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 Among the registration forms was a pamphlet titled "GOP Clown Car
2016." It featured pictures of each of the Republican presidential
candidates.
A word balloon above the image of Donald Trump, the frontrunner for
the Republican nomination, quoted his controversial remarks about
illegal immigrants from Mexico: "They're bringing drugs, they're
bringing crime," it read. "They're rapists."
For Democrats and Republicans, convincing unregistered Latino voters
- as many as 12 million, according to some advocacy groups - to vote
in the November 2016 election is the first step to securing the
support of a critical bloc of voters. Outside of swearing-in
ceremonies, schools and even grocery stores, both parties are
scrambling to register Latino voters.
In heavily Latino areas, Democratic party and progressive activists
are actively promoting the inflammatory immigration rhetoric of
Trump and some other Republican presidential candidates as part of
their voter registration campaigns.
 It shows up in video and radio advertisements, runs across voter
education websites, and even appeared at last month's Latin Grammy
awards, where Mexican rockers Maná and long-time norteño band Los
Tigres del Norte concluded a performance by holding up a sign in
Spanish that read "Latinos united don't vote for racists."
“Our best spokespeople are the Republican candidates,” said Randy
Borntrager, the political director for People for the American Way,
a liberal activist group which released radio ads earlier this year
in Spanish and English using Trump as a prod to get Hispanics to
vote in local Virginia elections.
In one commercial, a mother urges her daughter to vote “para
callarle la bocota a Trump” ("to shut Trump’s big mouth").
Trump's campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but Fred
Doucette, the co-chairman of Trump's campaign in New Hampshire, said
most Latinos he had met were not offended by Trump's comments. "The
ones that are upset are the ones that are illegal quite frankly," he
said.
To be sure, Latinos, like other racial and ethnic groups, are hardly
monolithic. Some Latino voters support Trump or other Republican
candidates, such as senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both
Cuban-American, and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida who
speaks fluent Spanish.
Alfonso Aguilar, director of Latino partnership at the conservative
American Principles Project acknowledges that “Donald Trump is a
political gift to the Democratic political machine,” which presents
the Republican party as the party of Trump.
And that's a problem because the party needs Latino voters. The Pew
Hispanic Center said Latinos made up 10 percent of the electorate in
the 2012 election and overwhelmingly picked President Barack Obama
(71 percent) over his Republican opponent Mitt Romney (27 percent).
 A VOTE AGAINST TRUMP
Outside the Los Angeles Convention Center, Pineda, a 36-year-old
immigrant from Honduras, was among those who made no secret of her
distaste for Trump, who launched his campaign by promising to build
"a great, great wall on our southern border" to keep out illegal
immigrants.
"Those things that Donald Trump said, that just upsets people," she
said.
Pineda is one of the tens of thousands of Latinos who have
registered in 2015 to vote. These include people who had never
registered before - newly naturalized citizens and teenagers just
turning 18.
"When Donald Trump decided to get into the campaign by insulting all
the Latinos, we saw an increase in voter registrations,” said Ben
Monterroso, the executive director of Mi Familia Vota, a nonpartisan
group dedicated to building the political power of Latinos in the
United States.
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The group said it registered about 32,000 new Latino voters in 2015
- about half of what they would expect in a non-election year. They
plan to register as many as 95,000 next year in Arizona, California,
Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Texas, all states with significant
populations of Latinos.
And the League of United Latin American Citizens hopes to register
25,000 voters next year. In 2012, they registered 14,500 in the
months before the election, when voter interest peaked, said Sindy
M. Benavides, the director of civic engagement and community
mobilization at LULAC. The group is also pushing to get more
volunteers ready to register voters.
Sustaining voter interest could be a challenge, particularly if
Trump fails to win the nomination. That's why it’s important to
focus on the underlying issues rather than specific candidates, said
Andres Ramirez, a Nevada-based political consultant.
“We're not pushing back against an individual because we don't want
the movement tied to an individual,” said Ramirez. “Simply coming
out here and shouting that Trump’s a racist isn’t going to change
outcomes."
Immigration, for example, remains an important issue for Latino
communities, along with jobs and economic policy.
Nevertheless, Trump remains the poster boy for many Latino voter
registration efforts.
The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, for example, put
Trump on their website's home page: “Respond to Trump: Register a
Mexican American to vote today.”
The New American Democracy Campaign, which works to help immigrants
naturalize and register to vote, created a 30-second ad that begins
with black-and-white images of smiling people as Trump’s voice talks
about how “they” are bringing drugs and crime. But then the images
change and the people acquire labels, such as Jose Hernandez, a NASA
astronaut. It closes with a plea: “Our future is at stake ... Become
a citizen today.”
The anti-immigrant rhetoric has also spurred people to tap their own
networks in the Latino community to boost voter registration.
Jose Macias, 26, an organizer with the union-backed Fight for $15
movement, which argues for a higher minimum wage, in Las Vegas,
estimates he’s registered about 90 new Latino voters this year, from
work sites to high schools, and has spoken to hundreds of people at
citizenship clinics about voting.
"When they attack Latinos, when they attack our families, that’s
when we know that we have to fight back,” said Macias. “If you just
stay home and watch telenovelas, nothing’s ever going to happen.”
(Reporting by Luciana Lopez, editing by Paul Thomasch and Ross
Colvin)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
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