By Michael Hernandez
WASHINGTON
With less than a week to go before Americans choose their next commander-in-chief, the Republican nominee faces a major obstacle largely of his own making.
Like national polls, Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton amongst registered Latino voters, but among this increasingly important demographic there is no contest.
Nearly 60 percent of Latinos have said they will vote for Clinton, compared to just shy of 20 percent for Trump, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center.
That’s largely due to his heated campaign rhetoric that has hit America’s Hispanic community particularly hard.
It did not take long for Trump to alienate the community, which has added roughly 4 million eligible voters since the last presidential election in 2012, according to Pew.
In announcing his candidacy, Trump demeaned Mexican immigrants, slinging vitriol at the largest segment of the Hispanic-American community.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said at his namesake tower in New York in June 2015.
“They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said.
“Some, I assume, are good people,” Trump conceded.
On the campaign trail, his repeated claims that he would build a wall along America’s southern border, which he says Mexico will finance, further exacerbated tensions among Latinos.
Among those polled by Pew, 75 percent said they discussed Trump’s comments about Hispanics and other groups with family, friends and coworkers.
A spokesman for the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest nonprofit Latino advocacy group, said the comments continue to resonate prominently among Latinos as Election Day nears.
"The American Latino community has not forgotten about that,” Julian Teixeira said, referring to the Trump’s announcement speech. “It was a very negative, untruthful, visceral and just downright mean comment to say that is completely unrepresentational of our community.”
Trump’s calls for the border wall have also created “a negative and visceral tone in the Latino community,” he added.
“It also portrays Latinos or Hispanics in a very negative light as though all of the Hispanic community is undocumented," he said.
And as Hispanic Americans continue to hold a larger slice of America’s diverse voting public, the comments are particularly disadvantageous in presidential races that have been decided by less than 8 percentage points since 2000. And all but one, the 2008 race, were decided by less than four points.
With the overwhelmingly narrow margins, Trump can ill afford to alienate the Latino voting bloc.
His comments appear to have so thoroughly soured Hispanics to the Republican nominee that they have eclipsed Clinton’s abysmal track record in Latin America.
Widely touted for her extensive public service, America’s former top diplomat has a less than stellar record among America’s southern neighbors.
As secretary of state, Clinton backed a coup in Honduras in 2009 that deposed the leftist government there and ushered in a new era of death squads.
She has also spoken positively of her husband, former President Bill Clinton’s, effort to bolster military aid to Colombia in 2000 when the country was one of the most repressive in the region, saying that the plan should now be copied in Central America.
The controversial policy led to mass disappearances, torture and the killing of non-combatants as Colombia fought a dirty war against leftist guerillas.
Her foreign policies are a source of unease and disappointment for Kimberly Benavides, a 26-year-old Maryland resident.
“I was born here so I don’t want the country that I call home to meddle in a country that I see as my parent’s home,” she said. “I want the U.S. to do better than that.”
But when paired against Trump’s divisive campaign, Latino Americans are undeterred in their preference for the Democratic nominee.
Casting her vote for Trump, Benavides said, would be “just too insane.”
“He’s not serious and I would never consider him a serious candidate,” she said, noting that her vote is ultimately against Trump “with hopes that she has the ability to do good things”.
Chris Salce, a California resident who was visiting the nation’s capital on vacation with his wife, said that while he wants to see Obama’s policies continued in a Clinton presidency, he is primarily driven by not wanting to see Trump assume office.
“I feel he is going to do a bad job, and he's going to split this country up if he gets in there," he said.
Asked what is off-putting about Trump, Annette Salce was succinct: “His mouth.”
“He just says all the wrong things at the wrong time," she remarked.
Coupled with Trump’s penchant to offend, Clinton’s legacy in the Americas region may just be too distant a memory for a Latino electorate that is focused on its more immediate domestic concerns.
"Hispanic-American voters are no different than any other American voters,” said Teixeira, the Latino advocacy group spokesman.
“What's very important for us is of course job creation, a strong economy, access to health care, education for our children,” he said.
“But I think where we're very different from other voters is immigration is always a subject that's very near and dear to our hearts, and I think that's what a lot of Latino voters are looking at: who is really proposing a reasonable, sensible solution to our immigration crisis and the issues that we're having right now in our country."
