CNN sounds the alarm: Hispanic midterm support not solidifying for Dems

You’ve heard it all before. Trump’s racist, Trump’s evil, Trump’s hates …well… pretty much everyone. That’s been the non-stop drumbeat of CNN’s 24/7 news coverage since before Hillary Clinton collapsed (figuratively, of course) during the run-up to the 2016 election. If you were one of the folks in charge of the 40-year-old news network, this had to be a bitter pill to swallow. Remember Wolf Blitzer dancing at the Dems’ convention? Remember the all the snarky anti-Trump election coverage? Remember all the predictions? Trump’s victory simply wasn’t supposed to happen. So, you spent two years trying to damage him any way you possibly could.

“The midterms,” you thought. “We’ll destroy his party in the midterms and he’ll be impeached! Surely, they’ll pay attention this time!” Uh-oh. According to a new report at CNN, at least one segment of the presumed anti-Trump midterm vote isn’t materializing.

Democrats have hit an unexpected speed bump in their drive to regain control of Congress: unsettling signs that the party may not generate as much turnout or support among Latino voters this fall as it expected. Despite a procession of provocations from President Donald Trump — from ending deportation protections for so-called “Dreamers,” young immigrants brought to the country illegally by their parents, to his now-terminated policy that resulted in children being separated from their undocumented parents at the border — a growing number of Democratic strategists are privately concerned that their candidates are not consolidating Latino support as much as they anticipated in several key races.

Allow me to translate that last bit from its native, unintelligible, CNN-speak. What they’re really saying is: “Despite the fact that we spent years coughing up an endless stream of news stories telling you that you’re supposed to hate Donald Trump, you Latinos haven’t been listening. We’re very important and we don’t understand how you can possibly ignore our epic 700-day rant.”

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In case you didn’t get the message, they’ve even outlined some places where people are, apparently, doing a little too much “thinking on their own.” There is, CNN suggests, still time to turn this around. While cautioning that there is still time to reverse the trend, they point to signs of wavering Hispanic support and engagement in House districts in Texas, Nevada, Florida and California, and in Senate races in Texas, Nevada, Florida and Arizona. “I still think it’s a little too soon to push the panic button, but having said that, we are not seeing the types of numbers with Hispanic voters that we should be seeing with the most hostile person to ever hold public office against Hispanics as the President,” said Fernand Amandi, principal at Bendixen & Amandi International, a Democratic polling firm that specializes in studying Latino voters. “And that in and of itself is a concern. I’m flabbergasted.” This basically translates to: “How dare you ignore our tribalist identity politics? We simply can’t understand why you’re not acknowledging our superiority. You’ve been told what to think, and yet you’re thinking other things!” They may be claiming that there’s no need to panic, but the sheer fact that this article exists at all would indicate otherwise. There’s simply no way this story would have run if things weren’t genuinely dire. Hardest hit by this news must be CNN itself. Just last week there was encouraging news about rising African-America support for Trump, and now we have this. Soon CNN will have no option but to acknowledge that their influence has been waning along with their audience.