Every week, new polling data confirm the Hispanic community’s growing frustration with President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s policy agenda. And every week, Washington insiders and political pundits try to unpack the “mystery” behind the trend.
Except, it’s not a mystery. In fact, the cause of their frustration is obvious: It’s the economy.
One recent survey commissioned by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council tells the story. The main issues driving Latino voters’ thinking are those driving everyone else’s thinking. The economy is far and away their largest concern. Specifically, it is Bidenomics’s crippling high inflation, interest rates, and prices.
The narrative in Washington says these problems are natural phenomena, like the weather. But everyone, including Latinos and especially small business owners whose livelihoods are tightly connected to the broader economy, knows better.
They know the Biden administration’s 2021 debt-financed spending spree fueled a generational inflation crisis. They know that Biden’s regulatory fanaticism has unfairly increased their cost of doing business. They know he has raised taxes on businesses still trying to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic while also giving handouts and bailouts to favored special interests.
And they know that the economic hardships small businesses face today — high borrowing costs, high prices, customers tightening their own belts, red tape restricting their every move — were a choice.
The economy is the way it is because Biden and his allies in Washington have made it this way with their poor policies.
It should come as no surprise then that only 35% of business owners polled, and only 27% of Hispanic business owners, said Bidenomics has been good for their business. Fewer than 1 in 3 Latino entrepreneurs reported having an “extremely” or even “somewhat” positive economic outlook.
I’m a small business owner and can tell you that inflation, high prices, and regulations are a heavy burden. The economy might be adding jobs, but it is still desperately hard to carve out success beyond simply getting by. We struggle to support our customers’ needs, our staff, and our dreams.
Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy — creating more than half of all new jobs. Hispanic Americans already account for 36% of business startups — and a staggering 70% of them launched only with entrepreneurs’ personal savings. Apply these numbers to Latinos’ growing share of the U.S. population, which is expected to rise to 29% in 2050 from 17% today, and the scope of Hispanic entrepreneurism’s impact on America’s economy and politics comes into clearer view.
Bidenomics is about picking winners and losers, tilting the playing field for political cronies, putting rules and bureaucrats between buyers and sellers in the market, and using taxpayers’ hard-earned money to do it. This approach has failed over the last three years, just like it has failed every time it has been tried, everywhere in the world — economically and politically.
The days of Democrats, or any party or candidate, taking Hispanic votes for granted are over. Recent polling from the LIBRE Institute found nearly 60% of Hispanics disapprove of Biden, a number that has grown since the same poll was conducted last year. A whopping 88% of Hispanics think the American dream will be harder to achieve than in previous generations, and much of that opinion is based on inflation and the economy.
Hispanic voters all over the country are deciding elections up and down the ballot. And contrary to the Beltway conventional wisdom, that decision will not hinge on the single issue of immigration, and certainly not on a distorted media narrative about it.
Latinos do not want pandering. They want opportunity.
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They want to be able to work and to start and grow businesses. They want to be able to save and invest. In their careers, their neighborhoods and churches, their children’s education, and every walk of life, they want the kind of freedom America has always promised to all her citizens — regardless of their race, creed, color, or nation of origin.
For three long, hard years, Bidenomics has ignored that fact. Entrepreneurial Latinos and their families and communities have disproportionately suffered because of it. Come November, they will have their say — and politicians up and down the ballot would do well to hear our concerns before then.
Jose Mallea is chief executive officer of The LIBRE Initiative and founder of the Biscayne Bay Brewing Company.