By , ,
Published December 07, 2016
Following last week’s presidential election, many people in the Latino community are looking back to try to figure out just what happened.
Florida going Republican was a surprise to many.
More than one in three Latino voters in the state cast their ballots for Republican Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton. According to National Election Pool exit poll data, his support among Cuban-American voters was even higher: 54 percent.
Given those numbers, commentators such as Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos believes the election exposed a new division within the Latino community.
“Definitely there was a hidden, secret Latino vote,” Ramos was quoted as saying by the New York Times. “We’re seeing a new divide within the Hispanic community. The wall that Trump was talking about is clearly apparent now within the Hispanic community.”
Fernand Armandi, a Democratic pollster based in Florida, doesn’t believe it's a new phenomenon.
“There’s always been a reactionary element within the Hispanic electorate – a quarter or a third of the Hispanic electorate identifies as Republican and in this case with Trump’s perspective,” Armandi told Fox News Latino.
Armandi, like many pundits and pollsters, are putting the blame squarely of the shoulders of Clinton herself.
“She didn’t take the Latino vote for granted, but she didn’t maximize the advantages of Trump’s weakness. She centered [her campaign] on demonizing Trump, and she focused too much on immigration issues – those issues are not the be-all, end-all. There are other issues of great importance to Latino voters,” Armandi said.
Even though an overwhelming majority of Latinos view Trump unfavorably, according to Pew Research Center, nearly a quarter of Latinos agree with him about building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Javier Palomarez, the president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, told FNL earlier this week that the biggest blunder the Clinton campaign made was selecting Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate instead of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.
“They took Latinos for granted, thinking, ‘This one’s good enough,’” Palomarez said of the process of selecting Kaine. “Well, he’s a great man, but he’s not a Hispanic! ... With Castro, every Latino in the country would have noticed and been energized."
“What they care about most are jobs, education, health care and terrorism,” Marcela Valdes wrote in the Times editorial that cited Ramos. “In Florida, Obama’s recent changes to America’s relations with Cuba — changes that Clinton pledged to uphold — may have proved particularly toxic.”
"In the end. the only number that matters is 45. Trump has been elected our 45th president," Palomarez told FNL, referring to the protests that have occurred across the country since the election. "We need to be able to do what we asked him to do: To respect the will of the people and to honor the integrity of the process."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/did-trumps-election-expose-secret-divisions-among-latino-voters