Wall Street Journal
By Peter Nicholas
July 14, 2015
Three
of the Democratic 2016 presidential rivals who are still seeking to
define their candidacies found a unifying theme on Monday: bashing
Donald Trump.
It
was a moment that anxious GOP strategists have been predicting for
weeks—Democrats urging an audience of Hispanic voters and activists to
hold the entire Republican
Party accountable for Trump’s depiction of Mexican immigrants as
“rapists” and criminals.
Hillary
Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, had initially delivered a
measured response, telling CNN in an interview last week that she was
“very disappointed” in what
Mr. Trump said. At the National Council of La Raza’s gathering, she
took a sharper tone in her speech to about 1,500 who came to a luncheon
hosted by the Hispanic civil rights group.
“It
was appalling to hear Donald Trump describe immigrants as drug dealers,
rapists and criminals,” Mrs. Clinton said. “He’s talking about people
you and I know, isn’t
he?” She added: “So I have just one word for Mr. Trump.” Using the
Spanish word for “enough,” she said, “Basta!”
Conference
attendees, many of whom were initially disappointed in Mrs. Clinton’s
measured response, relished her new message and predicted Mr. Trump’s
remarks will galvanize
the community to the detriment of the Republican nominee.
As
a parallel, they cited 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s
comment that “self-deportation” was the remedy for the millions of
people living in the U.S. illegally.
Mr. Romney captured just 27% of the Hispanic vote compared with 71% for
Mr. Obama. That was a worse showing than Republican Sen. John McCain,
who won 31% of the Hispanic vote in his 2008 presidential race against
Mr. Obama.
“He’ll
be mobilizing voters—just not the voters who are going to support him
or vote for him,” Clarissa Martinez De Castro, deputy vice president of
NCLR, said of Mr.
Trump.
After
hearing Mrs. Clinton’s address, Cipriano Garza, 68 years old, of Miami,
said in an interview he has voted for both Republican and Democratic
candidates in the past.
He will have little trouble making up his mind this time around about
what party he will support. He described Mr. Trump’s comments as
“horrible” and predicted the Republican Party will face reprisals from
Latino voters.
“He’s made it easier for a Democrat to win,” Mr. Garza said.
After
losing the election in 2012, Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus
organized a postmortem analysis that concluded, in part, that the GOP
needed to adopt a more
welcoming approach toward Hispanics. “If Hispanics think that we do not
want them here, they will close their ears to our policies,” the report
said.
In
more than a dozen interviews, Hispanic participants at the conference
suggested that Mr. Trump’s comments are a setback toward that goal.
Juan
Rivera, a housing counselor in Los Angeles, said he found Mr. Trump’s
comments “scary.” Should Mr. Trump win the White House, he said he would
consider leaving the
U.S.
“It brings up memories of the past—the Holocaust,” said Mr. Rivera, 63. “You don’t win Latino votes that way.”
Linda
Castillo, a Portland, Ore. resident who runs an economic development
program, said Mr. Trump’s comments amount to “a galvanizing call to
action for a lot of Latinos.
For such a high-level person to say something so horrible has led us to
see this as what we have to deal with.”
Speaking
earlier in the day, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running second
to Mrs. Clinton, told the audience that the country has made progress in
improving race
relations. “No one—not Donald Trump nor anyone else—will be successful
in dividing us based on race or our country of origin,” Mr. Sanders
said.
Martin
O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who is struggling to gain
traction, said: “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.”
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