Why California’s Latinos are just as politically divided as everyone else

In 1998, four Latino Republicans were elected to the California Legislature. As the press secretary for a Republican legislative leader, I convened a news conference demanding an end to a discriminatory policy: The all-Democratic Latino Legislative Caucus should stop insisting on a political monoculture and allow Republicans to join.

Twenty-five years later, California’s Latino Legislative Caucus still excludes Republicans. In contrast to states such as Arizona and Texas, whose Latino caucuses are bipartisan, California’s Latino Republicans remain excluded from an ethnic caucus that purports to represent them.

This peculiarity mirrors the history of Latino political empowerment in the state. When the caucus was founded in 1973 by the late L.A. Assemblymember Richard Alatorre and others, it seemed inconceivable that any consequential number of Latino Republicans could be elected to serve in Sacramento. This proved accurate for decades.

But now, as the rightward shift of Latino voters has swept a record number of Republican Latino lawmakers into the Capitol — there are now nine who have formed their own caucus — the debate has been resurrected. This time, it feels different — because Latino voters and identity are different.

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Today’s Latinos lack the defined ethnic and racial perspective of prior generations. New Latino voters are overwhelmingly U.S.-born, primarily English-speaking and more likely to see themselves as “typically American” than to associate with their countries of origin. And they are more likely than members of any other ethnic group to be unaffiliated with a political party. Latinos are becoming more populist and less partisan.

Over the years since I was a bright-eyed, 20-something staffer, I’ve come to doubt the practicality of a bipartisan Latino caucus, which now seems like a lost opportunity of the last generation. A bipartisan California Latino caucus could have focused on shared goals such as improving public education, increasing college attendance and graduation rates, making housing more affordable and preserving the upward mobility of working-class Californians — all of which should have been Sacramento’s priorities too. Instead, by nearly every social and economic metric, Latinos are worse off now than they were a generation ago despite the exponential growth of Latino representation.

This failure unfolded in a time of increasingly blistering partisanship. Today a bipartisan caucus is no more likely to achieve a broad, productive consensus than our bipartisan Legislature. A truly representative Latino caucus seems incompatible with both major parties.

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Each party certainly has a legitimate claim to representing aspects of the Latino community. Democrats are much more in line with Latinos on immigration reform, healthcare access and reproductive rights (despite what you may have heard about Latinos’ cultural conservatism). Republicans are much more in line with Latinos on border security, crime and building housing and economic opportunity.

But the evidence that neither party has a hold on the hearts and minds of Latino voters is overwhelming. Democrats have no more claim to Latino identity than Republicans, and the idea that putting partisans from both camps under the same ethnic tent might bring about commonality on hot-button issues such as reproductive rights or mass deportations is nonsense.

Why? Because Latino politicians on both sides are far more interested in their partisan identity than they are in advocating for the priorities of the Latino community they claim to represent.

Otherwise, Latino Democratic politicians would be greater advocates for tough-on-crime measures such as the recently passed Proposition 36, which Latino voters supported overwhelmingly. They would be much fiercer proponents for overturning extreme environmental and regulatory measures such as the California Environmental Quality Act, which has helped turn housing affordability into a generational crisis for the state’s Latinos, among others. And they would be doing a better job of holding the state’s Democratic-dominated government accountable for failing Latinos on a spectrum of issues.

Republican Latino politicians, meanwhile, would have the courage to openly denounce President Trump’s overt appeals to racism. They would also be more supportive of reproductive rights, investments in healthcare and a pathway to citizenship for the millions of immigrants our economy desperately needs.

But expecting Latino politicians to put their communities ahead of their parties appears to be asking too much these days. Latino politicians, ironically, have matured to the point of being like other politicians: more focused on power and partisanship than on solving the problems of a community that has been clear about its priorities for decades. Perhaps an ethnic caucus can’t effectively serve California’s largest ethnic group because the whole idea suggests Latinos are the sort of woefully underrepresented minority we no longer are.

At the same time, Latino voters are more moderate, independent and focused on day-to-day economic issues than any other ethnic group in the state. California and the country need politicians to be more like them.

As our society is becoming more diverse, Californians are becoming less interested in our racial and ethnic differences than in their common economic struggles. Pocketbook issues are replacing identity issues.

If Latino lawmakers were as preoccupied with those issues as Latino voters have been for many years, they would be working across the aisle to address them with no need for a caucus, bipartisan or otherwise. The two parties’ incessant need to fight about cultural issues has come at the expense of focusing on economic mobility. We don’t need a bipartisan Latino caucus to get things done; we need a bipartisan Legislature solving economic problems that disproportionately affect Latinos.

That’s the great opportunity for the emerging generation of Latino lawmakers: to assume leadership in both parties and make the entire Legislature work better. Latino politicians on both sides of the aisle need to start leading the parties instead of following them.

Mike Madrid is a political consultant and the author of “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Changing Democracy.”