On today’s BradCast: After the recent Republican National Convention, LULAC has decided they’ve had enough. They are coming off the sidelines for the first time in their nearly century-long history to endorse a Presidential ticket. [Audio link to full show follows below.]
Over the past week, Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, with her “joyful warrior” running mate, MN Gov. Tim Walz, have been barnstorming battleground states with rallies attracting 10,000 or 15,000 people at every stop. Her poll numbers are soaring (the NYT/Sienna poll, which has been very friendly to Donald Trump in recent months, now puts the Harris up by 4 points in each of the Democrats’ key, must-win “Blue Wall” states (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) and both major labor unions and civil rights groups are jumping on board the train to endorse the Democratic Presidential ticket.
But, on Friday, the political arm of one such civil rights group, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s largest and oldest Latino advocacy group, did something they haven’t done in their nearly 100 year history: they endorsed a Presidential ticket. In this case, they are tossing in for the Harris/Walz ticket.
We’re joined today by former LULAC President and current Chair of the LULAC Adelante PAC, DOMINGO GARCIA, to explain why the group finally decided, through a unanimous vote, they had to get off the sidelines and get into this fight against the menace posed to the nation — and specifically to Latinos — by Donald Trump.
“We saw the rhetoric coming from ex-President Trump saying that he was going to deport 15 million people; he was going to build these mass concentration-deportation camps; he was going to have the Army go door to door and ask people for their papers. These are just bizarro, weirdo ideas,” Garcia tells me. “Then we saw the visions of the Republican National Convention, of people [holding signs] saying ‘mass deportations’. We were saying, ‘Whoa, these guys have gone to the extreme far-right, with almost neo-Nazi Klan mindsets that need to be stopped.”
Garcia explains why the group, which was founded after WWI, and considered one of the more conservative civil rights groups, finally learned to believe Trump after his campaigns in 2016 and 2020.
“We take Trump at his word now,” says Garcia, noting they didn’t believe Trump in 2016 that he was going to separate children from their parents. “And he did! We did not believe him. We did not think there was anybody capable of that kind of cruelty,” he explains, recoiling from the sight of two and three-year olds in prison buses. “It was so shocking that that was happening to America. To have a repeat this cycle — we support securing the border; we support opening up legal immigration and cracking down on illegal immigration — but doing it in this sort of evil, cruel way, using immigrants for fear-mongering, scapegoating, and as his political pinatas, we said we have to put a stop to that.”
Garcia believes that LULAC has the reach to stop Trump, particularly in battleground states like Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the Latino populations easily overcome the margins in the Presidential races over the last two cycles.
Among the other points Garcia speaks to on today’s program…
- The Trump Campaign’s response to their endorsement by charging LULAC is out of touch with Latino voters.
- What might explain the apparent increase in Latino support for Trump over the past two cycles.
- What LULAC thinks of the very conservative border security bill agreed to by the Biden-Harris Administration with Senate Republicans, but then scotched by Trump to keep the so-called “border crisis” alive as a campaign issue for him.
- What his group hopes to see Harris do moving forward from the current Administration’s policies as they apply to Latino voters and their families.
FINALLY, as Harris/Walz continue to climb in the polls with their hopeful, positive campaign — in contrast to Trump’s dark, dystopian message — listeners ring in on the addition of Walz to the ticket, and the madness of Trump, who now says that the tens of thousands turning out for Harris/Walz rallies is actually fake and being done by Artificial Intelligence. Yes, he is really claiming that the numbers that the Democratic ticket is drawing for rallies — and caught on video by thousands of people — is actually somewhere between zero and 1,000 or so, but for the use of A.I. to hoax the public into believing tens of thousands were there instead. Seriously. That’s what he now says…
Who dunnit (Here Come De Conservative Judges – 14).