Hillary Clinton’s Unusual Opportunity: Trumpexit

Any discussion of the data surrounding the Hispanic/Latino vote and its potential always produces the same negative narrative not to be repeated here.  This blog-post is not about numbers.  Rather, it is about motivating Hispanic/Latinos to vote in higher numbers than usual.

The credible, numerical reality that should drive the formulation of a Hispanic/Latino strategy within Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that Hispanic/Latino voters exist in sufficient registered and unregistered numbers to swing the election to Hillary Clinton and bring along additional states that a splintered Republican Party could help push into the Democratic column.

Conventional thinking suggests that Donald Trump’s candidacy will be enough to cause many more Hispanic/Latinos to register and vote in November than four years ago.  Indeed, I cannot remember a Republican candidate so unpopular among Hispanic/Latinos – to the point of being loathed.

That said, what are the messages that can elevate Hispanic/Latino registration and turn-out to historic numbers?

First of all, the Clinton campaign needs to jettison the standard, boiler-plate language about education, health care and jobs that Hispanic/Latinos have heard repeatedly through the years.  Hispanic/Latinos would not have voted Democratic for decades if they did not already understand that voting Republican is not in their best interest.  These issues are of clear and evident importance to Hispanic/Latinos from Seattle to San Antonio to Miami.  I say let the national convention in Philadelphia, the presidential debates and the campaign’s general advertising take care of re-enforcing the Democratic message to Hispanic/Latinos.

To me, the Clinton campaign should find – and deliver forcefully – a core message the like of which Hispanic/Latinos have never heard specifically from a presidential candidate.  Instead of staid, standard commercials and forgetful speeches, the Clinton campaign should make an icon out of the image of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the jurist whose Mexican heritage Trump disparaged in racist language not heard on the campaign trail since George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, ran for the Presidency in 1968.  And the campaign should use the icon as bludgeon.

I believe the Curiel episode is an existential moment.  For many Hispanic/Latino voters, a Trump Presidency could determine whether some of their relatives and neighbors can continue to live in this country.  But for many more – for many Hispanic/Latinos whose families in what would become the United States predate the American Revolution – the Curiel episode is about how Hispanic/Latinos will exist in the future.

The fact of the matter is that Hispanic/Latinos only recently are beginning to be thought of as part of the mainstream – and that by only some segments of the national population.  It has come as a surprise to many Hispanics/Latinos, especially those who have voted Republican in the past, that many millions of non-Hispanic/Latinos do not consider those of us, who like Judge Curiel share Mexican or Puerto Rican or Central American or South American roots, as ‘Americans’.

It is not lost on Hispanic/Latinos that Republicans in the Senate have blocked President Obama’s selection of another judge,  Merrick Garland, to the Supreme Court in the hopes that a President Trump would appoint a justice to the court that would continue its recent decisions that carry an anti-Hispanic/Latino taint as the nation’s new demography exerts itself.  The court’s decision on affirmative decision on affirmative action notwithstanding, its decision that blocked President Obama’s plan to shield millions of immigrants from deportation is importantly instructive to Hispanic/Latino voters.

Hispanic/Latinos do not want to exist in a world in which a form of second-class citizenship characterizes their lives.  Messaging, then, on the part of the Clinton campaign should be aimed at Hispanic/Latino parents and grandparents and young Hispanic/Latinos contemplating raising a family to consider how their children and grandchildren exist and live their lives in the future.

The opportunity for the Clinton campaign extends to the traditional Hispanic/Latino Republican vote that usually comprises about 35 percent of the Hispanic/Latino vote.  In some states, these voters can push Clinton’s vote totals higher to bring unexpected victory in unexpected places and in unexpected down-ballot races.

Hispanic/Latino business owners would understand that Trump’s fiscal theories could wreck the economic recovery now underway and incur billions of additional debt that more and more will land on Hispanic/Latino taxpayers in the future.  Hispanic/Latino veterans are aware that Trump is all-talk about his support of veterans.  Veterans would react to a message that a disastrous Trump Presidency would jeopardize their benefits and the social security and medical benefits that the country affords their parents.   Veterans instinctively would come to realize how Trump’s domestic and foreign policies would set up the country for another round of George W. Bush’s failures.  Fallujah, anyone?

The goal to reduce the total Republican Hispanic/Latino vote in some places to near-naught and explode it in others is not fantasy.  There was a time, remember, that a Republican candidate for President in some Hispanic/Latino precincts would receive zero votes.

The Democratic ticket has an heretofore unknown opportunity to drive a series of sophisticated messages into the Hispanic/Latino community to maximize its vote.

And to sweep Trump and his view of the world from history in which the existence of more than Hispanic/Latinos eventually would be in peril.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.