LULAC's Garcia on Town Hall: Hispanic Vote Up for Grabs Read Newsmax: LULAC's Garcia on Town Hall: Hispanic Vote Up for Grabs | Newsmax.com Urgent: Do you approve of Pres. Trump? Vote Here in Poll

Bill Hoffmann

Newsmax

Oct 19, 2019

Next week’s LULAC-Newsmax Presidential Town Hall in Des Moines, Iowa, will show Americans that the Latino vote is truly up for grabs, LULAC president Domingo Garcia told Newsmax TV Friday.

LULAC — the League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organization — is co-sponsoring the Town Hall with Newsmax TV.

“We represent over 60 million Latino Americans who are part of the American dream. At this event, we are going to be listening to the Democrats and their vision,” President Garcia told Newsmax TV’s John Bachman on “Newsmax Now.”

“But we also want to know hear what the Republicans are going to do. Our vote is really up in the air for whichever party has the proper plans and proper issues that will appeal to us as to what they can do to bring every family up into the American mainstream.”

The special live two-hour presentation will air live on Newsmax TV from 8 p.m. ET, and is expected to draw more than 500 eligible and registered Latino voters in the Des Moines area.

The Town Hall will focus on issues important to all Americans, but also the impact policies have on the Hispanic electorate.

Expected Democratic presidential candidates include Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.

Among the issues that are most important to Latinos, according to Garcia, are health care and immigration.

“Health care affects all Americans, but going back to the Hispanic family, the fact of the matter is every family is just one terrible illness or injury away from bankruptcy and that’s not the way it should be – and so how the candidates address this is going to be important,” Garcia told Bachman.

“And of course immigration is a guiding campaign issue. We have Democrats who go from different extremes and different positions, and we want to know what they going to do. Are they going to build the wall or are they going to stop the wall? Are they going to provide Dreamers with the opportunity to legalize their status in the United States?

“And what are we going to do with the 3,500 veterans who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq who are being deported because they got a DWI or a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge?”

Garcia noted LULAC is non-partisan and looking to support politicians — from either party — with the right answers.

For instance, he said, “I’ve been to the White House and met with Jared Kushner and Sen. John Cornyn who are trying to find a bi-partisan solution to immigration reform.”

Garcia said contrary to what many Americans believe, many Latinos lean conservative.

“A lot of Latino families are anti-abortion, they are very strong about supporting the military and law enforcement, very strong about family values in the church,” he said.

“I’m in Texas, and our governor Greg Abbott ... got 35 percent of the Latino vote. He has a Mexican-American wife and they went out there and they went after the Latino vote and they got a good chunk of it.”

And he noted that Latinos may have the most diverse voting record of all in the United States.

“In Florida, for example, a lot of Cuban-Americans tend to vote Republican and conservative, while in California and Nevada, Mexican Americans tend to vote for the Democratic side over the Republicans,” he said.

The participation of LULAC — the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization with the mission of empowering Hispanic Americans and building strong Latino communities — comes as the group has made voter registration a top priority and works to identify and register Hispanic voters across the state.

LULAC, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is made up of 1,000 councils around the United States and Puerto Rico. The group has worked with other nonprofit groups to more than double the number of registered Latino voters in Iowa over the past 15 years, from 23,000 to 53,000 which led to a significant turnout during the 2016 Iowa Caucuses.

LULAC’s broadcast partner is Newsmax TV is America’s fastest-growing cable news channel.

Newsmax TV is now carried in more than 70 million cable homes nationwide — including on DirecTV, Comcast Xfinity, Dish, U-Verse, Fios, Charter (Spectrum), Optimum, Suddenlink and more than three dozen other systems.