Former President Barack Obama rarely misses an opportunity to assail citizens of genuine Christian belief, those “bitter” simpletons who “cling” to faith and the Bible. This past week he added a new wrinkle to his standard bromide: demeaning Hispanics at the same time.
The former President remarked: “a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, undocumented workers in cages. They think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion.”
Credit for packing such a diabolical level of condescension and falsehoods into just two sentences. That’s no easy feat.
The most important problem, however, lies in Obama’s dismissal of sincere Christian faith.
PESKY CHRISTIANS.
Obama effectively posits that we Hispanics could actually vote “correctly” for the Democrats if we could only rid our decision-making of this pesky Christian conscience that prioritizes a culture of life. He gets one thing right here. Hispanics are materially more pro-life than other Americans, and proudly so. But we are hardly tunnel-vision, single-issue voters, either.
While a 2018 Pew poll found that 61 percent of whites and 60 percent of blacks believed abortion should be legal in most/all circumstances, only 44 percent of Hispanics concurred. Additionally, statistical evidence of President Trump’s 2020 surge among Hispanics points directly to the economy as the driving force attracting Latinos to the America First agenda.
PESKY CAPITALISTS.
According to CBS News exit polling, of Hispanics who named the economy as their top issue, a stunning 87 percent voted for Trump. No wonder Hispanics rally to the president on bread-and-butter issues of economic opportunity. After all, in all the history of Labor Department statistics on jobless rates, there have been 28 total months with a Latino jobless rate below 5 percent. Incredibly, 27 of those 28 instances occurred under the leadership of President Trump, with one lone exception from 2006 under President George W. Bush during the Housing boom.
In fact, gains for all categories of working-class people – including many minorities – have been stellar during the Trump era, even when you factor in the intense difficulties foist upon us by the China Virus.
Wage gains for nonsupervisory, production workers during this first Trump term has been 14 percent, just recently reclaiming all pandemic losses to hit a new all-time high. In comparison, during the second term of Obama/Biden, those same wages rose only 9 percent over those four years.
Putting the differential in dollar terms, the average non-managerial hourly laborer now earns $24.82/hour, or $992 per 40 hour week. That take-home pay represents over $100 more every single week compared to the end of Obama/Biden’s White House tenure, and almost $200 more every week vs. the end of their first term, with negligible inflation to diminish the income gains.
Regarding incomes, before the China Virus ravaged the global economy, Donald Trump produced the single best year for workers in all of American history, with record-setting wage gains of 6.8 percent overall. Blue-collar workers and minorities did even better, outpacing the stunning overall rate of increase.
With 2019 Hispanic wage growth at 7.1 percent, an incredible 1 million Hispanic children were lifted out of poverty in the first three years of Trump’s economic boom.
If past years’ achievements are not sufficient, the present economic ascent shows similar promise as American workers and businesses learn to live with the virus and mitigate risks.
For example, sales of lightweight trucks, mostly pickups, just hit an all-time high in September of 12.55 million trucks, annualized. The speed of the recovery in pickup truck sales validates the “Super V” shape of the present recovery from the Spring lockdown lows, and particularly projects well for Hispanic workers, who are over-represented in the trades that often use such trucks.
PESKY VOTERS.
Such significant, tangible rewards attracted Hispanics in giant numbers to President Trump, shocking disconnected ruling class elites like Barack Obama and his allies in the corporate media. In key targeted states, the president’s performance among Hispanics sealed crucial victories.
Even according to CNN, Trump split the Hispanic vote in Florida nearly 50-50, ensuring his comfortable win by over 370,000 votes in the Sunshine State.
Similarly, media prognostications of some blue wave putting Texas in play proved fanciful, with Trump gaining 10 percent over his 2016 share to earn the support of 40 percent of Texas Hispanics, per Reuters.
Some of the most remarkable Hispanic gains for Trump emanate from Texas, particularly in the highly-Latino Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Trump nearly won Starr County, Texas, which is America’s most Hispanic county at 96 percent, improving 55 percent on margin there vs. 2016. In next door Zapata County, which is 85 percent Hispanic, Trump did win, gaining 38 percent in margin over his 2016 performance.
This broad surge in Hispanic support for the president constitutes a huge reason so many Americans understandably disbelieve the reported results on the election.
In addition to the statistical anomalies that pile up discrediting the supposed Biden win in the swing states, it seems far-fetched to postulate that Donald Trump gained 10 million votes in total, showed massive increases among Hispanic support, and yet somehow lost to this doddering, lazy candidate Biden?
I remain confident that President Trump will be duly confirmed as the victor from November 3rd, and sworn in on January 20th for a second term. But regardless of that critical outcome, the incredible progress among Hispanics in 2020 presents a massive opportunity for the populist nationalist groundswell in our land, as the America First cause becomes a truly trans-racial, multi-ethnic workers’ movement that will dominate the 2020s.
