t lost a statewide election since 1994. No other state in the Deep South can boast such longstanding conservative control.
In 2014, Democratic Party operatives built a multimillion-dollar effort led by organizing group Battleground Texas, rallying behind the candidacy of abortion-restriction filibusterer Wendy Davis. She lost her campaign for the governorship to Greg Abbott by more than 20 percentage points. President Donald Trump’s fulminations against Mexicans and vilification of the border on the 2016 campaign trail likewise spurred no surge of Hispanic voter mobilization in Texas….
image…ROQUE PLANAS/HUFFPOSTDanny Diaz, in the foreground, leads a group of canvassers to knock on doors in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood of South McAllen, Texas, ahead of the 2018 midterm election.