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Late last month, Spain’s venerable newspaper El País announced—with great fanfare—the launch of El País US, a new Spanish-language edition conceived for what its editors call a “diverse and thriving community of more than sixty million people,” namely the over sixty million Latinos who live in the US.
The inaugural issue featured a long-form article, with reporting on the ground from several US cities, on the all-too-important US Latino vote in the 2024 presidential election, making it very clear, right from its headline, that Neither Biden, nor Trump will win without the Latino vote: a 36-million-vote force.
Call me crazy, but I think I saw this movie before.
Every four years, almost without fail, Republicans and Democrats alike seem to wake up to the fact that there are a lot of Latinos eligible to vote in the US and, thus, decide to court us for a while. They would embark on some Hispandering here and there, visit a bodega, gobble down some tacos at El Gordo taqueria, or drop one or two words in broken Spanish during public events. Some have even gone as far as to tell us we should vote for them because they’re just like our abuelas.
Then, once the election is called, they’ll forget about us for another few years. And then the cycle starts yet again.
As Mexican TV news anchor Jorge Ramos once wrote, this “open and flagrant display of opportunism” that takes place every four years in the US has come to be known as the “Christopher Columbus Syndrome.”
This time around is no exception: as we head to yet another presidential election in the US, Latinos are being rediscovered—yet again—as we apparently hold the key (again) to which of the presidential hopefuls will occupy the White House starting January 2025.
WARNING: Before you keep reading and/or vote this writer off the Internet and send her on a discovery trip to where-she-came-from, please remember this column was conceived to be handled with a serious dose of humor.
I’m no political pundit, but candidates would be well advised to get a little more serious this time (or at least hold on to the “discovery” a bit longer.) And that is because beyond the sheer numbers (an estimated thirty-six million Latinos are eligible to vote this year), Latinos are expected to play a key role in the so-called swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—which could ultimately decide the outcome of the election.
And this is where things start to get sticky for Democrats who have historically won the Latino vote with comfortable margins. According to official figures, Biden won 59 percent of the Latino vote in 2020, but now, polls are showing Latino support for Biden might be dwindling. What’s worse, many younger Latinos might be losing interest in voting at all.
For better or worse, Hispandering has already begun and at least in the democratic front, it started earlier than usual, even though neither party has officially nominated a candidate to the presidency.
Trump, who had been stuck for a while in New York City before being found guilty of thirty-four criminal charges in a Manhattan courtroom, did what any presidential hopeful would do to try to court a member of a minority: he visited a bodega on the outskirts of Harlem, one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. In what many labeled a “staged photo op,” Trump was seen surrounded by Black and Latino residents chanting “Four More Years!”
On the other side of the aisle, the Biden-Harris campaign in March announced “Latinos con Biden-Harris,” a national program to reach Latino voters that was presented during a brief stop by Biden at—where else?— a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix. The launch, which includes media buys across several Latino markets in English, Spanish, and even Spanglish, came as the Biden campaign rushes to reverse gains that former President Trump appears to be making among Hispanics.
Will my people be the ones responsible for putting Trump or Biden right back on their presidential chairs? Only time will tell, but our mighty, white, male “discoverers” seem to be eager to get their hands on our voting gold.
“I need you. I need you badly,” Biden pleaded before a group of Latino voters during a recent trip to Arizona, one of the nation’s swing states where Latinos could help tip the balance in November. “I desperately need your help […] You’re the reason why—in large part—I beat Donald Trump.”
Stay tuned for Laura Martinez’s next Hisplaining column, which will tackle other key biz terms and jargon and help leaders everywhere smoothly navigate the multicultural business world. In the meantime, send us tips and ideas for other terms and jargon that you’d like to see us feature. And remember: Don’t panic . . . it’s just his-PANIC!
