Group items tagged

Latinos have maintained this type of edge despite generally having lower incomes, less access to health care and a greater prevalence of some chronic health issues, such as diabetes and obesity. Some researchers believe the life expectancy advantage is tied to the fact that many Latino immigrants to the U.S. are younger and healthier than many older Latinos, and have lower rates of smoking.

The researchers used projections of COVID-19 mortality to reach their conclusions, and a follow-up study arrived at similar findings. A CDC analysis showing provisional life expectancy estimates also pointed to a three-year drop in life expectancy for Latinos, and a shrinking gap between Latinos and whites.

Latino subgroups have an array of political and cultural differences. But one cultural norm that cuts across all groups is the primacy of family. Whatever country they’re descended from, it’s not uncommon for Latinos in the U.S. to live in multigenerational households that often include young children, their adult parents and a grandparent or grandparents.When young children and adults – many of whom are essential workers – live with elderly grandparents, “that increases the risk for the older people in the household,” says Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. “If the younger people in the household contract COVID-19, they may be OK, because younger people have stronger immune systems and tend to be healthier. Older people – who tend to be not as healthy and have chronic diseases – may become severely ill, with increased risk of hospitalization and mortality.”

“Once you put all those together, what you find is you have the disappearing of the Latino paradox,” Saenz says.While older Latinos have continued to have a higher rate of COVID-19 mortality than their white counterparts during each year of the pandemic, the difference in death rates has diminished over time. During the first year of the crisis, Latinos age 65 and older died of COVID-19 at 2.1 times the rate of older whites, Saenz and Garcia’s research shows. In 2021, older Latinos died at 1.6 times the rate of older whites, and into late April of this year, older Hispanics had died at 1.2 times the rate of older whites. Saenz attributes the narrowing difference to COVID-19 death rates among older whites in red states where vaccination rates are lower.

Transportation, language and employment. A study in 2020 from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative found Latinos (and Blacks) in Los Angeles County and New York City were roughly twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as non-Hispanic whites as of July 20 of that year, and noted that carpooling or taking public transportation to work may raise the risk of coronavirus exposure. The study also found that 34% and 37% of the populations in Los Angeles County and New York City were foreign-born, respectively, with Latinos making up the largest share of that population in each area. Approximately 13% of the foreign-born do not speak English, according to the report, which poses a challenge to their obtaining important health information.

“A three-year reduction in life expectancy is huge in historical terms. We usually have not seen reductions this large except during times of war or major pandemics,” says Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral scholar at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at USC and one of the PNAS study’s researchers. “Of course, it’s really sad to think about the individuals who died of COVID, but it also has broader implications for the family members of those who died.”COVID-19 has not only claimed the lives of many older Latinos, but many younger, working-age Latinos as well, leaving behind children, siblings, parents and grandparents who depended on them, Andrasfay says. She says she and other researchers are working on an update, tracking the effect of COVID-19 on life expectancy in 2021: “We’re finding a similar pattern (to 2020), with Latinos having the largest reduction in life expectancy.”

Though he wasn’t in the best of health, Salvador Macias, 83, enjoyed going to a neighborhood community center for senior activities in Long Beach, a beachside city about 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. He lived in a modest, tidy house with his wife, Manuela, and their adult daughter, Julie.Salvador suffered from three chronic health conditions: diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, says his son, Joe Macias.In August 2020 – four months before health care workers received the first COVID-19 vaccine – the elder Macias became ill with the disease, suffering from fatigue and severe shortness of breath. After several days, Salvador died at home. Manuela, who doesn’t have the chronic health conditions her husband had, also contracted COVID-19. She was hospitalized for a week, but survived.

The Mexican author Octavio Paz, in his 1950 book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, described the pachuco (a word used to refer to young Mexican American men, many of them gang members, in the mid-1900s) as a “pariah, a man who belongs nowhere,” alienated from his Mexican roots but not quite of the United States either.

Gloria Anzaldúa, in her 1987 classic, Borderlands/La Frontera, described Chicana identity as the product of life along the U.S.-Mexico border, “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”

We need to understand that they want the same freedoms, comforts, and securities that all people have wanted since the beginning of civilization: to have a “home with a place to paint, or a big, comfortable chair to sit in and read under a lamp, with a cushion under the small of our backs.”

offers a more intimate look into the barrios, homes, and minds of people who, he argues, have been badly, and sometimes willfully, misunderstood.

Tobar’s main focus is on how the migrant experience has shaped Latino identity.

More than these other works, though, it engages in contemporary debates and issues, such as how Latinos have related to Blackness and indigeneity, the question of why some Latinos choose to identify as white, and the political conservatism of certain Latino communities

“To be Latino in the United States,” Tobar writes, “is to see yourself portrayed, again and again, as an intellectually and physically diminished subject in stories told by others.”

Even when migrants survive the journey and settle across the United States, Tobar sees a dark thread connecting them: “Our ancestors,” he writes, “have escaped marching armies, coups d’état, secret torture rooms, Stalinist surveillance, and the outrages of rural police forces.” Tobar is referring here to the domestic conflicts, fueled by the U.S. military, in Guatemala, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other countries during the Cold War, leading to unrest and forcing civilians in those places to flee northward.

For Tobar, this history of violence is something all Latinos have in common, no matter where in the country they live.

He writes, “I want a theory of social revolution that begins in this kind of intimate space,” not in the symbols “appropriated by corporate America,” like the Black Lives Matter banners displayed at professional sporting events, or the CEO of JPMorgan Chase kneeling at a branch of his bank, which critics have read as virtue signaling. Mere intimacy and the recognition of common histories isn’t the same as justice, but it is a necessary starting point for healing divisions.

there are many Latino stories that he does not, and probably cannot, tell. For one, he conceives of Latino history as the history of a people who have endured traumas because of the actions of the U.S. But this framing wouldn’t appeal to Latinos who see the United States as the country where their dreams came true, where they’ve built careers, bought homes, provided for their families.

If the small number of conservative Latinos Tobar interviewed are anything like the Hispanic Republicans I’ve talked with over the years, they would tell him that it is the Republican Party that best represents their economic, religious, and political values.

If our aim is to understand the full story of Latinos—assuming such a thing is possible—we should explore all of the complexities of those who live in a country that is becoming more Latino by the day. For that, we’ll need other books besides Our Migrant Souls, ones that describe the inner worlds, motives, and ambitions of Latinos who see themselves and their place in this country differently.

A New York Times/Siena College poll of Florida released on Sunday showed Mr. Biden with the support of 54 percent of the state’s Latino voters, compared with 62 percent for Mrs. Clinton four years ago. He and Mr. Trump were basically tied among Hispanic men in the state

Mr. Biden is competitive among Latino voters, and could still win Florida based on his strength with educated whites.

But he would be in better shape, campaign aides privately acknowledged, if the campaign had reached out earlier to recruit infrequent voters and soften Mr. Trump’s support among Hispanic men in the state.

“The Biden people have done a good job in playing catch-up, but it is always the same, every cycle,” said Chuck Rocha, who runs Nuestro PAC, a pro-Biden committee that has raised $9 million for Spanish-language advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts. “Everybody only does Latino outreach in the last couple of weeks of the campaign. That has to change.”

The coronavirus has also been an impediment, said Mr. Castro, the former secretary of housing and urban development under President Barack Obama and now an adviser to Mr. Biden. “Latino voters like in-person contact,” he said.

The overall problem is rooted not only in the party’s inconsistent efforts to reach Latino voters, but also in the particulars of Mr. Biden’s primary campaign. It was a cash-poor operation that was focused on Black voters, a group long courted by the former vice president that turned out to be critical to his primary victory.

Still, the party has seen some successes. The Democratic National Committee invested heavily in microtargeting Puerto Rican voters through the purchase of call lists in 2019, and Mr. Biden owes his surprising strength in Texas and Arizona to strong support from Latino voters.

Democratic officials say they expected that nine million Latino voters will have gone to the polls early by mail or in person, up from 3.7 million in 2016.

Democrats have also recently begun pouring money and resources into outreach efforts, with donors pumping $28 million into three independent expenditure groups aimed at increasing Latino turnout in the past two months.

Thanks to those funds, the Biden campaign has been able to increase its Spanish-language media buys in the closing weeks, with six-figure expenditures booked in Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, a spokesman said.

But much of the Democrats’ resources in the closing days is being devoted to providing basic voting information to registered Latino voters, rather than funding a deeper dive into the voter files to reach more voters, or a big effort to change the minds of wavering male voters, party officials said.

On Saturday, Veronica Escobar, the Democratic congresswoman from El Paso, spent 20 minutes on the phone with a young Mexican-American woman in Texas who was outraged at Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic and frightened by his rhetoric — and had no intention, whatsoever, of voting.

Democrats are relying on many Latino voters to go to the polls on Election Day, as they have tended to do in the past.

Latino voters in Florida and Arizona had Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump among the group 55% to 33% and 66% to 26%, respectively.

Almost two-thirds—64%—say they disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the crisis, while 28% approve. By a 12-point margin, Latino voters said coronavirus was more important than the economy in determining their vote

Just 63% of Latino voters ranked their interest in the race at the very top of a scale from one to 10, compared with 82% of non-Latino white voters and 74% of Black voters. The 63% for Latinos is higher than the 58% recorded in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted shortly before the 2016 election.

For the final week of the campaign, Mr. Biden had almost three times as much money booked as Mr. Trump for Spanish-language broadcast television ads, $2.4 million to $829,000, data from ad-tracking firm Kantar/CMAG showed.

The oversample of Latino voters was conducted in conjunction with The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted Oct. 29-31. The survey, which included 410 registered Latino voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8 percentage points

two brothers and my parents, who are essential workers in one of San Diego’s coronavirus hotspots – where Hispanics comprise 45% of Covid-19 deaths.

I’m disheartened by the disparate impact of the pandemic, which disproportionately victimizes Latinos.

In each glance we exchange, I sense silent despair. It’s hard not to surrender to the material challenges we face.

My struggles mirror those of millions of Latinos like me, which makes our solidarity so important.

Only in recognizing our solidarity can we overcome the obstacles of the pandemic – a path made more viable with Biden’s plans to address disparities in vulnerable communities.

Trump’s separation of families and proto-fascist rhetoric have simply harmed Latino communities for far too long. We may not agree on every issue, but electing Biden now is a matter of survival.

Though Biden hasn’t committed to Medicare for All and continues to swallow corporate cash, his presidency, if victorious, should galvanize us to demand for needed reform.

With Biden, I have hope for my future and the fate of millions of Latinos like me.

after months of hearing the party front-runner talk about Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals and rapists, followed by discussion of the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants and any American-born children with undocumented parents, most Latino voters changed their minds. The party brand suffered at the hands of its most popular candidate, and now all the Republican candidates hoping to be the next nominee are disadvantaged.

At the most basic level, the argument is that a strong party brand serves all members of the party seeking election, because a strong signal is more valuable than a weak one. And of course a popular brand is more desirable than an unpopular one. Think of it as quality control.

In less than a year, Mr. Trump has both weakened the party signal and made it less popular, especially among groups that the party needs to court.

the most explosive growth has been in Indigenous, independent Pentecostal churches

we ought to start talking about a new family of “spiritual” churches that have no historical ties to Western church traditions. These “spiritual” churches are largely not a result of colonial missions.

Sub-Saharan Africa had the most striking growth of Christianity, growing from around 9 percent Christian at the beginning of the 20th century to almost 45 percent at the end of it. There are around 685 million Christians in Africa now.

even conservative estimates guess there were around 98 million evangelical Christians globally in 1970. Now, there are over 342 million.

as Christianity booms overseas, more Christians are migrating to the United States. But there’s also evidence that migrants who come to here are finding immigrant-led churches and converting to Christianity after they arrive. These trends, George told me, are “globalizing American Christianity.”

Today, the three largest Protestant churches in Paris are Afro-Caribbean evangelical megachurches of a charismatic or Pentecostal bent

Immigration has been a huge factor in the demographic growth of the United States over the past decade. Much of that growth is attributable to Latinos, who now number around 62 million and represent just under 20 percent of the United States population. Some projections estimate that by 2060 there will be 111 million Latinos in the United States, constituting 28 percent of the population.

Latino evangelicals are the fastest growing segment of evangelicals in the country. It also said that “Latino Protestants, in particular, have higher levels of religiosity”

as of 2021, Pew reported that 29 percent of all adults identified as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”

alongside that trend, the changing demographics of Christianity promise to transform faith and religious discourse. We cannot assume that America will become more secular so long as the future of America is less white

it is difficult to provide definite statistics on how many evangelical and Pentecostal churches in America are led by Latinos, immigrants or other nonwhite or non-English-speaking pastors because many of these churches are small, non-organized and grass roots.

the standard American religious survey categories no longer account for the realities expressed in the church in America. “White evangelicalism,” “Protestant mainline” and “progressive” are categories that are largely defined by a white majority.

This “browning” of the church in America, as some scholars call it, scrambles all the categories. What we are seeing isn’t simply that white evangelicalism is changing; it’s that something new is emerging.

most hold convictions that overlap with traditional evangelicalism in substantial ways. They are by and large traditionally conservative about sexuality and marriage. They hold an authoritative view of the Bible and believe in miracles and supernatural occurrences.

But they tend to be more committed to social justice and, in George’s words, “communitarian” than many white evangelicals.

when he visits churches in Brazil and Argentina, “Sometimes the Catholics are more evangelical and Pentecostal” than even typical white evangelicals in America.

This influx of nonwhite believers will challenge white religious conservatives to choose between xenophobia and building alliances with immigrants who share their views on social issues.

These trends will also challenge them to unbundle their religious views on social issues from a kind of libertarian economics that harms those who are less wealthy

The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants or the children of immigrants. And that reality ought to change our present conversations about religion in America.

“If you’re a Hispanic holding your breath and hoping for Donald Trump to get better in his outreach to Latinos, you’re going to die of asphyxia,”

The unhappiness among many Latino GOP members only adds to the Republican Party’s broader problems in attracting Hispanics and other minorities

Trump has derided Mexican immigrants as rapists and killers and built his candidacy around vows to build a giant border wall, deport 11 million illegal immigrants and temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country.

Republican activists and contributors are in “a very difficult situation” because of Trump’s rhetoric and positions.

Just when someone thinks that they can begin to maybe start thinking about coming on board, Trump goes and attacks that judge for being Mexican

“are looking to see if the candidate is going to evolve,” adding that Guerra’s decision to go was “fair.”

“But if the candidate doesn’t reflect some of those principles and values, then waking up in the morning, meeting deadlines, being creative and standing in the gap for the candidate becomes difficult.”

said he’s less concerned with “personality or charisma” and more concerned with a candidate’s policy positions. The group will concentrate on Senate races in the fall.

Compared to similar points in previous election cycles, Trump trails previous GOP presidential candidates by wide margins.

Alfonso Aguilar, a Hispanic conservative activist who knows Guerra and Aguirre Ferre, said Wednesday night that it will continue to be a challenge for any Latino Republican to defend Trump.

You can have all the Helens you want, but if the candidate continues with his rhetoric and proposals, you’re not going to win Latinos

Trump had retweeted an offensive comment about Columba Bush, who was born in Mexico.

Three years ago, bruised by Romney’s loss to Obama, the RNC commissioned a study to determine how to improve its outreach to minority voters

00-page report urged Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform, to focus less on social issues and to build stronger relationships with minority communities.

everything issued in that report has been ignored

The big promise that Democrats failed to keep was the passage of an immigration reform bill that would legalize the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

Latinos haven’t forgotten Mr. Obama’s promise. That’s why Democrats have a “Latino problem.”

Now it falls to Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to overcome this lack of trust within the Latino community. “I think it was a big mistake,” Mr. Biden said of the Obama administration’s mass deportations during our interview. “It took too long to get it right.”

Mr. Biden’s second promise is specifically for Dreamers. “I will also legalize Dreamers again,” he said during our February interview, “making sure they are not deported. These are already Americans.”

Mr. Trump’s policies have had a profound effect on immigration: From 2016 to 2019, annual net immigration to the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 migrants per year.

It’s possible that Mr. Biden’s policies could send the wrong message to people in the Southern Hemisphere. So, in order to discourage new caravans of people from traveling to the United States from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Mr. Biden has said he plans to invest $4 billion to create jobs in Central America and tackle the root causes of migration.

of 114,411 deaths related to COVID-19 between May and August found 24% were Hispanic or Latino

Dr. Hotez described the impact of Covid-19 on Latinos as a “historic decimation.”

“Given the fact it's hitting Hispanics in their 40s, 50s and 60s, what that really means is it's robbing families for this whole generation of their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters,” said Hotez

Health experts say the reasons behind the coronavirus’ disproportionate toll on Latinos is multifaceted.

“We are much more likely to be essential workers. We have to be out there in the pandemic. Some of them had to take public transportation. There was no choice,”

“We need more minorities -- both Latino [and] African American -- to participate in these studies. The problem is our risk factors are different,” said Carrasquillo. “We need to make sure these vaccines work on our people.”

“We're losing more people because of our economic situations. Most of our families can't stay home, can't stop going to work,” said Martinez Felipe.

The pandemic’s resulting economic crisis has only deepened the pain. The Hispanic unemployment rate at the height of the pandemic’s first surge hit a peak of 18.9 percent, the worst rate among demographic groups, before trickling down to 10.5 percent.

when Senators John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, tried to advance the legislation setting up the Latino museum on the National Mall.

“My objection to the creation of a new Smithsonian museum or series of museums based on group identity — what Theodore Roosevelt called hyphenated Americanism — is not a matter of budgetary or legislative technicalities,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s a matter of national unity and cultural inclusion.”

“The so-called critical theory undergirding this movement does not celebrate diversity; it weaponizes diversity,” he said. “It sharpens all those hyphens into so many knives and daggers. It has turned our college campuses into grievance pageants and loose Orwellian mobs to cancel anyone daring to express an original thought.”

He argued that Latinos were just as entitled to their own cultural institution as African-Americans and Native Americans, to whom Smithsonian museums have been dedicated in recent years.

That concern, along with budgetary ones, has been one of the main points of opposition to a Latino museum in recent years amid extensive lobbying campaigns in its favor.

“Surely in a year where we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, this is the time, this is the moment to finally pass the legislation unanimously recommended by an independent commission to establish an American women’s history museum in our nation’s capital,”

Even if Congress approved the museums, it would likely take about another decade to open their doors.

Torres pointed as well to the cumulative toll taken by progressives who for at least a decade have loudly championed cultural causes and chanted slogans that turned off rank-and-file Democrats across many demographics

“Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” Torres told me, “which alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’”

Torres emphasized that in his view, Harris ran a vigorous and effective campaign, given the circumstances. He did not discern many missteps. Although she sometimes tossed up clouds of vagueness when asked about past positions, she was disciplined and avoided mouthing the buzzwords of the cultural left during her 2024 campaign

But she could not sidestep her previous concessions to liberal cultural fevers, as she discovered when the Trump campaign bludgeoned her with endless commercials highlighting her decision, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to champion state-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners.

In recent election cycles, Democrats have invested much hope that “people of color”—the widely varied and disparate peoples long imagined to be a monolith—would embrace an expansive list of progressive causes and rearrange American politics.

Politics, alas, is more complex than simply arranging virtuous ethnic and racial voting bloc

Four years ago, even as Biden triumphed, a majority of Asian and Latino voters in California rejected a ballot proposition that would have restored affirmative action in education and hiring.

A week before the election, Marcel Roman, a Harvard government professor, explained on X that he and a Georgetown colleague had discovered that Latino voters deeply dislike being labeled Latinx, a gender-neutral term now widespread in academia. This term also came into use by Democratic politicians eager to establish their bona fides with progressive activists. Alas, voters liked it not so much.

This problem seems easily remedied: Refer to voters by the term they prefer—Latino, say, or Hispanic. Roman drew a different conclusion, calling for “political education meant to root out queerphobia in Latino communities.”

Democrats might do well to listen carefully and respectfully to the tens of millions of Americans whom they claim to want to represent. This need not entail a turn away from populist economics so much as remaining clear-eyed about self-righteous rhetoric and millennialist demands.

He noted in our conversation that he is strongly in favor of immigration, and his majority-Latino district has many hardworking undocumented residents who need his aid.

But he recognizes that the national electorate, not least many Latino and Black voters, now seeks to at least partially close the door and tighten restrictions. He accepts that reality. “You have to recognize that in a democracy, public opinion matters,” he said. “We cannot just assume that we can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

“It is an important way to influence that diversity effort in an industry,” Delgadillo said about the caucus’s effort.She and other professors, though excited about the effort, were also critical of the list, because, they say, there were few stories about Latinas and L.G.B.T.Q. people.

independents — especially recently arrived Spanish-speakers — are seen as more up for grabs because they’re less tied to U.S. political parties and are more likely than longtime voters to be influenced by mainstream news outlets and social media.

The GOP under Trump mastered social media, especially Facebook use, in 2016 and even Democrats acknowledge that Republicans have made inroads in the aggressive use of WhatsApp encrypted messaging.

Valencia bills her Spanish-language YouTube page, which has more than 378,000 followers, as a channel for geopolitical analysis. But it often resembles English-language right-wing news sources, such as Infowars, sharing conspiracy theories and strong anti-globalization messages.

In South Florida, veteran Latino Democratic strategist Evelyn Pérez-Verdia noticed this summer that the WhatsApp groups dedicated to updates on the pandemic and news for the Colombian and Venezuelan communities became intermittently interspersed with conspiracy theories from videos of far-right commentators or news clips from new Spanish-language sites, like Noticias 24 and PanAm Post, and the YouTube-based Informativo G24 website.

“I’ve never seen this level of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lies,” Pérez-Verdia, who is of Colombian descent, said. “It looks as if it has to be coordinated.”

Some of the information shared in chat groups and pulled from YouTube and Facebook goes beyond hyperbolic and caustic rhetoric.

Political campaigns, social justice movements and support groups have followed along, making WhatsApp a top tool for reaching voters in Latin America and from Latin America.

unlike the conspiracy theories that circulate in English-language news media and social media, there’s relatively little to no Spanish-language media coverage of the phenomenon nor a political counterpunch from the left.

Bula-Escobar, who’s also a frequent guest on Miami-based Radio Caracol — which is one of Colombia’s main radio networks and widely respected throughout Latin America — has gained an increasing amount of notoriety for pushing the claim, often seen as anti-Semitic, that billionaire George Soros is “the world’s biggest puppet master” and is the face of the American Democratic Party.

“Who’s going to celebrate the day, God forbid, Trump loses? Cuba; ISIS, which Trump ended; Hezbollah, which Obama gave the greenlight to enter Latin America; Iran; China … All the filth of the planet is against Donald Trump. So, if you want to be part of the filth, then go with the filth,” Bula-Escobar said in a recent episode of Informativo G24.

On Facebook, a Puerto Rican-born pastor Melvin Moya has circulated a video titled “Signs of pedophilia” with doctored videos of Biden inappropriately touching girls at various public ceremonies to a song in the background that says, “I sniffed a girl and I liked it.” The fake video posted on Sept. 1 has received more than 33,000 likes and 2,400 comments.

various fake stories across WhatsApp and Facebook claim that Nicolás Maduro’s socialist party in Venezuela and U.S. communist leaders are backing Biden.

“It’s really just a free-for-all now,” said Raúl Martínez, a Democrat who served as mayor of the largely conservative, heavily Cuban-American city of Hialeah for 24 years and is now host of a daily radio show on Radio Caracol. “It’s mind boggling. I started in politics when I was 20. I’ve never seen it like this.”

“When I hear from other stations, they haven’t just sipped the Kool-Aid. They drank the whole thing,” Martínez said.

Radio Caracol, for its part, received unwelcome attention Aug. 22 when it aired 16 minutes of paid programming from a local businesssman who launched into an anti-Black and anti-Semitic rant that claimed a Biden victory would mean that the U.S. would fall into a dictatorship led by “Jews and Blacks.” The commentator claimed that Biden is leading a political revolution “directed by racial minorities, atheists and anti-Christians” and supports killing newborn babies

on Friday, the editor of the Spanish-language sister paper of The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, publicly apologized for its own paid-media scandal after running a publication called “Libre” as a newspaper insert that attacked Black Lives Matter and trafficked in anti-Semitic views.

"What kind of people are these Jews? They're always talking about the Holocaust, but have they already forgotten Kristallnacht, when Nazi thugs rampaged through Jewish shops all over Germany? So do the BLM and Antifa, only the Nazis didn't steal; they only destroyed,” the ad insert said.

“It’s not right wing. I don’t have a problem with right-wing stuff. It’s QAnon stuff. This is conspiracy theory. This goes beyond. This is new. This is a new phenomenon in Spanish speaking radio. We Cubans are not normal,” Tejera laughed, “but this is new. This is crazy. This is f---ing crazy.”

Second, the assumption that people will vote as a bloc according to their ethnic or racial identity is simplistic.

despite Trump’s xenophobia and racism, a larger share of Latinos and black men voted for him this year than they did in 2016.

Democrats also lost Texas again. During the campaign, the Democrats had targeted their appeal to Latinos by emphasizing Trump’s mistreatment of immigrants entering illegally from Mexico and Central America. But Mexican-Americans along the border supported Donald Trump because their jobs and wages are being undercut by the newer immigrants.

Republicans of course have been the major promoters of policies that have beneftted investors at the expense of workers. But, shamelessly and cleverly, they have diverted white working class anger toward minorities, protecting the country’s elites.

The Republicans’ trap for the Democrats White skin is still privileged in the United States of America and the Republican Party has increasingly pandered to racism. Democrats, for both moral and political reasons, must strongly support racial justice.

But in an overwhelmingly white society, they cannot attract the necessary sustained political support with a message focused on generalized white guilt.

Thus, for example, a majority of whites supported the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality towards Blacks. But the support dropped sharply when demands rose for whites to pay reparations for past oppression of Blacks.

After all, several decades of stagnant wages, precarious employment and the erosion of upward mobility have left most whites in the United States today who must work for a living no longer feeling very “privileged.

National polls showed that Latino-American voters thought jobs and health care, not immigration, were the most important issues for them.

Economic class trumps racial affiliation Most Latinos and black Americans are working class — like the majority of whites. And the data shows the economic problems of minorities are now more likely a function of their class than their race or ethnicity.

Thus, the central issue of income and wealth inequality is not the privilege of “whites” any longer. Rather, it is the privilege of “rich whites.

As economist Adolph Reed, an African American, puts it: If you say to those white people in the bottom 50% (i.e., people who have basically no wealth at all) that the basic inequality in the United States is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the black people in the bottom 50% (i.e., people who have even less than no wealth at all), they also know you are wrong. It’s not all the white people who have the money; it’s the top 10% of (mainly) whites.

An engine of inequality Thomas Piketty and others have shown that modern capitalism has become an engine for the expansion of inequality between capital and labor. Thus, in the absence of substantial reform, incomes and opportunities for most working Americans — whatever the color of their skin — will continue to shrink.

Trump succeeded in part because large numbers of white working people felt abandoned by Democrats. Over the last few decades, the Democratic Party’s establishment forged an alliance with Wall Street financiers who are liberal on social issues — such as racial discrimination, immigration and abortion — but very conservative on economics.

One bizarre result was that throughout the campaign, voters saw the plutocrat Trump as better at creating jobs and prosperity than Biden.

Have Democrats really learned the lesson? Biden’s less elitist style helped him with enough white workers to win three key Midwestern states that Hillary Clinton had lost. Still, had Donald Trump shown a minimum of competence in responding to the COVID 19 crisis, he could well have been re-elected.

Republicans forcing the Democrats’ hands Because Republicans will do everything they can to make the Biden presidency a failure, the Democrats’ disparate factions have to unite behind him in a “popular front” against the authoritarian right. This may be hard for many on the Party’s left, but they have no choice. If Biden fails, they fail.

Conclusion The election gave us some clues to where U.S. democracy might be headed, but the question remains unanswered: Can Biden and the Democrats restore enough security and prosperity to the American working class to finally eradicate the neofascist political pandemic?

What matters isn’t how much money you have, they argue, but how much stuff you have, and the income gap isn’t matched by a comparable consumption gap.

From reading Hassett and Mathur’s op-ed piece, you would never know that there’s a disagreement among serious academics on the basic question of whether consumption patterns match income patterns or not.

Not all consumption is created equal. Which items are cheaper? Which are more expensive? Hassett and Mathur don’t say. The answer is that clothing and food and electronics are cheaper (Hassett and Mathur marvel that even low-income people often own microwave ovens and cell phones) while housing, transportation (read: automobiles), higher education, and health care are more expensive.

Health care is especially expensive when people have no health insurance, or lousy health insurance. In 2010, for instance, Latinos saw their health care expenditures rise by 17 percent (i.e, by $274), while non-Latinos (who tend to be wealthier) saw their health care expenditures rise by a mere one percent (i.e., by $4). On a per-dollar basis, Latinos “consumed” more health care than non-Latinos. But obviously that’s a meaningless statistic. The non-Latinos had cheaper access to health care, which is what matters.

To buy stuff you need money, right? Hassett and Mathur pretend this question doesn’t exist, but the answer is obvious. If the middle class really is keeping up with the affluent Joneses, it’s through borrowing. And in fact, a growing body of work (including this recent Century Foundation paper) suggests that income inequality has been driving America’s debt binge.

“However, it is likely that prejudice, both interpersonal and systemic, plays a role. We know that when teachers, parents, communities, and the culture at large hold negative stereotypes (including low academic expectations) of minority-group members

arguing that failure to address it will threaten the nation’s future position as a global economic leader in an ever-increasing technology-based society, because one in four kindergartners in the U.S. is Latino.

The defection of Hispanic voters, together with an approximately 3 point drop in Black support for Joe Biden compared with Hillary Clinton, threatens a pillar of Democratic competitive strength, especially among Black men: sustained high margins of victory among minority voters whose share of the population is enlarging steadily.

This social and cultural mismatch, according to some observers, is driving a number of minority voters into the opposition party.

Ulibarri emailed me to say that he believes that “Hispanics see what white America has done to Black America, and the backlash leads to more G.O.P. votes.”

In the past, “they may have been conservative and Latino, but you were Latino first and the way you were treated as a group and discriminated against trumped some ideology. Now, less so.”

e first, roughly a quarter of the Hispanic population, is made up of those who self-identify as people of color, according to the study, “as a group that, like African Americans, remains distinct over generations.”

The third Hispanic constituency, nearly three in ten, is made up of “bootstrappers” who “perceive Hispanics, not primarily as people of color or as white ethnics, but as a group that ‘over generations can get ahead through hard work.’ ” These voters tend to be “slightly more conservative regarding race, class, and government, and are the most likely to be Republican.”

What matters most, Haney-López continued, “is susceptibility to Republican ‘dog whistle’ racial frames that trumpet the threat from illegal aliens, rapists, rioters and terrorists.”

“What may be changing is how certain ethnic and nationality groups within Hispanics perceive themselves with regards to their racial and ideological identities,” she wrote by email:

In brief, Shor makes the case that well-educated largely white liberals on the left wing of the party have pushed an agenda — from “socialism” to “defund the police” — far outside the mainstream, driving conservative and centrist minority voters into the arms of the opposition.

A Brookings analysis conducted by William Frey, a senior fellow there, showed that Biden won a smaller percentage of minority voters in the key states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 when she lost all three.

With the Senate runoffs approaching on Tuesday, Asian-American political operatives from across the country have joined local groups in Georgia to try to ensure that the tens of thousands of Asian-Americans who voted for the first time in the general election will vote again this week.

Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on the virus, among other things, made progressive organizers and Democratic candidates optimistic that Asian-American voters would flock to them. In some cases, it did motivate people.

Over the last two decades, as their numbers grew, Asian-Americans as a whole moved left politically and slowly amassed enough power to help decide some tightly contested House races in districts where they had clustered

Now, as Mr. Biden forms his administration, Asian-American congressional leaders and many of their colleagues are already chafing at what could be a cabinet without a single Asian-American secretary for the first time in decades.

At the presidential level, Asian-Americans cast a record number of ballots in battleground states where Joseph R. Biden Jr. notched narrow victories. But a New York Times analysis showed that in immigrant neighborhoods across the country, Asian-American and Latino voters shifted to the right

For the first time, three Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders sought a major party’s nomination for president. One, Ms. Harris, is set to be vice president; another, the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, has been privately telling New York City leaders that he intends to run for mayor this year.

When analysts get a complete picture of the 2020 electorate, he said, the data will probably show that the total number of ballots cast by Asian-Americans nearly doubled.

Despite the modest increase in support for Mr. Trump, roughly two-thirds of Asian-American voters backed Mr. Biden — a fact often cited by the Asian-American officials who have urged the president-elect to pick a cabinet secretary from their community.

Roughly 30 percent of Asian-American voters do not identify as either Democrats or Republicans, and many are settling in the suburban swing districts that are the focus of both parties.It is a demographic and political reality that has been playing out in parts of Southern California for years. Randall Avila, the executive director of the Republican Party of Orange County, said he had found that many Asian-American voters — and potential candidates he had worked to recruit — approached Republican ideas with an open mind.

The real victory, experts on the Latino and Asian-American vote agreed, would be for voters of color to be pursued with the same vigor as white voters, who are routinely grouped into subcategories based on where they live, or their income or education level.“Democrats need to stop obsessing about white rural voters and white suburban moms,” said Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland.

One place they may demonstrate their growing political power is in Georgia this week. Neil Makhija leads an Indian-American political organization that is running a $2.5 million campaign to turn out A.A.P.I. voters in the state’s Senate runoffs. He sees the significant increase in Asian-American voter participation in November as a success — and a lesson.“What we’re going to try to do is take some of what we’ve learned,” he said, “and really go all in.”