My late parents were on the phone with some Venezuelan friends in the early days of Hugo Chávez. After a long chat, my mother said, “We already saw that movie,” and my father added, “And it ends poorly.” They were recounting their memories of Fidel Castro saying he was not a communist and promising elections. My parents were right about Chávez and were always very skeptical of populism, especially the kind that makes everything sound so easy.
Well, let’s talk about Hispanics and the Democrat party. It sounds to me as if many Hispanics are telling Democrats that they already saw that movie, too. Let’s take a look:
According to polling from NBC News, Telemundo and the Wall Street Journal, 49% of self-described conservative Latinos preferred Democrats to control Congress, 9 points more than Republicans. In September 2022, 73% of conservative Latinos support Republicans in Congress as opposed to 17% who prefer Democrats, a 56-point GOP advantage.
“They don’t like the socialists,” Hank Sheinkopf, veteran Democratic political consultant and president of Sheinkopf Communications, told Fox News Digital about the Latino community. “They don’t like the abortion argument being thrust at them on a constant basis. They don’t like the crime. They don’t like the chaos. And they’re responding.”
Sheinkopf added that Democrats “always” do worse than they think they are going to do when “chaos” is occurring in the United States and warned that Democrats are “failing to understand” that abortion is not the “end-all be-all.”
They don’t like socialists? No kidding. They have seen what socialism does to countries, whether it’s Cuba or Venezuela or even Argentina, where a heavy dose of statist policies has killed a country.