This Is what the left doesn't understand about Latino's.

This Is what the left doesn't understand about Latino's. Since our website has lurkers who love to copy our articles, maybe if they read this reprint, they might learn something. Everything below is original to the writer Except where I comment in red. The writer is one Progressive. Only difference from our Progressive lurkers is that this writer is he's educated and has some common sense.

By Ian Haney López and Tory Gavito

Mr. Haney López is the author of “Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections and Saving America.” Ms. Gavito is the president of Way to Win, a progressive electoral coalition.

Joe Biden needed no reminder from the arrival of Hispanic Heritage Month this week that he should focus on Latinos. While a mere 3 percent of American voters overall have yet to decide on a presidential candidate, according to recent polls from Quinnipiac and Monmouth, 38 percent of registered Hispanic voters in 10 battleground states may be ambivalent about even voting.

At least so far, this large group of Latinos seemingly perceives little reason to choose Mr. Biden over President Trump. That makes this group — part of the largest racial-ethnic voting bloc in the country after whites — a key component of the swing voters in this election.

Our recent research opens a window onto these voters. One of us studies racism in American law and politics; the other runs an organization dedicated to expanding the electorate. Both of us have roots in Latino communities. This spring, we teamed up to study what was happening among Hispanic voters and to fashion a strategy for drawing our communities — Latinos and others as well — into a multiracial progressive coalition.

With the help of two liberal pollsters, Joshua Ulibarri and Celinda Lake, we conducted 15 focus groups with members of various Hispanic communities across the country and ran a national survey. We also polled large cohorts of whites and African-Americans.

The results are sobering. We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points.

Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.

These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it. Blacks and Latinos agree there's problems in their groups that Progressives don't see or refuse to accept.

Hispanics, of course, are no more monolithic than any other group, and internal differences influenced how individuals reacted. The single biggest factor was how respondents thought about Hispanic racial identity. More than whether the individual was Mexican-American or from Cuba, young or old, male or female, from Texas, Florida or California, how the person perceived the racial identity of Latinos as a group shaped his or her receptivity to a message stoking racial division. Hispanics aren't house broke the way Blacks are. They want to make their own choices.

Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color. Hispanics don't follow the give me welfare or union only job. They will take any and all jobs. Except for the lazy 25%.

In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

The minority of Latinos who saw the group as people of color were more liberal in their views regarding government and the economy, and strongly preferred Democratic messages to the dog-whistle message. For the majority of Latinos, however, the standard Democratic frames tied or lost to the racial fear message. In other words, Mr. Trump’s competitiveness among Latinos is real. Majority of Latinos wish to integrate and be part of the American culture. They don't play the racial blame game the way Progressives do.

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