Democrats attack Trump as they woo Hispanic voters

Politico

By Gabriel Debenedetti

July 13, 2015

Democrats attack Trump as they woo Hispanic voters

Not one Republican presidential hopeful bothered — or dared — to show up at this annual gathering of influential Latino activists.

But one of them was very much in the room: a certain real estate mogul who’s been spending his summer bashing Mexican immigrants.

“It was appalling to hear Donald Trump describe immigrants as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists. He’s talking about people you and I know, isn’t he?,” asked Hillary Clinton, one of three Democratic presidential contenders speaking here. “I have just one word for Mr. Trump: Basta. Enough.”

“No one, not Donald Trump, not anyone else, will be successful in dividing us based on race or our country of origin,” said Bernie Sanders.

“If Donald Trump wants to run on a platform of demonizing immigrants, then he should go back to the 1840s and run for the nomination of the Know Nothing Party,” said Martin O’Malley.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump walks on stage to speak before a crowd of 3,500 Saturday, July 11, 2015, in Phoenix.

But winning over the crowd at the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza, a reliably left-leaning Latino advocacy group, required more than beating up on the man emerging as Hispanic voters’ No. 1 villain. The speeches also highlighted the varying challenges facing the trio among Democratic Latino voters as the former secretary of state fends off a surge from the Vermont senator, and the former Maryland governor looks to gain ground in the primary.

For Clinton, the dominant front-runner, the question is how to excite and mobilize minority voting blocs once Election Day rolls around in November 2016. Her answer on Monday was to adapt her newly unveiled economic pitch to the Latino audience, decrying the wage gap between Hispanic women and white men while noting that comprehensive immigration reform would boost U.S. GDP by roughly $700 billion in the next decade.

For O’Malley, who has made immigration reform a centerpiece of his campaign and who plans to unveil a detailed policy platform on the topic on Tuesday, the question is how to introduce himself to a sympathetic group that likes what it hears from him, but is still learning about his record. His solution in Kansas City was to point repeatedly to his Maryland experience — from defending an in-state version of the DREAM Act to welcoming undocumented children stuck at the southern border into the country last summer.

And for Sanders, the insurgent candidate who represents a notably white constituency in Vermont and who only added the conference to his schedule last week, it is, quite simply, how to broaden his appeal. The socialist senator’s response on Monday was to graft a section about immigration reform onto his standard campaign speech, riling up a morning crowd by decrying slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and what he called the “plague” of racism before pledging to extend protections to DREAMers’ parents — and then returning to his usual lines about inequality and the “one percent.”

Clinton stuck to the message she set earlier in the day at Manhattan’s New School, where she rolled out her economic message — with a Latin twist.

“How can it be that on average Latinas make just 56 cents on the dollar compared to white men?,” she asked, using a new version of the statistic she often promotes to describe the wage gap.

She also harkened back to her initial visit to Nevada, when she delighted immigration activists by pledging to go beyond President Obama on a slate of immigration policies, such as pushing to reunify families.

And she took shots at former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, castigating him as unfamiliar with groups heavily represented by Hispanics, like dishwashers in Las Vegas or “farmworkers breaking their backs in southern California.” (She left out Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants, whom she criticized in New York earlier in the day.)

But where Clinton’s appeal to Latino voters has been political and economic, Sanders’ has a tacked-on quality, even as he made the case that immigration reform is a personal issue to him because of immigrants in his own family. “I know something about immigration because my dad came to this country from Poland without a nickel in his pocket,” he said.

Sanders has filled large auditoriums in liberal cities from Madison, Wisconsin, to Portland, Maine. But few of his largest events have been in states with large Latino populations, except for one in Colorado, and he has yet to deliver a Hispanic policy-focused speech outside of a pair of conferences at which Clinton has also appeared.

He’s also faced criticism for speaking infrequently about immigration, and on Monday he opened his remarks by launching into an extended defense of DREAMers and undocumented workers who “play an extraordinarily important role in our economy.”

“We should recognize the young men and women who compromise the DREAMers for what they are: American kids who deserve the right to legally be in the country they know as home,” he added.

Colorado Representative and Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo participates in the 'All-American Presidential Forums on PBS' at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, 27 September 2007. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Arizona Senator John McCain, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson declined to attend the event, moderated by PBS television host Tavis Smiley, citing scheduling conflicts.    

Sanders’ biggest applause came when he returned to his standard stump speech and spoke of criminal justice reform and economic inequality — a message he did not specifically tailor for a Hispanic audience, unlike Clinton.

As for O’Malley, he tried out a theme he has been building ahead of Tuesday’s immigration policy rollout: Latino issues are moral issues.

O’Malley described passing his own DREAM Act in Maryland and defending it through a Republican-led referendum, and touted his outspokenness during the border crisis of summer 2014, when he clashed with the White House over whether to send back undocumented children fleeing Central American violence and poverty.

“Some governors around the country spoke of these children as if they were some kind of invading swarm of jackrabbits,” he said, peppering his speech with Spanish phrases.

O’Malley, who trails far behind both Clinton and Sanders in the polls, has courted smaller Latino sub-groups his rivals have largely overlooked. As he reminded the crowd, he was the first presidential candidate to release any comment on the Puerto Rican debt crisis, and remains the only one to speak repeatedly about the humanitarian crisis in the Dominican Republic.

The gathering in Kansas City was the first time so many of the Democratic candidates have been in the same place at the same time since they all declared their candidacies, but it marked only the first such opportunity this week: Clinton is due Tuesday on Capitol Hill — where she will see Sanders — and all three will be in Iowa on Friday for the state Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame ceremony (along with fellow candidates Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee). And both Sanders and O’Malley are due to attend the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix over the weekend.

Still, the prospect of running into each other on the trail is remains a novelty to some of the candidates.

Speaking with reporters after his speech, O’Malley was asked whether he had run into Clinton backstage.

“No,” he said with a smile. “But tell her I say hi.”

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