The Libertarian Party Should Be Targeting Hispanics

Given the Libertarian Party’s and the libertarian philosophy’s position in favor of open borders, Hispanics are a perfect target for votes for L.P. candidates. Along with the other two groups that I have identified in my previous Substack articles — people who don’t vote and blacks — Hispanics provide an excellent potential for L.P. presidential candidates and congressional candidates to break out of the standard 1-3 percent of the vote totals and break into the 7-10 percent (or higher) vote totals. (See my two Substack articles “A Winning Political Strategy for the Libertarian Party” and “The Libertarian Party Should Be Targeting Blacks.")

I have addressed the libertarian open-borders position in two previous Substack articles: “Open Borders Is the Only Libertarian Position” and “Addressing Objections to Open Borders.” Therefore, I won’t repeat my analysis in those two articles here.

This is not to say, of course, that Hispanics generally agree with the open-borders position. I think it’s a safe bet that most of them take the same position as Republicans and Democrats in favoring America’s socialist system of immigration controls.

But my hunch is that for many Hispanics, that’s because they have never heard — and, therefore, never seriously considered — the case for genuine open borders. If they were to hear that case, I believe that many of them would support L.P. presidential candidates and congressional candidates in droves. 

After all, every Hispanic in the world has to feel sympathy when they see Hispanic immigrants who are simply trying to survive or better their lives being subjected to death, suffering, humiliation, arrest, incarceration, prosecution, incarceration, and deportation.

But since Hispanics do not know that there is a viable way to bring an immediate end to all this misery, they naturally fall into the Republican-Democrat immigration-control paradigm and seek the same pipe-dream that Republicans and Democrats (and their acolytes in the mainstream press) seek: “comprehensive immigration reform” that will, they think, finally — finally! — bring an end to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis. 

I also believe that if Hispanics were to learn that open immigration is our nation’s heritage and that our American ancestors had a system of open immigration for more than 100 years, including on the U.S.-Mexico border, they would be more disposed to consider it and embrace it. 

From a political standpoint, consider this excerpt from an October, 22, 2022, article entitled “Key Facts about Hispanic Eligible Voters in 2022” at pewresearch.org:

An estimated 34.5 million Hispanic Americans are eligible to vote this year, making Latinos the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S. electorate since the last midterm elections. The number of Hispanic eligible voters has increased by 4.7 million since 2018, representing 62% of the total growth in U.S. eligible voters during this time.

That is a lot of potential votes for L.P candidates! Yes, I know, the standard shibboleth among right-wingers is that Hispanics are going to always vote Democrat. But not so though according to a November 3, 2022, article in the Atlantic entitled “Why Democrats Are Losing Hispanic Voters.” It states:

Over the past few years, Hispanics have begun abandoning the Democratic Party, defying generations of political patterns and causing varying degrees of panic on the left. 

A December 31, 2022, article in Deseret News states,

Roughly one-third of Latino voters nationwide cast a ballot for Republicans in the 2018 midterms, and Trump made gains among Hispanic voters in 2020 despite his controversial immigration policies, Trump’s gains were especially pronounced in the 34th District, which is 84 percent Hispanic and which President Joe Biden only won by 4 percentage points.

The Deseret News article does make it clear that the gains are not as much as Republicans had hoped: 

But the theory that Latinos will abandon Democrats en masse has yet to come true. Democratic House candidates won 60 percent of the Latino vote in the midterms, according to one CNN exit poll. An estimated 39 percent of Latinos voted for Republicans in House races — an improvement compared to 2020, when that figure was 36 percent, but a modest one at best.

Moreover, take a look at this website called Americano media. It is a 24-hour talk conservative radio station that used to be on SiriusXM and is now based in Miami. Every single one of the hourly talk-show hosts is a conservative.

The important point is that the Hispanic vote is in flux and, in my opinion, up for grabs. Given that immigration is one of the burning domestic issues of our time, Libertarian Party presidential candidates and congressional candidates should be seizing the day and targeting Hispanics by showing them that the libertarian case for open borders would bring an immediate end to America’s perpetual immigration crisis and America’s immigration police state, along with the many deaths and the horrible suffering that come with the Republican-Democrat socialist immigration-control system.

Recap:

As I have stated in my previous Substack articles, I am convinced that a Libertarian Party presidential candidate can break out of the standard 1-3 percent range and into the 7-10 percent range (or higher), but it requires a bold political strategy, one that is totally different from the standard L.P. presidential campaign: This would entail the following:

1. Restore the Libertarian brand to one of principled libertarianism and restore the Libertarian Party to its position in the political arena as the “Party of Principle.”

2. Reject Republican-Lite, reform-oriented, pragmatic, practical, watered-down, and compromised policy proposals, including such things as school vouchers, health-savings accounts, Social Security “saving,” “privatization,” or “phasing out,” regulatory reform, monetary reform, CIA reform, NSA reform, Pentagon reform, selective foreign interventionism, and “comprehensive immigration reform.”

3. Stop targeting Republicans for votes by adopting their reform measures, currying favor with them, endorsing them, praising them, and attaboying them. They are never going to cross party lines and vote for Libertarians. Instead, go after them as fiercely as we go after Democrats, holding them jointly responsible for what they have done — and are doing — to destroy our country and our rights and freedoms. 

4. Target the following three groups of people for votes: (1) people who don’t vote because they know that the entire Republican-Democrat welfare-warfare state system is crooked, corrupt, and destructive; (2) blacks, who have long been at the receiving end of the Republican-Democrat war on drugs, the most racially bigoted program since segregation; and (3) Hispanics because they will be naturally receptive to considering the libertarian case for open borders. I am more convinced than ever that these three groups are potential gold mines for Libertarians and can break us into the 7-10 percent vote range or higher.