To Republicans and conservatives, the Hispanic vote must seem like a big ol’ football, just waiting to be booted through the electoral uprights. Hispanics are natural Republicans, we’re told. They’re hardworking, industrious, entrepreneurial, family-oriented, and socially conservative, just like Republicans!

Yes, yes, we say. Yesssss. And then, each time the first Tuesday in November rolls around, the Hispanic vote goes overwhelmingly to the Democrats. In this respect, we’re like hapless Charlie Brown, and Lucy is a lovely Latina. She’s holding that infernal pigskin, flashing those doe-eyes, and goading us to take just one more running start at it.

This time, she says. I promise.

Uh-huh.

Something’s clearly happening, though. Perhaps it’s the perfect storm of a wildly incompetent and unpopular Democrat standard-bearer and a leftward political lurch that Hispanics can simply no longer tolerate. Something’s happening. As The Hill reports:

A Wall Street Journal poll released last week showed Hispanic voters evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, and while that poll’s data faced substantive questions over its tiny sample size, its results sounded alarm bells among Democrats nonetheless.

“I think that both parties should always have a sense of urgency in communicating with Hispanics, Latinos,” said Ivan Zapien, a Democratic lobbyist and former executive director at the Hispanic Leadership Council of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

“Do I think that Democrats’ heads should be on fire over this issue? Yeah, I do. I think that their head should be on fire over this issue every day regardless of what polls say,” he added.

Longtime liberal political analyst Ruy Teixeira is of a similar bent. “The Democrats are steadily losing ground with Hispanic voters,” he writes. “In the most recent Wall Street Journal poll, Hispanic voters were split evenly between Democrats and Republicans in the 2022 generic congressional ballot. And in a 2024 hypothetical rematch between [Donald] Trump and [Joe] Biden, these voters favored Biden by only a single point. This is among a voter group that favored Biden over Trump in 2020 by 26 points.”

We first wrote about this phenomenon last September, before the presidential election, when a lot of attention had been focused on the black vote — especially the black male vote — moving subtly but perceptibly toward Donald Trump. But the Hispanic vote had gone largely unnoticed — unnoticed, that is, by everyone except Trump himself. He worked hard to court that vote, and in many places he got it. This was especially true in Florida, which he won handily, and in Texas border towns, many of which are overwhelmingly Hispanic and went solidly into his column.

And this was the guy who ran on building a wall.

More recently, Hispanics have begun to register their deep dissatisfaction with Joe Biden. Just like everyone else. In a September Quinnipiac poll of Hispanic Texans, for example, Biden is way underwater, with just 37% approving of the job he’s doing while 55% disapprove. Wow.

“Keep on calling us ‘Latinx,’ guys,” quipped political strategist Giancarlo Sopo. “It’s really working!”

Ah, Latinx, that trendy new word coined by white leftist academics to accommodate the gendered nouns of the Spanish language. It’s pronounced luh-TEE-nex, and it sounds stupid to everyone, including Hispanics. As columnist Rich Lowry writes: “Out in the real world, ‘Latinx’ polls even more poorly than Joe Biden does. A Politico poll found that only 2% of Hispanics prefer the term, while 68% opt for Hispanic and 21% favor Latino or Latina. The term is considered offensive to 40% of respondents and 30% said that they are less likely to support a politician or group using it.”

Apparently, the Left has been slow to get the message. And perhaps that’s precisely the sort of condescension helping to push Hispanics away from the Democrat Party and toward the Republicans. Oh, the Democrats’ incompetence on the economy, their inability to keep inflation under control, their coddling of pressure groups like Black Lives Matter and antifa, and their anti-cop, pro-criminal policies — these are also very serious issues. Hispanics, after all, can look south of the border and see a future that they’d rather not have replicated in their own United States.

And perhaps they’re beginning to think — and vote — accordingly.

Perhaps.