Political action committee will promote the Latino vote in key states for this year's election
Group led by former Los Angeles mayor seeks to promote the Latino vote and defeat Trump in the elections.
Photo:
BRING SMIALOWSKI / AFP / Getty Images
WASHINGTON.- The former mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa and the businessman Fernando Espuelas announced Monday the launch of a “political action committee”To promote the Latino vote Y defeat president Donald Trump in the elections of November.
The committee, baptized "American Latinos United”(ALU), has the sole strategic objective reduce the proportion of Hispanics who sympathize with Trump lowering that preference from 25% to 30% of voters in that community, the project said.
According to Pew Center, the states with the highest proportion of Latinos authorized to vote in 2016 were New Mexico, with 40.4% of all citizens eligible to pay, Texas (28.1%), California (28%), Arizona (21.5%), Nevada (17; 2%), Colorado (14.5%) and NY (13.8%).
But even in other states, where the proportion of Latinos eligible to vote is much lower, your vote can be decisive when the contest is very close and the decision results in the number of delegates to the Electoral College, which is where the presidential victory.
Thus ALU He will focus much of his efforts on Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, whose delegations to the Electoral College may prove crucial in November.
"Trump captured about 30% of the Hispanic vote in 2016“, Said in a statement from ALU Espuelas, one of the pioneers of internet expansion in Latin America and co-founder of StarMedia.
"If it falls below that threshold in 2020, the key disputed states will be out of reach," he said.
Different surveys show that in the last three months of 2019 Trump's popularity among Latinos was between 25% and 30% of respondents, far from 50% support for the president among whites.
A problem that ALU must face is the poor participation of Latinos who have the right to vote but do not attend to do so, and the concurrence figures in the legislative elections of November 2018 gives rise to optimism.
In the 2014 legislative elections, according to Pew, only 26.9% of Latinos eligible to vote did so, and two years later, halfway in the Trump Presidency, that participation rose to 40.2%, this is about 11.7 million people.
It is expected that in November some 32 million Latinos are eligible to vote, being for the first time the largest minority from U.S.
"Our country is on a precipice"Said Villaraigosa, who was mayor of Los Angeles between 2005 and 2013 and lost the election for governor of California in 2018." incompetence and the corruption from Trump they threaten our democracy and the American way of life. ”
Trump, on the other hand, launched in September, during a political act in New Mexico, his own campaign to court the Hispanic vote, called “Latinos por Trump”, with which he intends to increase his sympathies among a minority that he does not usually like his rhetoric and anti-immigrant policies.
And that low affinity was already evident in the 2016 presidential election, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton received 65% of the Latino vote.
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