There are over 12.2 million Latinos that are not registered to vote. That means 12.2 million Latino voices have been put on mute because someone else has decided their future for them.
Lame people have a million excuses for not registering to vote, but they’re all bullsh*t now.
When creating the app, mitú founder Beatriz Acevedo made sure registering would be made fast and easy. “We could not have made registering to vote easier! In less time than you heat up a tamal, unwrap it and eat it, you can download the app and register to vote!” Yassss, queen! ??
Jessica Cisneros conceded the race for Texas’s 28th Congressional District to incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar. The young progressive was once an intern for Rep. Cuellar in Washington and wanted to unseat him to bring progressive ideas to Congress.
Update: Progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros conceded her congressional race to her primary opponent Rep. Henry Cuellar.
Despite the defeat, Cisneros is claiming a victorious because of the power the grassroots campaign had in southern Texas. In her concession speech, Cisneros praised her supporters and staff for making a difference in Texas politics through her campaign.
“I think one thing is clear, that our movement was victorious tonight,” Cisneros told supporters. “That’s because this fight has always been about an opportunity to prove how one of us, a brown girl from our community, with her whole community behind her, could take on an entire machine.”
Rep. Cuellar secured 51.8 percent of the vote which translates to 38,720 votes. Cisneros received 35,964 votes.
Jessica Cisneros is running for Congress to unseat Rep. Henry Cuellar.
Credit: jcisnerostx_ / Instagram
The 26-year-old immigration and human rights attorney is fighting to unseat a politician she once worked for. Cisneros worked for Rep. Cuellar in Washington as an intern answering calls and dealing with constituents’ requests. Now, the young Latina from Laredo, Texas is going to be on the ballot Tuesday trying to unseat him.
“It took me having to go to Washington to figure out how conservative he was,” Cisneros told BuzzFeed News. “I think about that experience a lot, because I get it when we go up to people’s doors and all of a sudden we, you know, hit them with the facts and what the congressman’s been up to, [and] many, many people don’t know.”
Cisneros is one of the many new faces recruited and promoted by Justice Democrats.
Justice Democrats is an organization that is working to elect more people to Congress to fight for working-class issues. According to the website, Justice Democrats is committed to recruiting, training, and election candidate who will fight for issues like “skyrocketing inequality, catastrophic climate change, deepening structural racism as the country becomes more diverse, and the corporate takeover of our democracy.”
Justice Democrats is the same organization the helped get Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elected in 2018.
Credit: justicedemocrats / Instagram
Cisneros represents the generational change in ideology that can be seen across the political spectrum in the Latino community. Cisneros is in favor of Medicare For All and the Green New Deal, two things that are popular with younger voters.
Rep. Henry Cuellar’s campaign is being dismissive of Cisneros as a viable candidate to unseat the incumbent.
Credit: repcuellar / Instagram
According to the Buzzfeed News article, Rep. Cuellar’s team canceled a scheduled phone interview after insisting that they will not answer any questions that were in response to Cisneros.
“We’re not allowing a 26-year-old young lady who’s never done anything question the character of a dedicated public servant,” Colin Strother, a spokesperson for the campaign, told BuzzFeed News.
Rep. Cuellar is considered “Trump’s favorite Democrat” because of his voting record during Trump’s first two years in office.
Credit: repcuellar / Instagram
According to FiveThirtyEight, Rep. Cuellar voted with President Trump 75 percent of the time. FiveThirtyEight is known for their polling science and, according to them, Rep. Cuellar should only be voting with President Trump 10 percent of the time based on the needs and demands of his constituents. Despite this information, Rep. Cuellar tried to argue that it isn’t that simple.
“If you look at my record here since I started here back in 2005, I’ve always been a centrist. If you want to use voting with the Democratic Party as a measure, you and I are going to be off completely because I was not sent to Washington to vote with the Democratic Party. I am a Democrat, but I don’t see my job as to vote with the Democratic Party. And I think any Democrat or Republican that votes their party, then I think they’re doing a disservice to their constituents,” Rep. Cuellar told FiveThirtyEight in a 2017 interview. “My district is about +7 Democratic, but it’s still a diverse district in many ways. I do better than most Democrats here even though I’m a moderate conservative Blue Dog and I still do very well here. My hometown of Laredo, the border area, I’ll get 90, 95, 98 percent of the vote, so I must be doing something right here.”
The real test will happen during Super Tuesday to see if Texas’s 28th Congressional District will continue with Rep. Cuellar or usher in a new progressive voice in Cisneros.
Credit: jcisnerostx_ / Instagram
Make sure you vote to make your voice heard this election.
The Democratic primary is heating up with the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary now behind us. During the campaign, some candidates have shown their support for the Latino community and it shows in the number of donations the candidates are receiving. The winner of the Latino donations, so far, is Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Latinos have donated more than $23 million to Democratic presidential candidates in 2019.
The study, done by Plus Three, analyzed Act Blue donation data to determine the Latino donations in the 2020 Democratic primary. The data showed that Bernie Sanders outraised the rest of the candidates in the field with Latino supporters every month in 2019. There were four months where Sanders raised more than $1 million from Latino supporters.
Sen. Sanders earned a majority of the Latino donations.
Of the $23.7 million donated by Latinos to the Democratic presidential candidates, $8.3 million went to the Bernie Sanders campaign. The contributions came from 1,713,678, according to Plus Three.
However, the study also shows that the Democratic Party is lost significant Latino support after two candidates dropped out.
One of the key factors in the drop in Latino support is a response to Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro leaving the race. The two candidates received $6.3 million from 315,000 Latino supporters, according to the study. O’Rourke raised $2.6 million dollars from 113,281 contributors while Castro raised $1.8 million dollars from 94,137 contributors.
The loss of Latino supporters signals a lack of Latino voters moving to other candidates as the field narrows. Since the two candidates left the field, Latino donations and contributions dropped 24 percent.
Latinos have become an important and elusive voting bloc.
Credit: Element5 Digital / Unsplash
The Latino voting power is fast-growing. Thirty-two million Latinos will be available to vote in the 2020 general election in November. This will be the first time in history that the Latino voting power will exceed the Black voting power. The trend in voting power is making the Latino community more and more important in elections.
However, Latinos are diverse and complicated as a voting bloc. The Latino community includes all races and religions. Ideology among the Latino community changes based on the voter and their experiences. In California, for example, 39 percent of Latinos identify as liberal, 30 percent consider themselves to moderate, and 31 percent of Latino voters identify as conservative.
Voting habits are also different between generations. In Florida, more and more younger Cubans and Cuban-Americans are registering with the Democrat Party signaling a departure from their conservative parents and grandparents. A study by Florida International University, shows a trend of the Cuban and Cuban-American population in southern Florida trending more liberal.
The FIU study, conducted after the 2018 midterms, Cubans who came to the U.S. before 1980 are 72 percent Republican, 11 percent Democratic, and 17 percent no party affiliation. Meanwhile, Cubans 18 to 39 are 35 percent Republican, 23 percent Democratic, and 40 percent no party affiliation.
Sanders has a commanding lead with Latino voters, and that is the vote that everyone is after.
