Bob Cortes, a Republican legislator in Florida, fears he is losing the Hispanic vote that helped get him elected. The culprits: Republican presidential candidates such as Donald Trump who are railing against immigration.
The upcoming visit by the most socially progressive pope in generations threatens to alienate them even more, driving a further wedge between Cortes' party and the Hispanic voters it needs to win back in order to retake the White House.
More than half of U.S. Latinos are Catholic, and they in turn represent 40 percent of the 51 million Catholics in America, making them a vital constituency for Pope Francis to address on his first U.S. trip that starts next week.
He is expected to address immigration, the closest issue to Hispanics' hearts. Francis has said that migrants and refugees should not be treated as "pawns on the chessboard of humanity."
Meanwhile, front-running Republican candidate Donald Trump has painted Mexican illegal immigrants as violent criminals, promised to build a border wall and slammed Spanish speakers. Several other leading candidates, such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker have shifted to a more anti-immigrant stance as they jostle in a crowded primary race.
“I hope the pope, being from a Latin American country, will kind of set the record straight that everyone here who speaks Spanish is not here illegally,” said Cortes, a Florida House representative who was raised in Puerto Rico.
To Cortes and other Latino Republicans, the more Trump talks, the more a political opportunity slips through their party’s fingers. Every month thousands of people fleeing Puerto Rico’s economic crisis settle in central Florida, each one a potential voter in next year’s presidential election.
Polls show that Francis, the first Latin American pope, is overwhelmingly popular among U.S. Hispanics regardless of their political persuasion, suggesting that politicians take a risk in having a message that strays too far from his.
Republicans here argue the Catholic Church remains a fundamentally conservative institution, lining up well with them on traditional issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But Francis' calls for action to tackle climate change, his stark criticisms of capitalism and inequality, and his somewhat more liberal stance on social issues risk throwing him into even sharper relief with leading Republicans in Hispanics' minds.
A new Reuters/IPSOS poll shows that on a range of issues ranging from climate change to economic inequality to energy production, Hispanic Catholics are more likely to side with the pope than Catholics as a whole.
In the five-day rolling poll, 52 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they agreed with Francis' stance on climate change, compared to 46 percent of Catholics overall. The Pew Research Center earlier this year found Francis to have an 88 percent approval rating among Hispanic Catholics.
Nelson Araque, a Catholic high-school teacher in Fort Lauderdale, said Francis’ encyclical this year that called for concerted action to combat human-driven climate change has pushed the issue to the top of Hispanic concerns.
“Latinos right now place the importance of Pope Francis’ message on climate change at the same level of immigration and abortion,” said Araque, who is also an environment activist.
(Reuters)
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