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.

“I see bigger movements with Asian, Latino and Africans joining together to fight for each other,” he said.

In some cases, Latinos who can’t vote are trying to persuade those who can to cast their ballots in the coming elections.

Enrique Yarce Martinez, a 21-year-old SRJC student, is working with the North Bay Organizing Project’s voter engagement team. Walking voter precincts, Yarce and others in the team visit people at their homes and inquire about the biggest issues that are affecting voters’ lives. They attempt to bridge those concerns with the act of voting as a means of effecting change.

“I tell people ‘I can’t vote, but I want you to vote,’?” Yarce said. “?‘You have that power, you have that privilege and you should be exercising it.’?”

Yarce said “it’s frustrating” to see Latinos who are eligible to vote but don’t exercise that right. Many of these Latinos are disenfranchised, he said, living in low-income communities that are continually ignored by local government. The weight of their economic burdens - high rent, low wages, blighted neighborhoods without adequate public service - leaves them feeling like their vote doesn’t count, he said.

Yarce, who is studying sociology but hopes to switch to a field in psychology to help people with trauma, said the most important local issue on many people’s minds these days is the high cost of housing and rent.

Those concerns echo what has emerged as central political issue in Sonoma County, with both city and county elected officials vowing this year to consider policies such as rent stabilization and eviction protections, as well as a county-wide affordable housing bond.

“For the most part, the price to live around here is very expensive, and conditions are very bad and managers aren’t fixing things,” Yarce said.

He said that during his precinct walk, he met a family in an apartment in Roseland that paid $1,300 a month but had no front door that separated their apartment from the building hallway. The family told Yarce that the apartment manager refuses to get a front door, even though their rent was increased by $100 in November and $150 this year.

“Where there should be a door, they cover it with a blanket,” Yarce said.

Nori Santos, 36, a Petaluma small-business owner who was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and became a U.S. citizen 11 years ago, also said local housing and federal immigration issues were big concerns this election cycle. Santos, who opened a high-end hair salon seven months ago, is part of the local Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Young Professional Network.

Santos said the biggest concern for the young generation of Latinos is how unaffordable Sonoma County has become. “I have a daughter who is 19. What’s going to happen when she tries to get her own family?” she said.

She said that in general, for most of her family and friends, the biggest concern is the legal status of Latino immigrants.

“There’s a lot of openings for labor and agriculture jobs, but we’re not giving them the legalization to be able to be secure within our system,” she said. “It’s just security for the employee and the employer.”

The increase of Latino voters in Sonoma County and California is likely to have more impact on local elections than national elections, said Michael Madrid, a Republican consultant who specializes in Latino politics. California, Texas, New York and Illinois - where there are large numbers of Latino voters - are not typically battleground states in presidential elections. Florida, with the nation’s third-largest Latino population, is the exception and is a swing state, he said.

But Madrid said the Latino vote could become more decisive in national elections in the future as the Latino population continues to grow in states like Nevada, Arizona and Colorado.

However, he said it would be a mistake to regard the Latino vote as a monolithic voting bloc, similar to the way African-Americans vote in the south.

“Latino millennials are voting a lot like white millennials,” he said, pointing out that Hillary Clinton lost 17 percentage points among Latino voters in this year’s Nevada primary compared to her performance in the 2008 primary against Barack Obama.

“That’s an enormous collapse,” he said. “It means the Latino electorate is finally diversifying. What it means is we are taking on the attributes of the overall electorate. And we are shunning the agreed racial minority model … integrating, economically, socially and politically.”

Annie Dobbs-Kramer, the North Bay Organizing Project’s voter engagement organizer, said voters of all backgrounds will be motivated to head to the polls on Election Day once they begin to see voting as a way to effect change in their own lives and communities. That’s when political representation follows.

“When there’s an uptick in the percentage of people voting in a specific neighborhood, there’s an uptick in the way that government responds to that neighborhood,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.