After the overwhelming whiteness of Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic Party’s Presidential campaign turned the corner in Nevada, where only half of the population is white. Latinos are the state’s largest minority—nearly thirty per cent. In an election season made rancid first by the demonization of Latino immigrants and then by a race to the bottom rungs of nativism among the leading Republican candidates, it felt past time to hear from Latino voters.
The outcome of Saturday’s caucuses was confusing. Hilary Clinton won, beating Bernie Sanders by five and a half percentage points. But according to entrance polls Sanders won handily among Latinos. The accuracy of those polls was later disputed, fairly convincingly. By any measure, Clinton lost her grip on the Latino vote, which she won in Nevada by nearly forty percentage points in 2008, while running against Barack Obama.
Nevada is a strange state. It’s a huge place, but the great majority of its people live in one county—Clark, the home of Las Vegas. Between 2000 and 2010, it was the fastest-growing state in population. Then it was flattened by the recession, with the highest home-foreclosure rate in the nation. Its main industry is tourism—entertainment, broadly defined. Where else could a citizen lobby called Hookers 4 Hillary, five hundred strong, make a passionate case for Obamacare and the virtues of imposing higher income taxes on their boss, the owner of a brothel called the Moonlite Bunny Ranch?
Two things that were clear from Saturday’s caucus results were Clinton’s strength among Nevada’s African-American voters, among whom she outpolled Sanders by more than fifty points, and Sanders’s strength among young voters, who preferred him by almost six-to-one. As in Iowa and New Hampshire, turnout among voters under thirty was strikingly high, and in Nevada the Sanders youth brigade was black, white, Asian, and Latino. There were many reports of Democratic families, particularly Latinos, having split along generational lines, with the old folks sticking with La Hillary and the young responding to the more revolutionary message of this finger-wagging newcomer soon fondly dubbed El Viejito—the little old guy.
On the threshold issue of immigration reform, there wasn’t much to choose from between the candidates. Clinton, clearly worried about a surging Sanders—he had gone from twenty-five points down in the polls five weeks earlier to a statistical dead heat by caucus day—tried to hang a 2007 Senate vote against immigration reform around her opponent’s neck, but Sanders’s explanation for his vote on that legislation was persuasive. Indeed, he has promised, if elected, to protect even more undocumented immigrants from deportation with executive orders than Clinton has. Both candidates have had to work carefully around the profound disappointment that many Latinos feel in President Obama, who failed to deliver immigration reform while deporting millions.
The much-anticipated “Trump effect”—the idea that the Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s threats to deport eleven million people will galvanize eligible Latinos into taking American citizenship, and/or registering to vote, and/or voting at higher rates than in the past—was not especially evident in Nevada. (Latino voter participation is traditionally low.) Of course, the incredible cumbersomeness of caucusing does not encourage turnout, particularly when there’s a language barrier. And, again, the existential threat to the community doesn’t figure directly in the Democratic-nomination debate. Still, it’s getting less notional every day.
The most effective voter-turnout organization in Nevada is said to be the Culinary Workers Union, which represents, among other workers, casino cooks, housekeepers, and cocktail waitresses. In a right-to-work state, “the Culinary” has fifty-seven thousand members, more than half of them Latino. During the 2008 Democratic caucuses, the union endorsed Obama, provoking an outsize reaction in the Clinton camp that included a civil lawsuit and angry calls to casinos by Bill Clinton. This year, the union offered no endorsement. There have been press reports, though, about how the Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the leader of the Democrats, pulled the caucus victory out of the fire for Hillary Clinton in his home state. Seeing the trend of Sanders’s support, and sharing the Party leadership’s view that Sanders would make a weak candidate, Reid called the leader of the Culinary, along with a few casino executives. It was arranged for a hundred organizers to help manage half a dozen caucus sites on the Las Vegas Strip, and for large numbers of workers to be given paid leave to caucus. These workers were generally of an age and position in life to be sticking with La Hillary, and Clinton cleaned up at those caucuses. Similar arrangements were reportedly made in other parts of Clark County. Reid has not yet endorsed a candidate.
An ambitious national drive to naturalize and register eligible Latinos to vote is, in fact, under way. It’s being run by unions (including the Culinary), churches, immigrant-rights groups, and Florida’s Miami-Dade County, with a near-term goal of preparing large numbers of new voters to participate in the November elections. Organizers say that fear and resentment of Trump and his proposals are indeed helping their efforts. Some states with large Latino populations, such as California and Texas, will see no dramatic effects from newly registered voters in the current electoral cycle, but in swing states like Nevada, Colorado, and Florida it could be a different story. Latinos may not play a decisive role in Democratic primaries—the way that African-Americans are now poised to do, in South Carolina and across the South, possibly paving Clinton’s way to the nomination. In the general election, however, in those swing states, Latinos’ electoral weight can easily tip the scales.
It’s remarkable to read today the warning issued, less than three years ago, by a task force created by the Republican National Committee after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012: “It is imperative that the RNC changes how it engages with Hispanic communities to welcome in new members of our Party. If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.” There are, of course, two Latinos in the running for the Republican nomination, and yet their positions on immigration reform are scarcely distinguishable from Trump’s. With the exception of Cuban-Americans, and perhaps some Puerto Ricans, the great majority of Latino voters seem to have been simply written off by the three main contenders for the Republican nomination.
But perhaps the conventional wisdom that the Republicans have, in this regard, made a major mistake is wrong, at least in terms of the 2016 elections. In the three primaries held so far, Republican voter turnout has been twenty-two per cent higher than it was in 2012. Democratic turnout, meanwhile, has been twenty-two per cent lower than in 2008. What if Republicans and other, nonaligned conservatives are energized by all the Sturm und Drang of the Party’s campaign, which has been nothing if not entertaining—the televised debates have broken all ratings records—and turn out in November in extraordinary numbers, sweeping the swing states before them? If that happens, it will be a victory at the expense of the Party’s future—and, presumably, a world of tears for millions of Latino families and their friends.
