As liberals attempt to reach out to Hispanic voters in a much more gender-neutral fashion, they’ve started to use the term “Latinx,” which first gained traction among left-wing academics and campaigners.
According to a new countrywide poll of Hispanic voters, that approach may be detrimental in recruiting people of Latin American heritage.
Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with this one
According to Bendixen & Amandi Worldwide, a leading Democrat firm specialized in Latino outreach, only 2 percent of those polled identify as Latinx. 68 percent identify as “Hispanic” and 21 percent choose “Latino” or “Latina” to characterize their cultural heritage.
More troublesome for Democrats is this: 40 percent said the term Latinx upsets or offends them in some way. 30 percent said they’d be less likely to vote for a politician or organization that uses it.
As per pollster Fernand Amandi and other Democrat and Latino vote specialists, the results of the survey raise issues about how successfully Republicans are interacting with Latino supporters at a time when they appear to make inroads.
I'm looking forward to Dems still trying to force "Latinx" on the Hispanic community despite another poll showing we overwhelmingly don't use the term.https://t.co/AlVxS31KOh pic.twitter.com/ztPbDaeFL4
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) December 6, 2021
“The figures show employing Latinx is a transgression of the Hippocratic Oath in politics, which is to do no political damage first,” said Amandi, whose firm advised Barack Obama’s effective Latino outreach countrywide during his two election races.
“Why do we use a term that is liked by only 2 percent of the voters we want to win, but offends up to 40 percent of the voters we would like to win?”
Amandi made it clear he was just not attributing the loss of Latino votes for Democrats solely on the term “Latinx.”
Latino voters have begun to tilt to the right for a variety of reasons, he said, most notably because conservatives “weaponized culture war themes at the margins with Latino voters.”
The party is divided
However, when more people on the left started to use the word Latinx in politics, it exposed a schism inside the party among centrist traditionalists and the more aggressive progressive base.
Those who support Latinx stated the term — as well as the tendency of terminating Spanish nouns with an X to make them gender-inclusive — is not a creation of the American left or white elites, but rather of Latin America and Latinos.
It’s also a replacement for the term Hispanic, which has been chastised for its associations with Spain, which occupied much of Latin America.
New Poll Shows Only 2% Of Hispanics Use Term ‘Latinx,’ Many Find It Offensive https://t.co/t9R9f9KZdu pic.twitter.com/N8UmRHr3YM
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) December 6, 2021
Although activists and scholars actually promoted and accepted Latinx for the recent decade, it is only in the last few years the word has gained traction and garnered criticism.
Spanish has a gendered vocabulary, with feminine nouns concluding in “A” and masculine ones finishing in “O.” Masculine nouns are usually preceded by “el” or “un,” whereas female nouns are preceded by “la” or “una.”
When talking to a group of mixed-gender individuals, the masculine is used by Latinos to apply to all sexes. When discussing a mixed-gender community, those who use Latinx believe masculine language should not be the default.
