As national Republicans prioritize reaching Hispanic Americans and other minorities for the 2024 cycle, they are facing a significant setback: Most of the Hispanic community centers launched in the last election cycle are closed.
Twenty community centers were opened during the 2022 cycle. Now only five are open, two of them having been opened in 2023, according to the Messenger, which said the Republican National Committee confirmed the closures.
The RNC said its budget goes through the chair’s term. When all leases ended after Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s term ended in 2022, it made sense to seek new locations for some of the community centers this cycle, the RNC told the Messenger.
There are plans to reopen centers at several swing state locations: Las Vegas, Nevada; Tuscon, Arizona; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Allentown, Pennsylvania. The five currently open centers are in New York, California, and Texas, but the RNC said it plans to open 40 community centers in several Hispanic, Asian Pacific, black, Native American, and Jewish communities, as well as ones with large populations of veterans.
“Democrats have taken the Hispanic community for granted for far too long, no amount of money spent will change the fact that Biden is a disaster for our community, from the economy, to the border and rising crime,” Jaime Florez, RNC Hispanic communications director, told the outlet. “Republicans will continue to make historic investments in Hispanic voter outreach, from opening more community centers to launching ‘Deposita Tu Voto’, that will further our gains with Hispanic voters and deliver Republican victories in 2024.”
However, some Hispanic voter groups are wary of the RNC’s plans for reopening community centers. Daniel Garza, executive director of LIBRE Initiative, a grassroots conservative group, reportedly said the community center launch was a cautionary tale about testing experiments before rolling them out.
“In this case, they went big, and it sounds like they didn’t get the response from the community they intended,” Garza said. “That’s OK. They tried; we appreciate that. But you have to have people on the inside who can advise you — these are long-term things that need to be backed by resources.”
“There’s intent and then there’s the reality that smacks you in the face,” he added.
Those who work closely with Hispanic communities say outreach depends on long-term investments and intentional programming and cannot rely on short-term efforts for a few months.
Republican sources told the outlet that the community centers may have been closed due to the party’s financial troubles caused by a drop in donations and funding. The party had $9.1 million cash on hand in November last year, the lowest amount for the RNC since February 2015, according to Federal Election Commission reports reviewed by the Washington Post. The RNC dismissed the idea that finances were considered when closing the centers.
Democrats, on the other hand, boasted double the amount of cash on hand in the same period at $17.7 million. President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and other Democrats have been working hard to sway Hispanic voters who have pulled away from the party. Exit polling from the 2022 midterm elections showed that while black, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific Islander voters trended toward Democrats overall, Hispanic and Asian support for the GOP jumped 10 points and 17 points, respectively. Black voters shifted to the right by 4 points.
The national GOP will still move forward with its Bank Your Vote campaign and its Spanish-language equivalent program, Deposita tu Voto, to reach Hispanic voters for the 2024 election.
Some of the community centers will move, such as the McAllen, Texas, center being replaced with a new location in Edinburg. Democrats argue the shuttering of the centers after a few months contradicts Republicans’ promise to lasting and meaningful relationships with the Hispanic voting bloc.
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“That makes sense because they said they had a presence in San Antonio, but we never saw them really doing anything with the center,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) said. “We won more races in Bexar County in 2022 than we’ve won in 40 years.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the RNC for comment.
