Jennifer Medina

Nevada will be the third state to vote in 2020, with its caucus coming just 11 days after the New Hampshire primary. And voters in California, which sends 495 delegates to the national convention, will start casting early ballots in the Democratic primary soon after the Iowa caucuses begin.

As more than a dozen candidates made their way through the states this weekend for campaign rallies and marathon candidate forums, there were near constant reminders about why each could make more sense to lead the charge to pick the party’s nominee for president.

There are more Latinos in Los Angeles County than the total population of the state of Iowa, as a moderator pointed out at the start of a forum on Latino issues in Los Angeles Sunday morning. Nevada, already a majority-minority state, is also home to one of the fastest-growing Asian American communities in the country.

“I don’t think it matters what happens in New Hampshire or Iowa, which are not representative of the country,” said former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, speaking to reporters before the state Democratic Party’s “First in the West” event Sunday night, which featured speeches from 14 candidates. “The press focuses on those two states, and I think they do that to the detriment of our country.”

Reid, the former Senate majority leader, has long been a champion of boosting Nevada’s influence in the primary season by pushing it further ahead in the calendar. Still, it remains a state where politicians occasionally need to be reminded about how to pronounce its name — Ne-VA-da, never Ne-VAH-da. And the concern about potentially being looked over is so great that “we matter” is now both a hashtag and rallying cry to signal that Nevada voters deserve the same kind of attention lavished on those in other early states.

“Nevada is eclectic, in a way that Iowa is just not,” said Nazia Junejo, a physician in Las Vegas who immigrated from India 30 years ago. “We live in a city where people come from all over the world. We used to feel comfortable, but now we’re just not. Now people are scared, and we understand that.”

Though the candidates’ basic stump speeches remain largely unchanged whether they’re in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Long Beach, California, the questions they face can be entirely different. For every question about farm subsidies or ethanol in Iowa, here they comb over the granular details of housing policies and immigration enforcement.

In a series of forums in California and Nevada this weekend, candidates offered a glimpse of how they were pitching themselves to an electorate that is less white, more likely to be represented by a labor union and often more liberal than crowds in New Hampshire and Iowa.

With his signature call for a political revolution, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont received a rowdy welcome in both California and Nevada.

“The truth is that this country faces an unprecedented moment in our history with enormous challenges before us,” Sanders said in Las Vegas on Sunday. “And tinkering around the edges just won’t do what has to be done. In this unprecedented moment in American history, we need an unprecedented response.”

Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts and the latest candidate to enter the race, received a lukewarm reception through much of the weekend, in his first major events since starting his campaign. California Democrats greeted his five-minute speech with a collective shrug, and those in Nevada had mostly left the room before he began his remarks, the last of 14 candidates who spoke Sunday night.

But the leading candidates were more enthusiastically welcomed. Former Vice President Joe Biden had the most raucous section of the ballroom in Las Vegas, entering to a thundering marching band and letters spelling out “NV 4 JOE” decorated with twinkle lights. (While Iowa may be known for its steak fries, the biggest night in Nevada politics had no food but plenty of glitz and poker chips.)

“The risk of nominating someone who wouldn’t beat Trump is a nation and a world our children and our grandkids won’t want to live in,” Biden told the crowd, leaning on one of the central arguments of his campaign. “I can beat Trump. I can beat him.”

Campaign aides were not abuzz over the latest poll in Nevada, which showed Biden ahead of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders. Instead, they were focused on the latest numbers from Iowa, where Pete Buttigieg has begun to take a commanding lead. Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, faces significant skepticism in Nevada and especially California, where he is far less known outside of donors backing his bid.

To the crowd in Las Vegas, Buttigieg touted his health care plan as better for unions, who have fought for paid heath care during contract negotiations for years.

“If you are a culinary worker who negotiated a plan you like, you should have the option to keep it,” he told them.

At the California Democratic Convention in Long Beach on Saturday, candidates were pressed for detailed specifics on immigration policy. Asked about the possibility of sending U.S. troops to Mexico to fight against drug and gang violence, Buttigieg said he would be open to considering it.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who arrived at the forum late after her staff said she was stuck in traffic, declared herself a “Sangeleno,” a portmanteau of her former home in San Francisco and her current status as an Angeleno.

“The last time I looked, one in two Californians was born outside the United States or has a parent who was born outside the United States, myself included,” Harris told the crowd Saturday.

At the Latino Issues forum the next morning, Harris said she believed Immigration and Customs Enforcement needed to be radically restructured, calling it the most dysfunctional federal agency.

Julián Castro, the former housing secretary who is calling for Iowa to lose its long-held distinction as the first-in-the-nation nominating state, said issues such as immigration and transportation would be more of a consistent focus in the campaign if states like Nevada, with significant urban populations, voted sooner.

Though Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota typically casts herself as a Midwesterner who wins Midwestern votes, she carefully tailored her speech to the Nevada crowd, praising Reid and mentioning victims of the 2017 mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip.

Biden and Warren spent much of their weekend in Nevada, holding campaign rallies. But both sat out the California events, as he held a fundraiser in Portland, Oregon, while she campaigned in Iowa.

Rusty Hicks, chairman of the state party, derided the choice as “misguided” and a public snub of California and Latino voters.

Their decision showed “blatant disregard and disrespect to California’s grassroots leaders who make the phone calls, knock the doors and give the money in swing districts and swing states alike year after year after year,” he wrote on Facebook.

Asked about her decision to skip California, Warren said that she was not ignoring any group of voters, pointing to the time she spends speaking with them on her selfie line as one bit of evidence.

When she stepped onstage in Nevada on Sunday night, Warren reiterated her call for “big, structural change” on issues like health care, taxes and government corruption.

“We’re not going to change it by a nibble here and a little bit of change over there,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

Voters in West Bemoan Iowa's Grip on Primary Season

LAS VEGAS — Want to understand Iowa’s outsize role in selecting the Democratic presidential nominee? Just come to the West, where anyone in Nevada or California will tell you: We are the voters presidential candidates should be paying more attention to.

But from the moment she sat down on set to tape her appearance, she did not stop herself. At the top of the show, Noah ripped off his shirt to reveal a leopard print leotard, a crowd-pleasing reprise from his long-ago appearance on “Dancing With the Stars.” Then, when the senator joined him, he grew more serious.

“A lot of people say you were one of the winners of the last debate,” Noah began, addressing his guest. “Do you get a trophy? What do you get for winning a debate?”

There was a half-second pause before she began.

“Well, I’m hoping I get to dance with you in that outfit,” she said, as the audience exploded with laughter again. “I’m thinking at the end of the interview.”

In the end, there was no dancing and no trophy for Klobuchar. But her late-night TV appearances, including on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” Tuesday; last month’s debate; and time out on the trail all point to a different kind of bragging right: Klobuchar is funny.

Wry, wholesome, self-deprecating, sometimes hokey funny, but funny. She has comedic timing, occasional deadpan delivery and a more than occasional wink to reveal just how hilarious she thinks she is.

This is all part of Klobuchar’s approach: She sees humor as a strategy, a way she can disarm an opponent, charm a voter and, she hopes, undercut President Donald Trump on the debate stage. “When things are so divided in politics, it helps to warm things up a little bit and find something that people agree on,” she said in an interview.

Shortly before Klobuchar declared her own presidential bid earlier this year, Abigail Bessler, her 24-year-old daughter, an amateur stand-up comic herself, somewhat sheepishly reminded her mother about the senior thesis Bessler wrote at Yale. The topic: the use of humor in presidential politics and the “Path to Power Through One-Liners, Talk Shows and Tweets.”

“Should an orator want to stir up laughter?” Bessler asked in her thesis. “The answer is a fairly resounding yes.”

Additional gems from the paper, written to complete a degree in political science, include:

“Humor can be used as a political weapon: to attack opponents, inoculate oneself from criticism, establish one’s good humor and more. Through comedy and wit, a politician can reduce audience scrutiny of arguments by appealing to their emotions and allowing them to discount any messages they might disagree with as ‘just a joke.’”

Sitting with her daughter over plates of dumplings and sweet potato fries before her “Daily Show” appearance, Klobuchar spoke in great detail about the way she thinks about her own humor and power.

Do not call it “mom humor,” a term Klobuchar disdains because, she said, it implies she is not actually funny. Never mind the fact that Klobuchar poked fun at her own mothering during a nationally televised debate, describing herself “meddling” in her daughter’s weekend social life. “In my mind as a mom, it’s not lame at all,” she quipped.

(As for “dad humor” — Klobuchar said that while her husband, John Bessler, is constantly trying out new jokes and offering her new material, nine out of every 10 of his attempts are more likely to make her laugh at him, rather than with him.)

Klobuchar’s brand of comedy is a clean, “aw, shucks” approach that conveys her own background as a Midwesterner, a mom and a slightly exasperated politician. She laughs easily, at herself and others, and can recall dozens of her successful zingers.

At a campaign stop in Virginia last week, she recounted her personal favorite: On her first Senate race, scrounging to find money any way she could, she started calling up men she once dated.

“I raised $17,000 from ex-boyfriends,” the joke begins. “That is not an expanding base.”

The first time she delivered it, she said, was in liberal Los Angeles during a fundraiser at Danny DeVito’s home. Initially, she presumed it was the kind of racy humor that could only go over well in Hollywood. But slowly, she began trying it out on Midwestern crowds and found that it got peals of laughter there too. When she delivered the monologue in 2009 at a Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., the $17,000 ex-boyfriend fund made its way into her remarks there too.

“True story!” she added then. “I know that is the record in the Senate, but in the House it’s held by Barney Frank,” she said, referring to the then-congressman of Massachusetts. The joke got roars of laugher, including from Frank. (One reporter at the time called her speech “bring-down-the-house funny.”)

President Barack Obama would later joke at then-Sen. Al Franken’s expense, saying that the professional comedian was the “second funniest” senator from Minnesota.

There’s an addition to the joke now: Klobuchar declines to say how many boyfriends chipped in.

More recently, she has been particularly fond and proud of an exchange she had with Trump soon after she announced her presidential run. Noting the inclement weather as she stood outside talking about fighting global warming, Trump tweeted that by the end of her announcement speech, she “looked like a Snowman (woman).”

“I wonder how your hair would fare in a blizzard?” she wrote back on Twitter.

For months, Klobuchar made the joke part of her stump speech. But she mostly retired it after Noah made a clip reel showing her using the hair joke several times. (Recycling is, as Noah no doubt knows well, a familiar aspect of the comedian and politician’s playbook.)

The campaign has provided plenty of fodder for new material. On “The Late Show” Tuesday she said the backstage atmosphere at the debates was more friendly than competitive. So much so, she joked, that she’s passed notes on the edge of the stage, where the lower polling candidates are placed.

“We were kind of down there in the corner,” she added, referring to the candidates, herself included, who are largely stuck in the single-digits. And she had no problem laughing during a clip Colbert played showing a cartoon version of Klobuchar screaming at other candidates.

A former aide did recall one joke that fell flat publicly: During a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, Klobuchar asked Kagan whether she was on team Jacob or Edward, a reference to the “Twilight” series that was popular with teenage girls at the time. Klobuchar was simply trying to lighten the mood, but Kagan looked at her blankly and replied, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

Like any comic, Klobuchar said she is constantly looking for and testing out new material, learning quickly what works and what doesn’t. Her daughter often provides suggestions that Klobuchar accepts, though the opposite seldom happens, the two said.

Another recent favorite is one comparing herself to Melania Trump, at her own expense.

“She was born, it’s true, an hour away from where my relatives were from in Slovenia. And every time I look at her, it’s like looking in the mirror,” the joke goes, which reliably gets laughs.

Many of her jokes are so goofy, the listener just has to laugh. When three campaign volunteers in New Hampshire recently lined up, each holding a letter of her name, Klobuchar reacted with some glee.

“Look what they can do with my name,” she told a radio reporter. “Have you seen this? Let’s make yam!”

There were some chuckles. “And then we could do May,” she went on. “It just shows a kind of broad support. We have the yam vote.” (A call to the U.S. Sweet Potato Council confirmed that, unfortunately for Klobuchar or any other anagrammatical political aspirants, the association does not endorse candidates.)

During a recent tour of a manufacturing facility at Nashua Community College, Klobuchar paid careful attention as an instructor showed her how a machine created a metal fastener. Then, like a stealth class clown, she interjected: “I have a real desire to pull this emergency stop — maybe it’s because of Washington right now.” (Klobuchar did keep her hands off the machine.)

Later that evening, she stepped into a hotel conference room, where a Halloween-themed wedding was set to take place. She took in the scene of black tulle and pumpkins, wondering aloud whether a witch was getting married. Then she began, unprompted, to talk about her own personal favorite Halloween costume: when she dressed up as “Purple Rain” in law school.

Like a proud mother, Klobuchar said she has read her daughter’s political comedy thesis more than once and even passed it on to John McCain and Mitt Romney, who are both mentioned in the paper. And Klobuchar has used several of her daughter’s humorous videos, which Bessler began creating after her mother called urgently asking for “something viral.”

But asked whether she was taking any advice from the thesis, the answer was a firm no. She would not, she said, be hiring any joke writers, as other candidates have done. Still, knowingly or not, she is taking a page from her daughter’s research.

Several academic studies “showed voters’ increasing attention to comedy shows over hard news sources, and found that candidates’ appearances on late-night shows increased voter knowledge more than morning shows,” Bessler wrote. “Politicians appeared on entertainment shows more and more to reach out to voters, and consultants knew an effective parody could change the course of a campaign.”

The Punchlines Amy Klobuchar Uses to Keep Voters Laughing

There were three hours to go before Amy Klobuchar would take the stage with Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show,” and she had no jokes prepared. After several late-night appearances she had learned one thing: It’s the host’s job to bring the comedy, not hers.

But whatever the language, one thing was clear: Democratic attitudes toward Israel are shifting in the highest echelons of the party.

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls spoke at a national conference hosted by J Street, a liberal lobbying group that describes itself as “pro-Israel and pro-peace.” Thousands of progressive Jewish activists gathered at the two-day conference, as candidates answered questions about what they would do to end the Israeli occupation in the West Bank as well as restart negotiations between Palestinians and the Israeli government. Such negotiations have long been at a standstill.

But the questions went beyond what is known as the two-state solution, which would grant Palestinians statehood — an idea that many see as far-fetched or impossible under the Trump and Netanyahu administrations.

In a sign of how far the Trump administration has changed the conversation around Israel, several Democratic candidates said they were open to withholding aid from Israel if it annexed more land in the West Bank. Speakers at the conference repeatedly referred to what they called racist policies in both the United States and Israel. None of the candidates did so in more personal terms than Sanders, who opened his speech by referring to his own Jewishness, his time living on an Israeli kibbutz, and his father, who immigrated from Poland to escape anti-Semitism.

“It is not anti-Semitism to say that the Netanyahu government has been racist — that is a fact,” Sanders said, receiving enthusiastic applause from the audience.

“I’m very proud to be Jewish and look forward to being the first Jewish president,” he said, adding that Jews “have suffered for century after century.”

“If there is any people on earth who understands the danger of racism and white nationalism,” he said, rising from his chair to deliver each answer. “It is certainly the Jewish people.”

He went on to say that the Israeli government should not be given “carte blanche” for spending the roughly $3.8 billion it receives in military aid.

In 2017, the Trump administration moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, and formally recognized Jerusalem as the country’s capital, a move that broke with decades of U.S. policy.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, said that the group’s polling showed that the vast majority of Democratic voters supported both Palestinians and Israelis but did not approve of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has backed settlement expansion and annexation of more of the West Bank.

In some quarters, any criticism of Israel is seen as a political risk that could leave candidates open to accusations of anti-Semitism.

“It shouldn’t be hard to be against bad policies and against anti-Semitism. Those are table stakes,” Buttigieg said. “You can be committed to the U.S.-Israel alliance without being supportive of any individual choice by a right-wing government over there.”

J Street college activists have been pressing the Democratic Party to add to its official platform explicit language opposing Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and a “commitment to Palestinian rights.”

Buttigieg also appealed directly to the young activists in the room.

“Mathematically, it is within the lifetime of anybody in college today that the situation in Israel, for Israelis and Palestinians, will either reach some kind of harmony, or catastrophe,” Buttigieg said. “You will live to see one of these two things happen.”

Former Housing Secretary Julián Castro received sustained applause from the audience when he said that he would reestablish a consulate in East Jerusalem that would serve as an embassy for Palestinians under a two-state solution.

“I am glad to see in this Democratic Party that the voices of folks who are concerned about the rights of Palestinians has emerged recently stronger,” Castro said, speaking after Buttigieg. On the question of whether he would withhold aid from Israel, Castro said it “wouldn’t be my first move.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota also spoke at the conference, and declined to answer a question about military aid, saying only: “It’s not a good idea to negotiate these things right now.”

Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado also attended the conference and echoed his refrain that Democrats have moved too far to the left to attract swing voters, including on foreign policy.

The race’s two leading candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, did not attend the conference, citing scheduling issues. But each of them recorded a video for the group, in which Warren repeatedly referred to the occupation, but Biden did not.

Ben-Ami said in a speech to the group Sunday, the first day of the conference, that “there is simply no question under international law that Israel is an occupying power.”

“Gradually over these decades, a one-state reality has emerged between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an area where today well over 13 million people live, slightly less than half of whom are Jewish,” Ben-Ami said.

He said that the group would continue to ask all candidates “what steps are they willing to consider should the occupation continue to deepen and the government of Israel consider formal annexation of all or parts of the West Bank.”

Klobuchar said at the conference that she did not support Netanyahu’s promise to annex more of the West Bank, but declined to say whether she would be willing to withhold aid if the Israeli government proceeded with such plans. She also defended her vote on legislation that would penalize groups that support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

“It just showed to me what Mitch McConnell is trying to do all the time: Instead of bringing people together for support of Israel on a bipartisan basis, he and President Trump are always looking for those wedges, a way to do things that creates wedges, instead of bringing people together,” Klobuchar said. “I think it has been very negative. And I’m not just talking about one vote. I’m talking about how the prime minister’s visit was handled, as everyone remembers that.”

2020 Democrats at J Street Conference Reflect New Tone on U.S.-Israel Relations

WASHINGTON — Pete Buttigieg on Monday compared Israel’s relationship with the United States to that of a close friend — one who needed and should accept more guidance. Bernie Sanders put it in starker terms, saying the United States should demand more from Israel.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was the only top tier candidate who missed the event, having declined the invitation after suffering a heart attack last week, though he addressed the group by video before the forum began.

The CNN LGBTQ town hall featured questions from the audience, which was filled with activists and many health and social work professionals who work in the gay community. The questions included topics such as family leave for gay couples, violence against transgender individuals and the conflicts between religious freedom and LGBTQ rights.

“There has to be consequences for discrimination,” said Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Booker, who was the first candidate at the forum, declined to directly answer a question about whether he would withhold money from private schools that discriminate against students based on gender identity or sexuality.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and the first openly gay major presidential candidate, released an 18-page plan hours before the forum, saying he would rescind the policy that blocks military veterans from receiving insurance coverage for gender reassignment surgery, and add non-binary gender options on federal documents, including passports.

Protesters calling for more attention on violence against the transgender community interrupted Buttigieg almost immediately after he began speaking.

Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor who was interviewing Buttigieg, said that the protesters should be applauded, noting that there was a long history of protest in the community. Buttigieg echoed the sentiment when he began speaking again.

“There is no right or wrong way to be gay, to be queer, to be trans,” he said. “I hope that our own community, even as we struggle to define what our identity means, defines it in a way that lets everybody know that they belong among us.”

Buttigieg also talked about his own process of coming out.

“What it was like was a civil war, because I knew I was different long before I knew I was gay,” he said. He also spoke in personal terms about donating blood, which is prohibited for men who have sex with men. “I can’t lead by example on this one, because my blood is not welcome in this country.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts also released plans Thursday, saying that she would restore many Obama-era policies that the Trump administration has eliminated and crack down on “overly broad religious exemptions to nondiscrimination.” Warren also said she would ban so-called conversion therapy.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California pledged Thursday to appoint transgender and gender-nonconforming people to her Cabinet and to the federal judiciary.

Julián Castro, the former housing secretary under President Barack Obama, has included transgender men in his reproductive health plan, saying that they too need access to abortions, a move that was welcomed by transgender advocates, who have said they were often left out of health care plans.

The candidates’ proposals make clear that they largely agree with one another on LGBTQ issues and are making considerable efforts to court voters from the community. And the plans also show just how far the party has moved in the last decade.

When Obama ran for president in 2008, he said he was opposed to same-sex marriage. That same year, California voters approved Proposition 8, a ballot measure that made same-sex marriage unconstitutional in the state. (In 2012, Vice President Joe Biden said that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage, a stance Obama did not adopt until later that year.)

“When I came out,” Biden began to say Thursday, referencing that decision. “Er, when I publicly stated,” he said, to roars of laughter from the audience. Biden then went on to talk about how dramatically attitudes toward the LGBTQ community had changed. “The idea is normal,” he said. “It’s normalized, it’s not strange.”

Alphonso David, the president of Human Rights Campaign, said that the candidates would differentiate themselves by explaining how they would implement their plans.

“It’s very nice to say that you support LGBT equality,” David said, speaking to reporters before the forum began. “How? How are you going to do that? How are you going to effectuate change? How will you effectuate change in a way that’s sustainable? How were you going to stop transgender violence?”

Today, 61% of voters say they support gay marriage, according to the Pew Research Center. But the support is somewhat split along party lines, with fewer than half of Republican voters supporting same-sex marriage, compared to three-quarters of Democrats, according to Pew. There are roughly 11 million LGBTQ voters, according to Human Rights Campaign, and 57 million voters who consider themselves allies.

And the overall shift in public opinion has not translated to across the board gains for the LGBTQ community. The Trump administration has banned transgender individuals from serving in the military, prohibited embassies from flying rainbow flags, and is fighting a case in the Supreme Court that could rule that employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status is prohibited under the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Several Democratic candidates, including Booker and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, have said they would reverse the transgender military ban. Each of the participating candidates have also said they supported passing the Equality Act, federal legislation that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

During the previous LGBTQ forum this year, Biden was pointedly questioned about his previous votes backing the bill that instituted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military, as well as the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage in 1996.

The entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who will both participate in the debate next week, declined the forum, citing scheduling conflicts, according to the event organizers.

Nine Democratic Candidates Speak at CNN LGBTQ Forum

LOS ANGELES — In a sign of how gay rights have become an essential part of the party’s platform, nine Democratic presidential hopefuls participated Thursday evening in the second forum of this primary season that focuses on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.

Her sons wholly embraced the lesson about political power — they both ran for and won elected office in their 20s — but they were never quite as impassioned as all the Chicano activists they had spent time with as children, rarely using the language of their mother and her political friends.

With Trump’s pitch to voters relying on attacks on Mexicans and immigrants, Castro has abandoned any reluctance to use the vocabulary of activists, increasingly speaking in terms that have surprised even his mother.

On Monday, he traveled to Matamoros, Mexico, where hundreds of asylum-seekers, in limbo under the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy for migrants, have created a tent city. He crossed into Brownsville, Texas, with a dozen people who were asking for an exception to that policy — people who he said were either disabled or victims of assault because of their sexuality or gender identity. The 12 asylum-seekers spoke with border officials for three hours, and then were turned away.

“It only made me more confident that this policy is born out of cruelty, to force these people to self-deport back to wherever they’ve come from,” Castro said Monday evening.

Reflecting on his maternal grandmother, who immigrated from Mexico in the 1920s as a 7-year-old orphan, he added: “I see in the children my grandmother’s face, and I know that there is potentially a life that can be saved or changed forever,” he said. “I am living that directly right now.”

The visit and his comments echo the tenor of his 2020 campaign, where he has taken stances on health care and immigration, including decriminalizing illegal border crossings, that would have been shunned by much of the Democratic Party just four years ago.

For Castro and other second- and third-generation immigrants, who came of age as Latinos seemed to be gaining political, cultural and economic influence, the Trump era has been a stunning reminder that attacks on people who look like them resonate loudly among people who don’t — and that all of those gains may be elusive. In interviews, Latino politicians across the country said that, for the first time in their lifetimes, it feels as if their Americanness is being called into question.

The mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, this summer, in which the gunman said he had targeted Mexicans living in the border city, underscored that fear and anger.

Castro said last month that he senses a great deal of anxiety remaining after that attack.

“There’s an urgency we need to respond with,” he said. “We have a president attacking Latinos and immigrants. There’s a real sense of going back, so of course I need to address that.”

But in a community as diverse as Latinos in the United States, there is not universal agreement. A small but vocal minority of Hispanics are steadfast supporters of Trump and dismiss any suggestion that he has encouraged racist attacks with his rhetoric.

Recent polls of Latino voters show, however, that the overwhelming majority believe they are facing increasing threats and view racism as a pressing issue. A Univision poll showed that 87% of Latinos who are registered to vote view racism as a significant issue, the highest percentage in nearly a decade, and some 66% of voters surveyed said they were “very worried” there would be another mass shooting “targeting people based on race or country of origin.”

Rosie Castro, 72, once urged a reporter not to confuse her sons’ politics with hers — she was more radical. But during the September debate, she was pleased by Julián Castro’s aggressiveness, and hopes it is a tone that he sticks with, especially in the debate next week.

She grew up at a time when Mexican Americans were banned from living in certain neighborhoods in her native San Antonio, and restaurants hung signs that read “No dogs or Mexicans.” Drawing lessons from the civil rights movement, Chicano activists in the 1960s and ’70s staged protests and walkouts throughout the Southwest, demanding access to better housing, education and political power.

“During my own time and the time of the ’60s, for me much of what I did came out of anger — it was just a raw deal for our people,” she said. “I think that with my sons, there is no need to come out of anger. They come out of an educated place, an experienced place — not to say that they can’t get angry, but they’re coming out of an understanding how public policy is made and in a strategic way.”

She then quickly added, of the current president: “You got a man who took everything and turned it on its head. Is there more of a reason to be angry? Of course. He’s talking about us and he’s talking about our people.”

Castro is the only Latino candidate in the 2020 presidential race, and in recent weeks he has seemed to lean into this role: His campaign has posted images on social media of him in a thumping lowrider, calling for a country with taco trucks on every corner and selling Chicano tattoo-inspired merchandise.

Still, he is careful not to be pigeonholed by his ethnic identity, even if he is eager to take on the president’s rhetoric.

“I’m being called on to speak to these issues, because of Trump, because of what he has said and done,” Castro said. “There is a characterization of us as other, as not belonging. This has been a turning point for Latinos because you have such high profile scapegoating so bluntly.”

When he was a member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, Castro rarely spoke out on immigration and did not take a public stance against the administration’s approach. By contrast, during his presidential campaign, he has repeatedly criticized the Obama administration’s deportation policies, saying he has “learned from those mistakes.”

On the campaign trail, Castro appears confident, eager to project an image as a polite but steadfast warrior for his liberal positions. But even as he courts left-leaning primary voters, polls have consistently shown that he is struggling to build a base of support. He has not yet qualified for the November debate and has suggested he may drop out if he does not make the stage.

As a child in the 1970s, Castro spent hours with his mother and her friends, Chicano activists in a deeply divided South Texas.

Frustrated by the lack of attention from local Democrats, Rosie Castro and her friends eventually formed a third party, La Raza Unida, in an effort to get Chicanos elected to public office. Castro ran for City Council as one of the party’s candidates.

She lost, but her twin sons went on to unquestionable success, enrolling at Stanford University as undergraduates, then at Harvard Law School and eventually reaching the highest echelons in politics: Julián Castro was appointed to Obama’s Cabinet, while his brother, Joaquin Castro, serves in Congress.

During the 1990s and 2000s, while the Castros were pursuing their political ambitions, there were significant improvements for many Latinos: more attended college, more were elected to public office, more gained economic and cultural power.

During his time on the San Antonio City Council and as mayor, in a city which is now 60% Latino, Castro maintained a reputation as a reserved pragmatist — very different from the kind of activist politics his mother adopted for decades.

Like his peers, he built a career that was shaped not only by where he had come from but also by the opportunities he had been able to access.

“We were all part of that first generation who had access to opportunity,” said Lorena Gonzalez, a California state legislator who attended Stanford around the same time as Castro. “But we suffered from our own privilege — we can have all these degrees, we can all go to law school, but we’re still seen as a Mexican who doesn’t belong here.”

Many in the Latino community did feel a brief sense of progress and optimism after the election of Obama, who promised immigration reform during his first months in office, said Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who graduated from Harvard and served in the Marines.

“There were all these anti-immigrant laws, and there was a hesitancy among many Hispanics to say it was racist or had racist intent,” Gallego said, referring in particular to Arizona’s 2010 law, which required law enforcement officers to determine an individual’s immigration status during a stop or an arrest. “Now you’ve seen a big evolution with the Hispanic community openly attacked — a lot of us realize that it has nothing to do with immigration, but it has to do with skin color.”

Lou Correa, a Democrat who has represented Orange County, California, in Congress since 2017, and considers himself a moderate, said that in his two decades in politics, he has “never felt comfortable with any label other than American,” and has “always resisted being labeled the Mexican candidate and Latino.” Now, even in his district where 66% of residents are Hispanic, he finds himself “having to justify the presence of Mexicans and Latinos in this country.”

“We didn’t start this fight, we were called out to fight when we’re told immigrants are criminals, so all of the sudden it is something we must do,” he said.

It’s a fight that Rosie Castro is pleased to see her son taking on as a presidential hopeful. When she talks about his campaign, she can hardly hold back her inner activist and stage mom.

She has often bristled at the fact that both of her sons are expected to answer questions about immigration, but are sometimes ignored on education or health care. After each debate, she has one piece of feedback on how Castro did: “I don’t think he gets enough questions asked.”

Later this week, she will get to answer some questions herself.

Decades after she brought her young sons to political rallies and meetings, Castro now attends them on her sons’ behalf. On Wednesday, she will make her first foray outside of Texas, campaigning for Julián Castro in three-day swing through Iowa — the perfect job for a stage mom and veteran political activist.

A Son of an Activist, Castro Finds It's Time to Raise His Voice

SAN ANTONIO — When Rosie Castro’s sons, Julián and Joaquin, were still in elementary school, she took them to countless political meetings in San Antonio, hoping they would learn to see the world as she did: a place that needed Mexican American voices, like theirs, fighting for representation in the upper echelons of power. A place that needed them to speak with urgency about civil rights and racism.

Several days into her rookie duties in late November, with all of the 244,393 ballots in the district counted, the race was officially called: She lost the election. Gil Cisneros, her Democratic opponent and a former Republican who ran on preserving Obamacare, captured 51.6% of the vote. Kim would not be a member of the 116th Congress.

Less than six months later, Kim announced she would try again. Now, the rematch between Kim and Cisneros will test how blue the 2018 wave in Orange County really was. Republicans hope that after the narrow loss, they can reclaim the district and two others in the county, which encompasses the birthplace of Richard Nixon and has long been a bastion for conservatives.

“This district is not as far left as many political pundits in Washington would like people to believe,” Kim said in an interview. Soon after the loss, Kim began discussing the possibility of running again with her husband, who is also active in local politics, and their four adult children. It was almost a given that she would try again. “Winners don’t quit,” she said. “That’s why I got back in — we know we can.”

The rematch has a lot in common with the first time Kim and Cisneros ran against each other. But that time he was running as a moderate, almost highlighting the fact that he had been a registered Republican a decade ago, while she made every effort to distance herself from the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Now, impeachment proceedings are underway.

Last week, Cisneros, a Navy veteran, joined several of his colleagues with military backgrounds to call for an impeachment inquiry.

For months, Cisneros was one of the few Democratic freshman from California not to back an impeachment inquiry. It was rare, he said, that a constituent raised the impeachment issue with him, though he was confronted by one such voter during a recent town hall. And though national polls released late last week showed public support shifting, there is no clear indicator that an impeachment investigation would be widely embraced by voters here.

“I’m not worried about that right now,” he said in a phone interview. “We thought it was the right thing to do. This wasn’t the Mueller report, this is about national security and that will be clear to the American public.”

Like many Republicans in competitive districts, Kim has so far stayed silent on the impeachment inquiry and declined an interview request.

President Donald Trump is despised among much of California, but he remains popular among many Republicans in the state. And Kim has walked a careful tightrope: She frequently distanced herself from the president during the 2018 campaign, though she now says his record is “pretty good.”

“A lot of people agree that the economy is the number one issue for them, and Donald Trump is doing the right thing in this area,” Kim said, adding that many voters in the district tell her they support his efforts to dismantle many federal regulations. “That’s a key issue for all voters and especially women,” she said. “We’re going to need to focus on the results.”

The district straddles northern Orange County, eastern Los Angeles county and a slice of San Bernardino — suburban areas that have become popular places for immigrants and their children to settle. Demographically, the area has transformed: The district is roughly evenly split between Asian-Americans, Latinos and whites. Like Kim, many were drawn to the area because of its schools and newer homes, and their influence is clear at strip malls all around the region: Kim’s last campaign office was flanked by Taiwanese and Oaxacan restaurants.

“National issues here are local issues,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, which released an extensive survey Wednesday showing that Trump’s approval rating hovered around 30% in the region. “With demographic changes have come changes in attitude, not just about immigration but also on issues like the environment and taxes.”

For years, Kim was a district aide to Congressman Ed Royce, and she decided to run almost immediately after his retirement announcement. But with an open primary, there was no guarantee that a Republican would advance to the general election and the national party initially stayed out of the race.

As Democrats rallied to capture several seats in Southern California during the midterms, many Republicans saw the brightest star in Kim, who routinely mentions her experiences as a Korean-American immigrant and mother of four. Kim’s candidacy could be traced to Republican efforts after the 2012 election to recruit more candidates of color.

This time, top party officials have rallied behind Kim. The National Republican Congressional Committee listed her as a possible “Young Gun” — a show of confidence in her ability to run a successful campaign — which will lead to more donations and resources. And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who represents Bakersfield, praised her even before she decided to run again.

Kim believes that more Republicans will be motivated to vote with Trump at the top of the ticket, but at the same time, the political landscape does not seem more favorable to her.

There have been signs of a continued shift away from the Republican Party even since the midterms. As of last month, registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans in Orange County, though the opposite is true in the 39th Congressional District.

“They are being more realistic,” she said of Republican leaders. “Mine is one of the top priority races for them,” she added, pointing out that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom lost in the district, though he won in a landslide statewide. “That means if you have the right candidate, this is a Republican district.”

Kim likes to refer to her life story as an American Dream: Her parents left Korea in the 1940s and raised their children in Guam and Hawaii. Kim, who was born in South Korea and spent her early years in Seoul, often served as their translator. After graduating from the University of Southern California, she opened a women’s clothing manufacturing company with her husband, eventually leaving it to work for Royce, as a liaison to the Asian-American community in the district.

“For the longest time, the Republican Party has been the party of opportunities and I’m an example of that,” she said.

Historically, the party has not cultivated people with her background for political opportunities, though that has changed dramatically in the past several years, particularly in Southern California, where several Asian-American women are running as Republicans in 2020.

But Kim bristles at the suggestion that she is being embraced simply because of a demographic imperative. “The party looks at us as qualified individuals who happen to be immigrant women. They are supporting me because they feel I’m the best candidate, not because of my background.”

Still, Kim said, Republicans need to do much more to reach out to Asian and Latino voters. She pointed to chronic challenges with homelessness, for example, and the rising cost of living in California as problems created by Democrats. And if all anyone wants to talk about is impeachment, change the subject.

“Just tell them about the issues they care about," she said, “regardless of what they feel about our president as a person.”

Can Young Kim Help Turn Orange County Red Again?

LA HABRA, Calif. — When newly elected members of Congress traveled to Washington for freshman orientation in late November, Young Kim, 56, flew from her Orange County home to join them. Not all of the ballots in California’s 39th Congressional District were counted, but Kim believed her narrow lead was solid. After shaking hands with other members at white-tablecloth lunches, she posed for her official portrait and a group photo of all new members. Kim was expected to be one of two Republican...

President Donald Trump came to New Mexico on Monday night for a rally aimed at demonstrating his support among Hispanic voters, and many did come to hear him — enthusiastically waiting for hours in the blazing sun.

Some said they were political loners among friends and family who were ardent Democrats. Others came from a long line of Republican voters.

“We are American,” said Martha Garcia, 65, who moved to New Mexico from Southern California two decades ago. She said she voted for Trump in 2016 and agreed with much of his rhetoric about the need to curb immigration.

“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” she added, echoing a refrain typically used by immigrant rights activists who support more liberal policies than those of the Trump administration. But Garcia said she would not support any changes that would make it easier for people to enter the country. “We need to take care of the people who are already here.”

In New Mexico, Hispanics make up 47% of the population — more than in any other state in the country. (In California, the figure is about 40%.) Trump is deeply unpopular with most Hispanics in New Mexico, and those who do support him are unlikely to have a decisive electoral effect there. But brown faces were not hard to find at this week’s rally, held in Rio Rancho, a suburb of Albuquerque.

The Hispanic Trump supporters drawn to the event were not single-issue voters. They said they were pleased with the president’s judicial appointments, especially judges who support curbing access to abortion, and the Republican Party’s stance on gun rights. They praised Trump for tax policy that they said had put thousands of dollars in their bank accounts.

Still, interviews with more than a dozen Hispanic voters at the rally, most of whom said they belonged to families that had been in the United States for at least three generations, revealed that their support for the president was most closely tied to his immigration policies, strictly limiting new arrivals.

Most said they did not feel a connection with recent immigrants or Central American migrants currently stuck in Mexico as they try to seek asylum in the United States. Instead, they saw them as foreigners who could not assimilate.

Dee Chronis, 49, was born and raised in New Mexico and identifies as Hispanic; she recently took a DNA test that showed her ancestors were largely from Spain, she said. Her daughters, ages 13 and 9, came with her to the rally, each decked out in Trump 2020 manicures.

She spoke about recent immigrants in stark terms. “They’re not nice, they’re always angry, they expect things,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with them if they come in and blend in, speak our language.”

Trump began his presidential campaign deriding Mexicans as rapists and criminals and has made anti-immigrant rhetoric a key part of his pitch to voters. But for Hispanic supporters at the rally, the overall takeaway from that rhetoric — directed at people who might look like them — is clear: He is not talking about me.

And while Trump supporters are clearly in the minority among Hispanic voters, it would be a mistake to presume Hispanics universally condemn the president’s language. Chronis and other supporters said they believed Trump’s rhetoric protected Hispanics like them because it emphasized their American nationality over their ancestry.

While the campaign has officially labeled its outreach effort “Latinos for Trump,” all of those interviewed eschewed the label and instead identified as Hispanic, which emphasizes ties to Spain and the Spanish language instead of Latin America, and is a term that is often more readily embraced among conservatives.

RIO RANCHO, N.M. — Some wore it proudly emblazoned across their chest: Latinos for Trump, though they would rarely use the ethnic term to describe themselves. A few forcefully emphasized that they were Hispanic, wielding it as if were a badge that proved they could not be racist, even as they said racism was a manufactured problem. For many, their identity was something of an afterthought.

Jennifer Medina

Articles written by the author

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