Democratic Party strategist and MSNBC contributor Paola Ramos said Saturday that Republicans are making substantial gains with Hispanic voters because they have become more afraid of socialism than fascism.
Ramos, the former deputy director of Hispanic media for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, joined The Cross Connection with host Tiffany Cross to talk about Hispanic voter outreach following reporting this week which purported to show that the Hispanic vote is now essentially up for grabs.
A poll from The Wall Street Journal released a week ago showed Hispanic voters who were surveyed said they were almost evenly split in their preference between Democrats and Republicans, meaning the country’s second largest voting bloc is now a swing vote.
Cross asked both Ramos and Northwestern University professor Geraldo Cadava about the potential ramifications of the polling. Ramos initially assigned blame to Cuban-American Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) for engaging in what she said was a misinformation campaign based on fear-mongering.
Ramos said, “When I think about this, I say shame on someone like Sen. Marco Rubio, right, that is constantly comparing the Build Back Better bill to communism. Shame on someone like Ted Cruz, who is constantly comparing Joe Biden to a communist and a socialist. Right, that is the biggest betrayal to the Latino vote. To undermine their experience and compare something like Cuba to a liberal democracy like the United States, that’s why Tiffany, because lies have become the central platform for Republicans.”
Later on in the segment, Ramos said Republicans in their messaging have offered Hispanics a binary choice between fascism and socialism, and that the strategy is working.
Ramos said, “So we know, Tiffany, that the number one issue has always been the economy, right? And that’s the problem that Democrats are up against. It’s a messaging problem. It’s a storytelling problem. In this moment, jobs are up with Joe Biden, wages are up with Joe Biden and unemployment’s down. Yet that is not resonating with Latinos.”
Ramos added:
What Democrats are up against is a massive, not just a massive disinformation campaign being led by the GOP, it is their own internal messaging failure, right? Because what is completely, completely alarming is that in this moment, right, of history which within one year we’ve had a failed authoritarian coup. We’ve had Republicans time and time again trying to undermine free and fair elections, right? In the same year we’ve had conspiracy theories transform the Republican Party. What is absolutely unacceptable is that still more Latinos believe and are scared of Democrats embracing socialism than they are scared of Republicans embracing fascism.
Ramos assigned some blame toward Democrats when she said, “That is a communication problem within the Democratic Party, and that’s — that’s what they have to fix going into the midterms.”
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