Sonoma County Latinos mobilizing for 2016 elections
Ever since he was a child, Jose Bedolla has regarded civic duties such as voting the same way some kids view playing sports.
“Some people grew up wanting to play baseball or soccer. I always wanted to vote,” said Bedolla, a first-generation American citizen whose parents emigrated from the central Mexican state of Guanajuato.
The 24-year-old is a Santa Rosa Junior College student who is active in student government and plans to attend law school after getting his bachelor’s degree at Sacramento State University. His affinity for voting goes far beyond simply picking a president every four years.
“Everybody knows Donald Trump, everyone knows Bernie Sanders. But a lot of people don’t know who their Congress members are,” Bedolla said. “I’d rather find out and vote for someone who’s actually writing the laws or has a team behind them writing the legislation.”
One of the key issues motivating Bedolla, and many other Latinos, is immigration. Another is the skyrocketing cost of housing in Sonoma County, where his father works as a vineyard foreman and his mother works in winery production. Bedolla said he hopes Latinos will show up in force this year at the voting booth, triggering political changes that he believes will benefit the Latino community and the country as a whole.
Latinos, long considered the nation’s reluctant sleeping giant of politics, likely will vote in Sonoma County in record numbers this fall, stirred to electoral action by a presidential candidate whose campaign rhetoric hits close to home, as well as a local housing crisis that is destabilizing Sonoma County’s low-income and working class communities.
Latinos are the largest ethnic group in the state, accounting for nearly two in five Californians. But the vast majority of the state’s 14.5 million Latinos never step into a polling place. In 2012, the last presidential election, less than 19 percent of California’s Latinos actually voted, according to research by the Public Policy Institute of California.
That may be changing. In the first three months of this year, there have been twice as many Latinos registering to vote across California as there were during the same period in the last presidential election in 2012, according to a recent analysis of voter registration statistics by Sacramento data-guru Paul Mitchell.
Experts believe some Latinos are registering to vote for the first time in response to what they view as anti-immigrant rhetoric from candidates like Trump, with calls for mass deportation, the construction of a 1,000-mile wall along the Mexican border and his early claims that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists.
Eric McGhee, a research fellow for the Public Policy Institute of California, drew parallels between Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and that of California Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed a successful 1994 ballot initiative that sought to prohibit undocumented immigrants from using social services such as health care and public education. Though the initiative was later found unconstitutional by a federal court, some political observers believe the anti-immigrant fervor surrounding the ballot measure sparked a historic mobilization of Latino voters in the state, one that has dogged Republicans seeking statewide offices ever since.
McGhee said early voter registration figures suggest a similar mobilization among Latino voters this year, sparked by Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination.
“I see no reason why that shouldn’t mobilize Latinos in California, especially for the fall but possibly for the primary,” McGhee said.
According to data provided by the Public Policy Institute of California, the share of Sonoma County Latinos who have participated in each of the past three presidential elections has steadily increased, from 6.6 percent of all voters in the fall 2004 election to 8.8 percent in the fall 2012 election. That’s an increase of nearly 4,600 Latino voters.
Despite the growth, Latino turnout in elections is still far smaller than the number of Latinos living in Sonoma County, where they account for roughly a quarter of the county’s population. Many Latinos cannot vote in U.S. elections because they are immigrants, both legal permanent residents and undocumented. That fact is motivating some Latinos to vote.
“I grew up wanting to vote. There are many people who can’t and wish they could,” said Bedolla, whose parents are not U.S. citizens. “You don’t need to be a history major to realize that a lot of people died for the right to vote.”
Bedolla said the issue of immigration “ties into every sector” of the country’s economy and society, and the perennial inaction in Congress to agree on some type of reform is a “ticking time bomb” that affects not only Latin American immigrants, but also Asian, African and European immigrants as well.
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