My late parents were on the phone with some Venezuelan friends in the early days of Hugo Chávez.  After a long chat, my mother said, "We already saw that movie," and my father added, "And it ends poorly."  They were recounting their memories of Fidel Castro saying he was not a communist and promising elections.  My parents were right about Chávez and were always very skeptical of populism, especially the kind that makes everything sound so easy.

Well, let's talk about Hispanics and the Democrat party.  It sounds to me as if many Hispanics are telling Democrats that they already saw that movie, too.  Let's take a look:

According to polling from NBC News, Telemundo and the Wall Street Journal, 49% of self-described conservative Latinos preferred Democrats to control Congress, 9 points more than Republicans. In September 2022, 73% of conservative Latinos support Republicans in Congress as opposed to 17% who prefer Democrats, a 56-point GOP advantage.

"They don't like the socialists," Hank Sheinkopf, veteran Democratic political consultant and president of Sheinkopf Communications, told Fox News Digital about the Latino community. "They don't like the abortion argument being thrust at them on a constant basis. They don’t like the crime. They don’t like the chaos. And they’re responding."

Sheinkopf added that Democrats "always" do worse than they think they are going to do when "chaos" is occurring in the United States and warned that Democrats are "failing to understand" that abortion is not the "end-all be-all."

They don't like socialists?  No kidding.  They have seen what socialism does to countries, whether it's Cuba or Venezuela or even Argentina, where a heavy dose of statist policies has killed a country.

They don't like chaos or crime?  Why do you think that they came here in the first place?  They want order, a stable currency, and the rule of law.  No criminals back on the street or drugs threatening their teenagers.  No first-graders being lectured on gender equity.

They don't want to hear about abortion all the time?  Who does?  The Hispanic community is very religious, and abortion is not how you get their votes.

You can tell that the Democrats are in trouble when a strategist brings up "messaging":

Jose Aristimuño, a Democratic strategist and former deputy national press secretary for the Democratic Party, told Fox News Digital that Democrats "need to do a better job at all levels in making sure that we message to Latinos on the things that they care about."

Yes, where have we heard that before about messaging? Actually, it's not the messaging, but the message itself.  It's the old story about putting lipstick on the pig.  It's still a pig!

Of course, it does not help Democrats that inflation is killing families.  They don't like inflation, either!

The Democrats do not need a better spokesperson or brand name change.  The message will fail as long as it sounds as though they're all running for the city council of San Francisco.

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Image: Marcelo Montecino via Flickr.