Two years ago, Cecilia Arosemena, who was born in Mexico but who has spent most of her life in Tucson, became a U.S. citizen. She didn’t register to vote, however, after taking her oath of citizenship.
Arosemena wanted to “belong” to the larger community, and she sought stability and peace of mind. As for voting, well, she believed her vote would not matter. Voting was not high on her priorities.
That changed however.
“Now I want to vote,” says 33-year-old Arosemena, a mother and a chef.
Recently she registered to vote at the YWCA of Southern Arizona-Frances McClelland Community Center on North Bonita Avenue in Menlo Park, where she is the owner of Dish for Dosha, which specializes in the preparation of healthy foods. Her decision to register to vote came after some personal and political reflection, and pep talks from her YWCA colleagues.
Some of the inspiration came from the other side of the globe, she said, after listening to a Burmese woman talk about the struggles for human rights and democracy in her Southeast Asian country. Additional inspiration came from the history of American women and ethnic minorities in the fight for the right to vote, an issue which continues in a number of states that have erected barriers toward widening voter participation. And in the building she works in and where we talked, it has a history of encouraging greater civic participation by Tucsonans.
Registering to vote and voting, she added, “is the minimum we can do for our community.”
Arosemena, who was born in Guaymas, Sonora, and graduated from Palo Verde High School, is one of a growing number of Latinas and Latinos who are registering to vote and whose votes in elections are growing. And that trend does not bode well for the Republican Party which is struggling with its presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
Anecdotal evidence across the country shows that Latinos and Latinas have registered to vote because of Trump’s attacks on immigrants and Mexico and Mexicans. Harder evidence shows that more than half of Latino registered voters are leaning toward the Democratic Party.
The Pew Research Center recently wrote that 54 percent of Latinos “continue to say the Democratic Party is more concerned for Latinos than the Republican Party” and a mere 11 percent say that Republicans have “greater concern.” The remainder believe there is no difference between the two major parties.
The percentages are not much different from four years ago when Latinos said they favored the Democrats over Republicans 61 percent to 10 percent.
But when it comes specifically to Trump and what he has said about Latinos and immigrants, Pew reported that 74 percent of Latino registered voters say “they have given ‘quite a lot’ of thought to the presidential election and they are ‘absolutely certain’ they will vote.”
The erosion of Latino support for the GOP is causing headaches for the party. The Republican Party is headed toward full-time minority status if it cannot reverse its decline among Latinos (and Asians and women for that matter.)
Political history has an example. California Republicans witnessed their spiral downward in the 1990s when then-Republican Gov. Pete Wilson gave his full-throated support for Proposition 187, a strict anti-immigrant ballot measure, in his 1994 re-election campaign.
This year could prove to be a pivotal year. A new voter like Arosemena has turned away from the GOP because of Trump, and the party’s social and cultural politics which are not friendly to women and minorities.
As she became more aware of how politics and public policy intersect, it became apparent that she could not support Republicans. Mind you, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, was not her first choice. She wanted Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator.
But casting a vote for a third party candidate for president or none at all is not an option, she said. She will vote for Clinton because “I don’t want hate to win.”
