| Kommentar | (Again, sorry for the length, but it seemed significant to me.) __________________ The Fight to Win Latino Voters for the G.O.P.
For 10 years, Libre — an arm of the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity — has been working to foster conservatism in Hispanic communities. Now, the group is going all-in on Georgia’s Senate runoffs. ...
This month, less than two weeks after it became clear that control of the U.S. Senate would be decided by two runoff elections in Georgia, Daniel Garza flew to Atlanta. A slender, charismatic 52-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair, Garza has spent the past 30 years wooing and mobilizing Hispanic conservatives, first for the Republican Party and now for the Libre Initiative, an organization he started with the Charles Koch Institute in 2011. He regularly opines on political happenings for Univision, Telemundo and PBS as president of Libre. ...
“Georgia right now stands at that intersection that it can decide the future of this country,” Garza said. According to the political-research firm Latino Decisions, 160,000 Hispanics cast votes in the presidential election in Georgia. While most of those votes went to the Democratic candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, 28 percent went to President Trump, two percentage points higher than Senator David Perdue’s share in the election. Garza believes that with targeted and sustained outreach, Perdue can significantly improve his performance among Hispanics. ...
Garza’s visit to Atlanta marked Libre’s decision to redirect all its resources to Georgia for the next two months. “David Perdue,” Garza said, “has proven himself to be that type of leader who would rather choose a free society.” (He said nothing about the other Republican senator facing a runoff, Kelly Loeffler, who co-sponsored a very restrictive immigration bill last year and supported Trump’s trade war with China.) Libre staff members from Colorado, Florida, Nevada and North Carolina will knock on doors around Atlanta, Valdosta and Dalton. Its “adopt a state” program will build virtual phone banks, using out-of-state Latino volunteers to call Georgians identified by its voter database. “Half of it is turnout of people that we know who are aligned,” Garza told me, “and half of it is persuasion.” ...
Libre has become adept at two critical skills: figuring out which Latino voters it wants to cast ballots and persuading them to do so. In both cases, it relies on a sophisticated voter database that it has been improving for more than a decade through petitions, surveys, classes and mailers. If most Latino voters regularly went to the polls, it would be harder for Libre to play the margins in a tight race. As it is, Latinos’ low turnout, large numbers and complicated political views make them a perfect electorate to cherry-pick for desired results. ...
Matt A. Barreto, a co-founder of Latino Decisions, argues that Trump’s increase in Latino support was really a function of his exceptionally poor performance among Latinos in 2016. Trump’s anti-Mexican remarks and his scorched-earth tactics against two Cuban-American senators, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, during the Republican presidential primary alienated many Latino conservatives. The so-called surge in Latino votes for Trump in 2020 has simply put him back in line with the average performance of previous Republican presidential candidates. ...
Even so, the result offers clear evidence that Republicans were able to bring Latinos back into the fold during Trump’s time in office — a possibilty that Garza noted to me during our first meeting, shortly after the 2016 election. At the time, this seemed like a counterintuitive prediction, to say the least. But over the years, as I observed Libre’s work in several states, I saw how it was accomplished. Libre has been playing a long game: training activists, building relationships and nurturing a new generation of conservative Latino leaders. ...
Libre’s operations in Georgia are still taking root. But in October, 10 days before the 2020 election, I went to see how Libre’s more established get-out-the-vote efforts proceeded around Orlando, Fla., a region densely populated with Puerto Ricans and South American immigrants. That Saturday, I followed along as Garza knocked on doors with a staff member named Juan M. Martinez. Martinez is originally from Puerto Rico, and like many of the Libre staff members and volunteers I met over the years, he first heard about Libre in his church. ...
This summer and fall, Martinez knocked on doors for eight hours a day, three days a week, sometimes doing as many as 400 houses a day. The Trump campaign was also going door to door in Florida, but Biden’s campaign discouraged knocking on doors because of the coronavirus pandemic. ...
As always, Martinez’s efforts were guided by a tablet loaded with an app powered by i360, a Koch-affiliated data-analytics company, that draws on consumer data and voter information to predict voters’ behavior. ...
A few years ago, during a reorganization of Koch-affiliated groups, Libre merged with Americans for Prosperity ... most of Libre and Americans for Prosperity’s phone-banking during the pandemic was done by people sitting in their own houses, using the i360 website CallingFromHome.com. ...
After the 2018 midterms — when Florida Democrats gained two seats in the U.S. House and six in the State House, and came close to winning a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship — progressives hoped that they might finally break the Republican hold on the state. Libre’s efforts might have stopped that from happening. Six of the seven state legislators it promoted won, and according to Latino Decisions, Trump took 38 percent of Florida’s Latino vote. ...
Libre, which is nonpartisan but usually supports Republicans, might have also affected the result in two Democratic primaries in South Texas this spring when it stepped in to aid Representative Henry Cuellar and State Senator Eddie Lucio fend off primary opponents from the left. “We’re now helping out more Democrats,” Garza says, “to help them against what we see as extremists.” He referred to Cuellar’s challenger, Jessica Cisneros, as “one of those A.O.C. types that terrify us.” ...
Garza describes himself as a “conservatarian”: “I’m conservative in some things and libertarian in other things.” He opposes legal abortion but not laws allowing same-sex marriage. He worries about the problems hamstringing America’s Latino population — poverty, high-school-dropout rates, children born out of wedlock — but wants solutions to come from churches, individuals and private charities, not government. (Exceptions should be made, he said, for “folks who are truly dependent”: children, some people with disabilities, some elderly people and some veterans.) His favorite political philosopher is Friedrich A. von Hayek, the Austrian who argued that economic markets should be virtually unregulated. From Hayek, Garza absorbed the notion that democratic socialism will eventually lead to Soviet-style communism. “I have to accept inequality in order to preserve freedom, because inequality is going to happen when people’s talents are so varied and so different,” Garza told me ...
Garza’s parents were migrant farmworkers. They harvested grapes in California, hoed sugar beets in Nebraska and picked cherries, peaches, pears and apples in Washington State. Garza himself dropped out of high school and got his equivalency diploma when he was 17. He pruned and picked until he was 19. But the way Garza tells it, the defining moments of his childhood were not the hours he spent in the orchards but the ones he spent in church. He was 6 when faith transformed his family. After his father joined an evangelical church, he stopped smoking, drinking, gambling and having extramarital affairs. The family bought a small home, which they later improved and sold for a profit. Eventually, they bought a motel with 16 units, then sold it and opened a Mexican restaurant. When Garza mentions the idea that God and good credit are the secrets to success, he’s speaking from the experience of his own family’s rise into the middle class.
Under Garza, Libre has deliberately recruited Latino evangelicals. Every event I observed in Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Texas leaned evangelical in both students and staff. Libre’s emphasis on self-reliance plays well with this audience, and several of its leaders shared stories with me about how their own families worked their way out of poverty. ...
From its inception, Garza imagined Libre not only as a political operation but also as a community-services-and-education program. “We knew that to get buy-in from the community,” he told me, “you’ve got to be a part of the community.” Across the country, Libre has drawn thousands of Spanish speakers to its free G.E.D. classes, citizenship classes, driver’s-license courses, small-business workshops, personal-finance tutorials and summer camps. During a 2018 visit to Orlando, I saw nearly 200 adults, mostly Colombians and Venezuelans, show up for free Monday night English classes that included a hot buffet. About 100 adults, mostly Puerto Ricans, appeared for a Tuesday morning English class at Libre’s office.
When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, causing some $90 billion in damage and knocking out the island’s electrical grid, tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans fled to Florida. Libre smelled opportunity in this exodus. Puerto Ricans landing in Florida needed to find housing, enroll their children in school, assemble résumés and get certified to continue their old professions. Because Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico, many of them also needed to learn English. Libre could help Puerto Ricans with all those challenges — free of charge. In early 2018, it began a Welcome to Florida program in Orlando, Tampa and Miami, with a projected budget of at least $200,000. ... For these new arrivals, Libre was a lifeline. They had no problem registering their contact information with i360 in exchange for such excellent assistance.
Libre’s classes, and its meals, position it as a benevolent educator in a community that often needs mentorship to acquire the skills necessary to succeed in America’s labor market. Its teachers and engagement directors build genuine relationships with their students, and these relationships may make Libre’s appeals more effective than those of a political party. ... Though Libre’s 501(c)(4) runs its advocacy work and its 501(c)(3) runs its service and educational programs, in practice the two entities share office space. Several staff members told me that, as contractors, they worked for the Libre Initiative during election years and for the Libre Institute during off years.
Classes may also make adults more receptive to Libre’s political and economic teachings. Though I heard many Libre volunteers and staff members describe it as an organization designed to “empower” or “help” the Latino community, Libre’s official mission is actually to advance “the principles and values of a free and open society,” i.e. classic libertarian ideals. It hosts policy forums on topics like tax reform, health care, school choice and Supreme Court appointments with elected officials like Senator Ted Cruz and Vice President Mike Pence. In October, it posted a forum on “the dangers of socialism & communism in the U.S.”
Such efforts may help working-class Hispanics identify with ideas like limited government. Without high school diplomas, English fluency or driver’s licenses, Latinos may feel deprived of social mobility. Classes can change that feeling. ... It helps that Libre may lobby for local legislation — like removing regulations for parking for taco trucks — that connects students with libertarian ideals in ways that feel relevant to their daily lives.
In these ways, Libre works like an old-fashioned political machine — or like a church — educating and mobilizing Latinos to its own ends. In fact, its most serious rivals on the Democratic side aren’t party groups per se but rather unions and grass-roots organizations, like the progressive New Florida Majority. ...
Trump’s decision to rescind DACA in September 2017 repelled Libre and caused Americans for Prosperity to begin publicly advocating on behalf of Dreamers. In 2018, Libre took part in a seven-figure campaign to press Congress to pass legislation supporting them. Libre also made its displeasure felt by refusing to rally support for two Republican bills on immigration, calling them inadequate. ...
When Trump signed an executive order that automatically opted states out of resettling refugees, Americans for Prosperity and Libre staff worked both behind the scenes and in public to argue for the merits of opting in. ...
Nevertheless, it’s clear that for both Americans for Prosperity and Libre, economic policies take priority over immigration. David Casas, who leads Libre’s office in Atlanta, voted in favor of H.B. 87, Georgia’s ferocious 2011 anti-immigration law, when he served in the State House. “H.B. 87 effectively turns Georgia into a police state,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote, because it allows police officers in Georgia to stop anyone at any time and demand proof of citizenship or immigration status. In the wake of H.B. 87’s passage, Georgia lost thousands of farmworkers, leaving millions of dollars’ worth of crops to rot in the fields. Casas also voted in favor of S.B. 492, which forced DACA residents in Georgia to pay out-of-state tuition at state universities, limiting the number who could afford college. “We are not a pro-immigration advocacy organization,” Garza told me while he was in Georgia. “We’re a free-society, limited-government organization.” ...
Garza takes pride in the fact that he doesn’t need to check in with any political party when deciding Libre’s activities or policy positions. Yet Libre doesn’t answer to any of the Latinos at its events either. Libre’s Spanish-speaking participants, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, are not members of the organization in any meaningful sense: They cannot set the organization’s national agenda, pick which candidates to endorse or decide how the data they collect is used.
This makes Libre different from, say, the League of United Latin American Citizens. Founded in 1929, LULAC helped end the segregation of Mexican-Americans by supporting landmark legal cases like Méndez v. Westminster, which paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education. Its only mission is “to advance the economic condition, educational attainment, political influence, housing, health and civil rights of the Hispanic population of the United States.” For nearly a century, its local councils have met annually to vote on LULAC’s policy platform. ...
And unlike the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that successfully resisted Koch’s efforts to align it more closely with Republican conservatives, Libre does not have an independent board that is capable of setting an independent agenda. ...
Libre now has media-savvy representatives in place all over the country ready to push back on Biden’s agenda for health care, education and environmental policy. Under Americans for Prosperity, Libre has already pushed for bail reform in Nevada, school choice in Florida, tax cuts in Arkansas and the use of pandemic stimulus funds to support remote learning in Georgia. Libre has expanded to Michigan and Utah, with Oklahoma soon to come, states where growing populations of Spanish-speaking residents might be receptive to appeals ...https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/magazine/l...(2/2) |
|---|
