The Latino Victory Fund is celebrating Ralph Northam’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election and is promising to release more anti-Southern ads in future races:
“With Democrat Ralph Northam winning Virginia’s fiercely competitive governor’s race Tuesday night, you would think that would mean a sigh of relief for the Latino group that inserted itself into the last week of the campaign, drawing harsh criticism over an ad that showed a pickup truck with a Confederate flag and a bumper sticker for Republican Ed Gillespie chasing down minority children.
But Latino Victory Fund, which briefly ran the ad early last week, says it will instead double down on its strategy.
The group, which works to elect Democrats, argues that this type of messaging campaign serves to defend the Latino community against ads like one from Gillespie that highlighted the danger posed by MS-13 gang members, which the group said promotes suspicion of Hispanics at large. …”
Here’s why we hope they keep this up:
1.) First, Establishment Ed lost because of suburban White women and healthcare. If he had won every Hispanic vote in Virginia, he would have still lost by 5 points. Immigration was a winning issue for Gillespie. He ran anti-MS-13 ads and still managed to win 32% of the Hispanic vote.
2.) Second, White Southerners are going to look at these anti-Southern ads and wonder why Hispanic groups are playing identity politics and organizing to advance an ethnic interest, but it is immoral for us to do the same. These kind of ads will stimulate racial and ethnic consciousness among Southern Whites and make it easier for the Alt-South to say we are just playing identity politics too.
The Latino Victory Fund ad depicts White Southerners as racist murderers with nothing better to do than to terrorize immigrants. It is saying that politics is about tribal identity. Ed Gillespie is a mainstream conservative, but his MS-13 ad essentially said the same thing. Politically, this was a boring race between two establishment candidates, but culturally it could have downstream effects.