Hispanic progress in the southwest of the country, thanks to the demographic change experienced by this region will play an important role in the presidential elections of 2020 role, because of its growing weight in the electorate of Republican strongholds like Texas and Arizona, said today experts.
Screenings like the Pew Research center, which puts Hispanics as the second largest voter bloc for next year’s presidential elections, are fueling the idea of ​​Hispanic “reconquest” in southeastern states and should “worry the supporters of the Administration of (Donald) Trump, “warned former Republican Party consultant Tony Quinn.
In an interview with Efe, Quinn, editor of the California Target Book, said that it is necessary to look to “the demographic changes that take place in the southwestern United States”, what he calls the beginning of a “reconquest”.
This change happens in the areas that belonged to Mexico before 1830 and that includes the states of Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, western Colorado and southwestern Wyoming.
Precisely in a recent editorial on the Fox & Hounds website, Quinn said that “here (in the southwest) is where the future presidential and congressional control will be decided”.
The analyst explained that the two most vulnerable Republican seats in the Senate by 2020 are in Colorado and Arizona.
In 2018, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema made history in Arizona by retaining the post of Jeff Flake.
The councilor of Tucson Regina Romero, who aspires to become the first mayor of the city in November, said that hopes are set in 2020.
“We have all the hopes placed in having two Democratic senators in 2020 and we hope to have the Hispanic vote to achieve it,” he said to Efe Romero.
If Arizona manages to turn its tendencies towards the Democrats, Quinn does not rule out that Texas escapes to this new wave thanks to the Hispanic voters.
And it is that the gap between the Hispanic and white population in Texas has been reduced, since last year for each new white resident who settled in this state came nine Hispanics.
According to recent estimates from the Census Bureau, Latinos are expected to become the largest population group in Texas by 2022.
Quinn pointed out that there are signs of estrangement from the voters of the Republican Party in Texas: There, the president, Donald Trump, obtained 52% of the votes in 2016, a reduction of 5 percentage points with respect to his party companion, Mitt Romney, who in the previous elections, in 2012, reached 57% of the votes in that state.
The expert called attention to the fact that other places like Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada are also seeing a demographic explosion of Hispanics.
And he said that this “reconquest” is not a wave of “progressive Latinos”, but a manifestation of the demographic changes “where the majority of Hispanics have Mexican roots”.
The expert Miguel Tinker Salas, professor of History of Pomona Collegue in California, clarified, however, that “the Hispanic voter does not guarantee that the vote is democratic, although immigration is an important issue this population must be conquered with plans that favor them all level. “
In the case of Florida, where this week the two parties drench their campaigns, Quinn and Tinker Salas agreed that the growth of the Latino population there depends on the Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Venezuelans, and most likely to vote Republican.
For Romero, it is precisely the low turnout at the polls where the problem of the advancement of Latinos lies.
“It does not do any good if we have more Hispanic population, if they do not go to the polls,” lamented Romero.
In that sense, Tinker Salas said that the greater presence of Hispanics could be used by conservative sectors as a racist element, promoting the idea that “Mexicans want to retake the territories that once belonged to Mexico,” and encourage whites to go out to vote
“The idea of ​​the reconquest (which some sectors handle) is that the foreigner is not part of the social fabric of the country and that he is trying to make a territory independent, something that can be used again in this campaign,” warned Tinker Salas.
