Like many Colorado voters, Tony Gomez isn’t a fan of either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Clinton makes him uncomfortable, he said, and Gomez objects to the language Trump uses when talking about Latinos and immigrants.
But the foreman said that up until Wednesday he had been willing to give Trump a shot because of his economic message — at least until recently.
“I thought he was for the working man and his main goal was to create jobs and help businesses. I support that,” said Gomez, surrounded by a crew of mostly Spanish speakers busy with shovels and bulldozers at a downtown Denver construction site.
“But the more he talks, the more it sounds like he only wants to create jobs for white folks, and he doesn’t get that deporting all these people at once will be bad for a lot of businesses,” Gomez added.
Itap a response that extends beyond the “mostly” right-leaning 53-year-old grandson of immigrants. Latinos make up about a fifth of Colorado voters, making them an important though elusive voting bloc with relatively low rates of registration and turnout. Clinton supporters are rushing to register Latinos here while the Trump campaign says its message will resonate with them in November — despite weak polling.
To several Latino leaders, Trump’s immigration speech on Wednesday represented a turning point. After hinting he might soften his position, Trump used the prime-time address to again blame immigrants for violence — “countless innocent American lives have been stolen,” he said — and reiterate his call for a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The speech led one member of his National Hispanic Advisory Council to resign and prompted several other Latino backers to rethink their support — all while raising the question whether Trump had lost his last, best chance at wooing new Latino voter.
Patrick Davis, the Trump campaign’s Colorado state director, thinks Trump’s message has found a home in the Rockies.
“Mr. Trump’s plan to end illegal immigration by building a wall, ending catch-and-release and tripling the number of enforcement agents is resonating very well with Colorado voters, as it stands in contrast to the Hillary Clinton plan for expanding the executive amnesty Obama enacted and weakening immigration enforcement,” he said.
“Coloradans are tired of Washington politicians doing nothing to secure our border and they are pleased that Donald Trump has made ending illegal immigration a top priority in this campaign.”
Not all Republicans feel that way, however.
in June as the Republican National Committee’s head of Hispanic media relations, a position that required her to defend Trump’s policies. CNN reported that it was because of her concerns about Trump. She was replaced by Helen Aguirre Ferré.
In Colorado, where Trump already faced a deep hole with Latino voters, a top aide to former President Ronald Reagan said Trump’s platform would have been unpalatable to that Republican administration.
“Trump would never have had a chance of being part of the Reagan Revolution,” said Linda Chavez, a Boulder resident who served as the in the Reagan White House and later chaired the National Commission on Migrant Education under President George H.W. Bush.
Reagan granted amnesty to 2.7 million undocumented immigrants who were in the country before 1982 when he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986.
“Reagan understood that to have a functioning national economy you need all kinds of workers to do jobs most Americans won’t do for what the job pays,” she said. “A person with a college education isn’t going to pick peaches in Palisade for a few dollars an hour. Those workers aren’t here.”
Latinos make up about 21 percent of Colorado’s population but only of its eligible voters, and turnout is traditionally low. Several organizations are trying to change that — and increase the muscle of the state’s Latino community.
Recent polls reflect the steep climb Trump faces in Colorado.
One pollster with Quinnipiac University cited the state’s large Latino population as a key reason why in an August survey of likely Colorado voters. A subset of that poll showed non-white Colorado voters preferred Clinton to Trump by 35 percentage points — .
“In Colorado, with a burgeoning Hispanic population, Donald Trump’s comments about Hispanics seem to have put the state out of his reach,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, in a statement.
Another August poll of Colorado found similar results. Clinton among the state’s Latino voters, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist survey.
An exit poll conducted by CNN in Colorado a found that 75 percent of Latino voters supported President Barack Obama — more than triple the 23 percent who voted for Republican Mitt Romney.
Priorities USA — a pro-Clinton Super PAC — recently announced it would spend $3.5 million to encourage Latino turnout in Colorado, Nevada and Florida as well as black voters in Florida.
Another super PAC called Immigrant Voters Win — which is funded by liberal mega-donor George Soros — has steered $3 million for outreach efforts in the state. The aim is to target more than 100,000 Colorado Latinos by Election Day.
Trump supporters are undaunted.
In an interview with the Denver Post Wednesday, before Trump’s speech, the RNC’s Aguirre Ferré said there are plenty of other issues that Hispanics would favor in a Trump presidency, including school choice, a focus on more jobs, particularly manufacturing jobs.
“Faith and family is one of the issues that’s absolutely critical,” she said.
Illegal immigration, she said, suppresses wages for many Hispanic workers who are here legally.
“Hispanics don’t want to be pandered to,” Aguirre Ferré said. “We have to be open and honest about the problems facing our nation.”
She said Trump merely says what many people are thinking but won’t articulate.