Old and busted: Republicans pounce®! New hotness: Republicans steal! The Hill changed its headline — without noting the change first — but its original take on GOP success in outreach to Hispanic voters lives on in its URL, and in its tweet.

I’ve screencapped it rather than trust that the tweet will remain up in its original version:

I’ve heard of progressives putting ethnic demographics on an electoral plantation, but I’ve never seen that embraced quite so enthusiastically before.

Besides, how would Republicans go about “stealing” Hispanic voters? Er … talking with voters, becoming part of their communities, and representing their political, economic, and cultural issues, it seems. (Man, if only someone had written a book about that …) This actually works to convince voters to support a party, especially when the other party spends its time imposing its own vision of economics, culture, and politics rather than listen:

Republicans are actively courting Hispanic voters in key competitive House districts, hoping to peel away voters from Democrats repeating their historical pattern of investing little and late in reaching out to Latinos.

The GOP’s approach is a danger to Democrats as Hispanic voters are likely to play a key role in at least a dozen districts in 2022.

“It couldn’t be a starker contrast between Republicans and Democrats as we engage and do outreach to minority voters, and specifically the Hispanic community,” said Danielle Alvarez, communications director for the GOP. …

The centralized GOP outreach stands in contrast to a Democratic machinery that’s built a broad network of grassroots organizations and a solid power base in the 36-member Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), but has struggled to inculcate an “early and often” Hispanic outreach mantra in its upper echelons, like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee or the House Majority PAC.

The expanding GOP outreach, led by Hispanic Republicans, is eroding an image Democrats had cultivated of having a virtual monopoly on Hispanic representation.

Democrats cultivated that image because it wasn’t too far removed from reality, especially between 2004 and 2016. GOP messaging turned off Hispanic voters and their share of that demo fell from a high of 44% for George W. Bush to 29% in 2016 for Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton won 65% of the Hispanic vote in that cycle, although Trump got some shifts in key districts and precincts in 2020. Democrats won 69% of Hispanics in the 2018 midterms. Joe Biden even won 65% of Hispanics in 2020 even with some of the marginal inroads Trump had begun to make in that demo, for that matter.

However, that was based on Biden being a centrist dealmaker, not an incompetent progressive windbag that proceeded to immediately touch off an inflationary wave through an unnecessary stimulus bill and idiotic energy policies. Instead of tempering his party’s cultural progressivism, Biden went full tilt into it with repeated references to “Latinx” voters. That kind of cultural imperialism hasn’t worn well over time with Hispanics, especially in this economic environment, and perhaps even more especially in the Southwest during the border crisis that Biden himself touched off.

Jill Biden’s “breakfast tacos” comment in itself probably doesn’t matter, but it’s emblematic of how Democrats talk down to Hispanics rather than bothering to engage with them:

If all you know about Hispanic culture and “diversity” are “bogedas” and breakfast tacos, then you don’t know much at all — and clearly, you aren’t bothering to learn more.

And Hispanics are clearly noticing. In the latest Pew poll, for instance, Joe Biden gets a 46/52 job approval rating from Hispanic voters after winning 65% of them less than two years ago, which is worrisome enough for Democrats. They may be more concerned by the damning-with-faint-praise 57/42 Biden gets from black voters, who had been nearly in lockstep with Biden until this year. That’s the demographic whose disappearance would spell utter catastrophe for Democrats, even more so than Hispanics, which is why Democratic cultural messaging has been entirely centered around CRT-related themes along with LGBTQ messaging on gender — hence the “Latinx” label, an obsession with Black Lives Matter in urban cores that excludes Hispanic concerns, and gender theory nonsense that plays very poorly in culturally conservative Hispanic communities, and so on, even apart from the economic corrosion that Biden has created.

Josh Kraushaar saw the same trend in the recent NYT/Siena poll:

What’s happening: House Republicans boast this year’s class of new candidates is the most diverse in history.

• The NRCC notes that 29 of its 75 House targets have a Hispanic population over 15%.

In the Times/Siena poll, Ds hold a 20-point advantage over Rs among white college-educated voters — but are statistically tied among Hispanics.

• Hispanic voters backed Democrats by a nearly 50-point margin in the 2018 midterms. In the 2016 congressional elections, Dems lost white voters with a bachelor’s degree.

Republicans aren’t “stealing” Hispanic voters. They’re engaging with them because Democrats have made it clear that they aren’t a priority.  That doesn’t even qualify as pouncing on the part of the GOP, but rather a good sign of competent politicking. Finally.