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OCTOBER 18, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Winning the Latino Vote

Arizona, Nevada, and America's future depend on the Democrats doing
well.

With the midterm elections now just three weeks away, it's clear that
the Latino vote will play a decisive role in the outcomes in two of the
closest states: Arizona and Nevada. In each state, the gubernatorial
race is up for grabs, and while Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly holds a clear
lead over Republican Blake Masters in Arizona, Democratic Sen. Catherine
Cortez Masto is either running even with or slightly trailing her
Republican challenger, Adam Laxalt, in Nevada. The prospect of
Republican Kari Lake winning the Arizona gubernatorial contest is
particularly ominous, as Lake has made the Big Lie of Trump's supposed
2020 "victory" in her state the central theme of her campaign, and the
thought of her administration running the state's 2024 presidential
election imperils every small-d democratic norm in the book.

Arizona (32 percent) and Nevada (29 percent) rank fourth and fifth

among the 50 states, respectively, in the share of their populations
that are Latino. As Latinos have a lower rate of voter participation
than many other groups (they have a higher share of under-18-year-olds
and a lower share of citizens), they are underrepresented in those
states' electorates, but with the elections so close in both those
states, their presence is still plenty large, and way more than large
enough to swing the elections.

Monday's poll

on midterm voting in The New York Times and Sunday's poll

on the Latino vote in particular in The Washington Post have fairly
comparable numbers on the overall Latino vote: 60 percent for Democrats
and 34 percent for Republicans in the

**Times**, 63 for Democrats and 36 for Republicans in the

**Post**. (The

**Times**poll appears to have polled roughly 100 Latinos; the

**Post**poll, which was only of Latinos, polled 1,008 who were validated
registered voters.)

The same 63-to-36 margin that was the total for all Latinos in the

**Post**poll was replicated in that poll's numbers on the largest
religious subgroup, Catholics, who also split 63-to-36. Protestant
evangelicals in the

**Post**'s poll had precisely the reverse result: 36 percent for
Democrats, 63 percent for Republicans. "Atheists, Agnostics and Nothing
in Particulars" came in at 79 percent for Democrats and 19 percent for
Republicans. As Latino evangelicals, like evangelicals generally, are
found disproportionately in the South, the Democrats' lead among Dixie
Latinos is just nine percentage points; it's much higher in the
nation's other quadrants.

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In American politics today, religious evangelicals are overwhelmingly
Republican and their stance on culture war issues is more determinative
of their partisan alignment than those issues are for other voters. But
decades of polling show that most Latinos-evangelicals excepted-vote
chiefly on economic issues: on which party appears to favor policies
producing more jobs, higher wages, greater and more affordable
educational opportunities, more affordable health care, and, generally,
more affordable economic basics. Advantage Democrats this year on all
but the last, and it's the failure of the Democrats to make their case
on every one of those points but the last one that could well cost them
in the midterms-most especially among Latino voters in Nevada and
Arizona. The failure of Nevada Democrats, who currently control both the
governor's mansion and both houses of the legislature, to enact rent
control could prove a crippling handicap to their electoral prospects
next month, as rents in Clark County (that is, Greater Las Vegas, which
is home to three-quarters of Nevadans) have soared over the past year.

The inverse relationship between the politics of Latino Catholics and
Latino evangelicals also highlights a fundamental conundrum for the
American Catholic Church. The right wing of that church is personified
by such ultra-right Benedict appointees as Archbishop José Gomez of Los
Angeles, who sought, unsuccessfully, to have the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops condemn and deny Communion to President Biden, and
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who did condemn and
deny Communion to San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi, in both cases because of
their support for a woman's right to choose.

Under Benedict's successor, Pope Francis, the Vatican made clear that
it was opposed to such neo-Inquisitional stances, and Francis has gone
on to appoint a liberal Catholic, Robert McElroy, to be archbishop of
San Diego. Earlier this year, Francis also elevated McElroy to the rank
of cardinal, while passing over the two more senior California
archbishops, Gomez and Cordileone.

All this suggests one way to resolve the rifts dividing the Catholic
Church. Given that the Benedictine wing of the Church is profoundly out
of step with two-thirds of the nation's Latino Catholics, but clearly
in step with two-thirds of Latino evangelicals, why don't they simply
leave the American Church behind and set up shop with those
evangelicals? At the outer fringes of each tendency, there might even be
a linguistic convergence, with the ultra-Benedictines bringing back the
Latin Mass while the ultra-evangelicals can speak in tongues. Neither
group, after all, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created equal, so speaking in languages alien to liberal modernity
should come naturally to both.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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