Obama’s decision to table executive action on immigration to “help” Democratic candidates angered Latinos

There is a Spanish saying: Más vale solo que mal acompañado ... better alone than in bad company. If the results are any indication, it may well be the refrain of the Latino electorate during these midterm elections which have given Republicans control of the Senate and maintained their control of the House. 

The Republicans won a good chunk of the contested governorships, as well, our own governor’s race notwithstanding.

Democrats are panicking. With reason. But as our mothers used to say — you made your bed, now lie in it.

An AP exit poll estimates that two-thirds of Latinos who did vote yesterday voted for Democrats. We don’t yet have an estimate of Latino turnout for this election, but we’re willing to bet the numbers will be glaringly low. 

The Democrats will excoriate us for this, laying part of the blame for their losses on our apathy. There is some painful truth to this. We don’t vote in numbers proportional to our population — although we constitute 11 percent of all eligible voters, less than half of us usually cast a ballot — and this is something we must all work to improve. 

But there is another truth to be faced: We are angry. Really angry. Maybe angrier than we’ve ever been. Angry enough to stay away from voting for the party that received more than 70 percent of our vote during the last presidential election.

In the lead-up to the election there was a considerable amount of bickering between factions of Latino leadership about how to react — electorally — to Obama’s announcement that he was postponing the executive action on immigration he had promised ... in order to ease things for Democrats in hotly contested runs. 

Some of the Latino leadership saw this as the last straw in a history of broken promises and faithlessness by a Democratic administration and legislators, and advocated withholding Latino votes from just those contested races. Other Latino leaders warned that we would be playing into GOP hands by not showing up to vote, and since the GOP seems to hate us, things would get exponentially worse for Latinos overall.

Honestly, there is some truth in both stances. But here’s a useful generalization: Latinos don’t like cowards. And we would much rather face an enemy one-on-one than have a flock of craven allies who high-tail it out when things start looking dicey. 

Because you know what? We can fight. We have always had to fight. For what we believe in, for what we love, to eradicate injustice and to secure rights. 

And we are part of grassroots organizations across the nation that have mobilized us by the tens, by the hundreds of thousands.

Can you imagine how we would have mobilized if the promise of executive action had been kept? 

We can. We’ve stood amid the half-million who gathered for the March for America in Washington and at the Day without an Immigrant rally here in Philadelphia. We know how much beginning to repair a broken immigration system means to us and to our brothers and sisters across the nation. 

According to a Latino Decisions poll released yesterday, immigration reform/DREAM-Act surpassed jobs and the economy as the most important issue for Latino voters during this midterm election. This is markedly different than it has been in the past number of years, when jobs/economy ranked as the top issue to Latinos.  This shift back to immigration as a top concern should have helped outcomes for Democrats, after all, it has before.

But the “sacrifice immigration to save Democratic seats” edict killed any chance of that. 

Look no further than Colorado to see how Democratic cowardice played out electorally. Latino turnout was good in Colorado (13 percent of voters in a state where Latinos are 14 percent of the population) where Cory Gardner, a conservative Republican, faced Democrat Mark Udall. 

Gardner said, during his campaign, that he supported an expanded guest worker program and a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants. Udall, meanwhile, shied away from talking about immigration at all. It was Democratic poisoned fruit, after all.

Colorado’s Latinos helped elect Gardner yesterday ... but Democratic politicians were indispensible to the outcome.

Democrats need to refocus and see where they did win. 

Maybe they should look to the gubernatorial race in Pennsylania, where support for Tom Wolf cut across party lines, in part because he was willing to talk about two terribly divisive issues that pit the commonwealth’s residents against each other: educational funding and hydraulic fracking. Folks in Philly don’t feel the same way about these issues as those in suburban areas or those in rural areas ... and yet we voted overwhelmingly to confront our differences about them.

It is not only Latinos who prefer those who stand instead of cower.

Hopefully the Democrats will have remembered that by the time the next election rolls around.