For a party that is desperately trying to retain Latino voters who are fleeing to Republicans ahead of midterms, let's just paraphrase President Trump a bit about Democrat outreach efforts to these voters: "they are not sending their best."

Actually, it's one blunder after another from the Democrats in their Latino outreach, each of which amounts to an insult more likely to repel than attract Latino voters to the Democrats.

The latest was in Arizona, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon:

A new Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ad aimed at wooing Latinos says Democrats "strengthened Arizona by investing in small businesses." The business to which the ad subsequently cuts is almost certainly not in Arizona, or even America — its prices are listed in euros.

The DCCC released the ad Monday as part of a "six-figure digital advertising campaign to reach Latino voters," the group said in a press release. During the spot, a narrator says Democrats supported Arizona entrepreneurs by investing in local businesses. But the restaurant to which the ad cuts is by no means local — its menu lists an array of overpriced options in euros. A goat cheese platter, for example, will set customers back 11 euros, while an avocado option costs 10.50 euros. Should an Arizonan want to visit the eatery, however, the cost would be much higher. The cheapest flight from Phoenix to the European Union is $750, according to online travel agency Kayak.

Ignore the pricing in euros for a minute.

Are they saying the average Latino-owned small business is a chic European-style café serving up pricey coffee and croissants, and not Mamacita's taco truck, or Manuel's landscaping service?  Small Latino-owned businesses, which account for 17.9% of Arizona's 500,000-plus small businesses, are far more likely to have homey business names such as those than bear the names of chi-chi Euro-style cafés. 

Oh, sure, some Latino-owned businesses undoubtedly have the fancy setups, maybe in downtown Phoenix or Scottsdale, but most small businesses in a state like Arizona, where 99.4% of the businesses are small businesses, are by necessity set up with the most practical of names and purposes, and serve communities throughout the entire state, not just the urban centers.  Unlike the Euro café, which would take some bank or venture cash to set up with all the decorations, one of the leading complaints of Latino-owned businesses in Arizona is that they lack access to bank capital and start-up capital.  That is why the names and setups are more likely to be improvised than sleekly polished and capitalized Euro cafés.

A phony upscaling of the Latino small business image isn't going to appeal to Latino voters, who know "fake" when they see it, particularly with the easily spotted euro-pricing of the video.

Democrats don't know Arizona's small business climate very well, do they?

The Beacon notes that this is far from the only blunder the desperate Democrats have been making around Latino voters.

There was Jill Biden comparing Latino voters to breakfast tacos, which is so hackneyed that it comes off as racist, like comparing black people to watermelons.

In the wake of the Jill Biden fiasco, there also was this:

Days later, the DCCC released a radio ad targeting Texas Hispanics, which argued that even though Democrats "seem so out of touch," they aren't as bad as "these Republican extremists." The ad was routinely mocked by liberal Latinos in the Lone Star State — Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha called it "the worst ad I've ever heard," while a Texas Young Democrats member said the spot was "so cringe."

Add onto it the failures of Democrat policy — the recent badly misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" touts some $300 million in Green New Deal spending, which is an issue that ranks at rock bottom among Latino and most other voters, as it is basically a subsidies bill for the wealthy.

The flip side of that bad bill is 87,000 new IRS auditors — to go after small businesses, with audits and even guns, to pay for it.  Latinos form a huge section of the small businesses in Arizona and all throughout the Southwest.

Guess who gets audited the most these days by the IRS!  You guessed it: Latino small businesses.  I'll post a chart shortly --- Update: here.

Tin ear, anyone?

The blundering seems to stem from not just a monolithic view of Latinos as victims with tacos.  It stems from a worldview that doesn't really know any Latinos, let alone Latino voters.

Here's the latest scandal about Democrats' perceptions of Latinos, as noted by Alfonso Aguilar, Mike Gonzales, and Joshua Trevino, writing in The Hill:

A new Latino exhibit at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) offers an unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion and economics. It is, quite frankly, disgraceful. Its only redeeming quality is that it makes clear why the forthcoming National Museum of the American Latino must not be funded.

It was a mistake for Republicans to have gone along with passage, in late 2020, of the National Museum of the American Latino Act. They were misled by liberal proponents who told them the museum would be fair.

Some of us who joined a letter in support of the bill, after being asked to sign by promoters, now feel badly let down that the museum is being used to advance an ideologically biased narrative about the Hispanic experience in America. Some of us foresaw what would happen and warned for years that this museum would become a hothouse to curate grievances against the United States. This is exactly what this exhibit is.

Congress must now correct that error by refusing to fund the museum — of which the current exhibit is an explicit preview. The exhibit, and the museum it previews, are profoundly disconnected from the actual Latino experience and cultures in the United States. It elevates only leftist ideologues, celebrates transexual activists, denigrates Christianity, denounces capitalism, condemns the West, portrays the United States as iniquitous and oppressive and badly distorts history. 

So they've got Latinos pigeonholed as wokester victim stories with a full-blown Castroite, Liberation Theology, and Hugo Chávez write-up of U.S. history.  Never mind that many Latinos are in this country now because they fled those foul regimes.

Couple it with an earlier blunder of theirs, renaming Latino people "Latinx," which is an English corruption of the Spanish language cooked up by wokester academics, and no wonder Democrats can't connect with Latino voters.

It's as if Latino voters live on another planet to them.  You can't get more out of touch than this string of blunders.  And yes, there are a lot of them, signaling that they haven't been paying attention to Latino voters for a long time.

One can only hope that these Laurel and Hardy, Beavis and Butthead Democrats keep spending their cash on Latino outreach with soft-shoed consultants with this kind of talent.  They'll have the entire Latino voter base in Republican hands in no time.

Image: Suthir via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.