Donald Trump spared humiliation of being dumped on by Latino vote

In the end, Donald Trump was very much a typical Republican running for U.S. president, with regards to gaining not-that-much support from the nation’s growing Latino population.
 

Likely to be smashed en masse for 4 years

The outrage felt at Trump who used Latinos as a political punching bag to gain the voter support of white people with ethnic hang-ups wound up not biting him in the culo like was originally thought.

THERE WAS THAT study by Latino Decisions, a Miami-based group that analyzes issues of Latino political empowerment, that estimated Trump could wind up taking as little as 18 percent of the Latino vote. That would have been a record-low, if it had happened.

Instead, it seems that Trump got 29 percent support from the Latino electorate that bothered to cast ballot.

Which means Hillary Clinton, according to the same studies by Edison Research, took 65 percent of Latinos – meaning two of every three people with ethnic origins to a Latin American country gave their support for her.

That is very typical for a Democratic presidential candidate.

JUST AS IS that 29 percent for a Republican. It’s kind of how few Latinos feel the need to be a part of the Party of Reagan. For whatever reason, those individuals don’t want to be identified with the Latino masses, so they wind up siding with political people who verbally express their contempt – and go out of their way to convince themselves that the GOP isn’t really talking about them specifically.

So I really didn’t think it all that significant early Wednesday when I saw on the television broadcasts of Trump’s victory celebration a couple of people waving about signs reading “Hispanics for Trump.” It was bound to happen.

Trump topped Mitt Romney (barely) for Latino votes

Although I have to say I find it interesting that the candidate who kicked off his whole political process more than a year ago by labelling Mexican-Americans as “rapists” and “drug dealers” is somehow more acceptable than the candidate who, four years ago, came up with that “self-deportation” nonsense.

For it’s true. Trump’s 29 percent level of Latino support is better than the 27 percent that Mitt Romney took when he challenged Barack Obama’s re-election.

Hillary couldn't match her esposo for Latino votes

IT’S ALSO BETTER than the 21 percent that Republican Bob Dole took in 1996 when he ran against Bill Clinton’s re-election. Hillary’s husband got what is generally regarded as the record-high Latino support level of 72 percent.

Hillary had been expected to get as high as 79 percent, but wound up falling short. I can’t help but wonder how a stronger turnout would have changed that percentage – because I suspect many people of Latino ethnic origins just didn’t bother to vote.

Although I’m not about to say that Hillary Clinton would have won if she had maximized every single Latino capable of casting a ballot to actually do so. I doubt it would have mattered in North Carolina or changed much in Wisconsin.

It might have made a difference in Florida. Then again, I wonder if only white people had voted in that state if Florida would have rivaled Indiana for the right to say it was the first state to fall into the Trump column on Election Night.

PEOPLE ARE GOING to be spending coming days, weeks and months crunching the numbers (which have yet to be made official in any state) to try to find out where exactly votes could have been changed to affect the outcome. Although I stick by my premise that if every person who had been insulted by Trump had turned out to vote, he would have lost – regardless of the quirks of the Electoral College.

Take my home city of Chicago, where there was roughly a 75 percent voter turnout on Tuesday and where Trump only got 12.5 percent of the vote.

On paper, Clinton took 85 percent of votes cast in the 12^th Ward, overseen by Alderman George Cardenas and is one of the most-heavily Mexican parts of Chicago. Yet the Chicago Reader pointed out that voter turnout in that ward was only 58 percent. I expect to learn that level of turnout was typical across the country; It’s hard to get outraged on behalf of people who couldn’t even bother themselves to vote.

 

Not same vengeance and anger for Latinos

Which makes me wonder if the great beneficiary of the Trump electoral victory is the piñata-making “industry” – since the majority of Latinos disgusted with his win will have to resort to smashing their Trump-shaped containers of candy and other treats with “great vengeance and furious anger” (remember actor Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction?”) to release their tensions over the many inane actions likely to occur during the next four years!

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