Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign made critical errors in its handling of Latino voters, giving them the impression they were being patronised and taken for granted in a way that depressed turnout and could have cost her the White House, a prominent leader of the Hispanic business community has charged.
Javier Palomarez, president and chief executive of the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC), made an impassioned critique of the tactics deployed by the Clinton campaign in its attempt to garner Latino support.
While he defended the former US secretary of state herself as being an excellent candidate, he accused her senior advisers of giving poor advice about how best to woo his community, leading in his view to the disaster of election night in which national exit polls suggested Donald Trump secured 29% of the Hispanic vote.
“We thought this election cycle would be different,” Palomarez told the Guardian. “Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton was advised once again by Beltway advisers who knew it all, had the models and the projections, but who called it wrong.”
The USHCC was singularly invested in the outcome of Tuesday’s election, as it had endorsed Clinton for the presidency – the first time it has done so for any candidate in its 38-year history. The chamber is the largest Hispanic business organization in the country, with 4.2m businesses on its books that contribute $668bn to the US economy.
Palomarez was especially scathing about the decision to choose Tim Kaine, a senator from Virginia, as Clinton’s running mate, passing over the rising Hispanic star Julián Castro, currently housing secretary within the Obama administration.
“I have to believe that if she had a Hispanic standing beside her she would have got more of the young vote, more of the Hispanic vote, and today she would be president-elect,” he said.
He blamed the decision on what he called the “young white Ivy League- educated kids” who were advising Clinton.
Palomarez is convinced the top team around the Democratic nominee came to the conclusion that given Trump’s extremist comments about criminal Mexicans, the Latino vote was secure and could be taken for granted.
“Somewhere along the line they decided that they had the Hispanic vote in the bag and there was no need to worry about it,” he said, “but you have to ask today: did that strategy of blowing off the Hispanic vote work for them?”
Palomarez’s comments are some of the sharpest criticisms to be leveled at the Clinton campaign since the autopsy began following her unexpected defeat in Tuesday’s presidential election. The Latino vote had always been a central part of Democratic strategy, with hopes high that a “sleeping giant” would finally be stirred to action by Trump’s virulent anti-immigrant message.
But nationwide exit polls suggest that the promise failed to materialize. They show that Clinton took 65% of the Latino vote, down from Barack Obama’s 71% in 2012, while Trump’s 29% share was actually two points up on Mitt Romney.
Clinton’s pollsters, Latino Decisions, have vociferously disputed the exit polls, arguing that they give a completely false picture of what happened on election day. The polling company claims the exit polls grossly underestimate precincts with high proportions of minority voters in them.
Matt Barreto, Latino Decisions’ principal pollster to the Clinton campaign, told the Guardian that in his opinion Palomarez’s criticisms were reflective of widespread frustration at Trump’s victory.
“If Clinton had won,” he said, “people would now be praising the campaign’s Latino outreach – they are frustrated not with the campaign, but with the outcome of the election.”
The campaign itself also disputes any suggestion that it underplayed the importance of the Latino vote. Clinton emphasized several policy pledges directed at Hispanics, including a promise to extend Obama’s Daca and Dapa programs that grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants as well as a vow to push for comprehensive immigration reform to forge a pathway to citizenship for all 11 million undocumented people currently living in the shadows.
“The campaign made a strong and robust effort to reach Latino voters, and you could see the results of that in excellent turnouts in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Virginia and even Florida,” said Stephanie Valencia, Obama’s deputy Latino vote director in 2008 and an informal adviser to the Clinton campaign this year.
But Palomarez said advice given to Clinton directly from the USHCC appeared to have been overruled by the candidate’s most senior advisers. He personally counseled her to make Castro her vice-presidential pick in a private meeting in October 2015 in San Antonio, Texas, where she was attending a presidential Q&A hosted by the USHCC.
“I was very candid with her,” he said. “I said we believe it is time to put a Hispanic on the ballot. But in the end, in their Beltway brilliance, her advisers thought that going with a white guy who could speak Spanish, Tim Kaine, would be enough for the Hispanic electorate.
“We adore Tim Kaine, but if you think a Spanish speaker is a replacement for a bona fide Hispanic, absolutely not, and the numbers have shown that.”
Palomarez also complained that when the USHCC invited Clinton to attend its annual national convention in Miami in October, the largest gathering of Hispanic business leaders in the country, her advisers decided against her appearing even though she happened to be in the same city at the time.
Instead, Clinton appeared at a rally with Al Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to George Bush in the contentious 2000 election.
“How did that go for them?” Palomarez said. “She went with Al Gore, and she went the way of Al Gore.”
Palomarez also accused the Clinton campaign of being culturally wide of the mark in its pitch to Hispanics. “The campaign was patronizing,” he said. “They tried to take a shortcut to us. We all love Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, but the kids who turned up to see them at Clinton events were there for the music not for the candidate.
“The campaign did not pay real attention to the issues that Hispanics care about – economic arguments, job creation, innovation. I resent the fact that they seemed to think we are all in one bucket when in fact Hispanics are very diverse.
“As a result she lost a portion of the Hispanic vote that could very easily have been hers, it was there for the taking.”
Palomarez argued that Florida, a state that Trump was under intense pressure to win with its large crop of 29 electoral college votes, could have swung to Clinton if more attention had been paid to Hispanic voters. Exit polls showed Clinton taking 62% of the Latino vote in the state to Trump’s 35%.
Again, those figures are disputed by Latino Decisions. Its research, based on official voting data released by precincts, tells a different picture for dominant Hispanic areas.
For example, Kissimmee in central Florida, where there has been a large influx of Puerto Ricans in recent years, voted heavily for Clinton. In some parts, the Latino vote was as high as 80% for the Democratic candidate, with as little as 17% for Trump.