Less than two weeks until Election Day, KCBS Radio is continuing its special edition of State of California, taking a deep dive into the issues at hand for the midterms.
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – With midterms approaching, some polls show that the Latino vote is undergoing a transformation, shifting away from Democrat and towards Republican. Will this have a significant impact on California?
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For an extended conversation surrounding the role of California's Latino voters, KCBS Political reporter Doug Sovern assembled a special roundtable of guests at the Top of the Mark on "State of California."
"There have been shifts nationally. There have been a number of polls that have shown us this." political sociologist Mindy Romero, Director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the USC Price School of Public Policy, told KCBS Radio. "How big of a shift varies. Still, it's important to note that Latinos are more likely going to vote Democrat — there's still a margin between their support that's significant. As always with politics, we take one thing, we run with it and the story becomes 'Latinos are shifting, they're Republican now,' and that's not the case."
In California, the shift is less significant than other states. “We’re not really seeing it,” Romero said, attributing the difference to the state’s history and trigger factors that have led Latinos to stay solidly Democrat.
Mike Madrid, veteran California Republican campaign consultant and one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project, explained that he believes it's less of a current shift and more of a "rejection of both political parties."
"If there are two politicians in the modern era that have dramatically overperformed expectations amongst Latinos, it's Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump," Madrid said. "When you look at it that way, you start to understand that there’s this insurgent economic populism that's endemic in Hispanics everywhere outside of California. It's really a rejection of both parties, just one has been far worse for 30 years for Hispanics."
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