Obama makes false statements about Trump and Hispanic voters
Confounding Democrats across America, President Trump made big gains in the Latino community on Election Day in states like Florida and Texas, vastly improving his 2016 performance with them.
The data doesn’t lie, as Politico explains:
Despite four years of being defined as a racist for his rhetoric and harsh immigration policies, Trump improved his margins in 78 of the nation’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties. And he did better with Latinos in exit polls of each of the top 10 battleground states, a POLITICO review of election data found.
Joe Biden still won Latino voters overall. But as post-election data trickles in, Democrats are growing concerned. Trump’s notable gains weren’t limited to Miami’s Cuban Americans or border-region Tejanos. Although Florida and Texas stood out for the notable shift, Puerto Ricans as far away as Philadelphia and Mexican Americans in Milwaukee drifted Trump-ward.
Trump’s numbers in Florida and southern Texas are particularly noteworthy:
But in Texas, 41 percent to 47 percent of Hispanic voters backed Trump in several heavily Latino border counties in the Rio Grande Valley region, a Democratic stronghold. In Florida, Trump won 45 percent of the Latino vote, an 11-point improvement from his 2016 performance.
There are many reasons for Trump’s improved standing with a voting bloc that has long been crucial to Democrat wins at the state and national levels. We’ll get into those in a minute, but first, let’s take a look at how former President Barack Obama tried to explain away Trump’s gains.
In an interview to promote his new book “A Promised Land,” Obama told the New York City-based “Breakfast Club” radio program Wednesday that Hispanic voters who went for Trump ignored his allegedly racist rhetoric and instead supported him because he was pro-life and against gay marriage:
“Those of us who live in DC or New York or LA,” Obama argued, sometimes lack “a good enough sense of how big this country is and how a lot of folks do not accept at all” policies that people living in larger metropolitan areas take for granted.
The former president turned to the topic of Hispanics who voted for Trump as an example.
“People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump, but there’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, undocumented workers in cages. They think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion,” he explained.
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While Trump is indeed pro-life, gay marriage was never a focal point of his 2016 presidential campaign, nor did he make it an issue during his presidency.
So with that in mind, on what did Obama base his claims? He didn’t say, but it’s a safe bet to guess that the basis for his remarks came out of the same old Democratic playbook that almost always boils down Republican gains among key voting groups to some form of bigotry or ignorance, because minorities who vote for Republicans couldn’t possibly be rejecting the Democratic Party for legitimate reasons, right?
Contrary to what Obama told the Breakfast Club hosts, the Hispanic voters who pulled the lever for Trump and other Republicans in down-ballot races did so because they rejected the Democrat messaging on socialism, defunding the police, and job-killing initiatives like the Green New Deal....
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What Democrats have been doing is playing the politics of fraud when it comes to Trump and Hispanic voters. He has never denigrated Hispanics. What he has done is have some harsh things to say about MS-13, and Democrats have implied that he was talking about all Hispanics and not the murderous thugs of MS-13. Trump's policies have actually benefited Hispanic businesses and Hispanic oil field workers. In Florida, Trump's opposition to socialism was important to refugees who came here to escape socialism.
If Democrats continue to treat Hispanics as race traitors they will deserve to lose even more votes.
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