40 percent of Democrats said Latinx bothered or offended them, and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician who uses the term.
Fernand Amandi and other Democrats and Latino vote experts said that the survey results raise questions about how effectively the party is communicating with Latino voters.
The firm that advised Barack Obama on his Hispanic outreach said that using Latinx is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no electoral harm. It's a word that's preferred by 2 percent but offends 40 percent of the voters we want to win.
Amandi was not blaming the erosion of Latino support for Democrats solely on the use of the word Latinx. He said that Hispanics have started shifting right because of more aggressive engagement from Republicans who have politicized culture war issues at the margins with Hispanic voters.
The term Latinx started to expose a fault line in the party between moderates and more activist progressives as some on the left began embracing it. Latinx is not a product of the U.S. left or white elites, but is a reflection of Latin America and Latinos. It is also an alternative to Hispanic, a term that is criticized for its ties to Spain.
Latinx has grown in popularity in recent years, despite the fact that it doesn't follow the gender binary in the Spanish language.
Spanish is a gendered language, with the words ending in A for the feminine and O for the masculine. Masculine nouns are usually preceded with "el" or "un", while feminine nouns are used with articles. Latino's use the masculine language when referring to a group of mixed-gender people. Men should not be the default when talking about a mixed-gender group, according to those using Latinx.
Spanish words don't end in the letter X, which is pronounced "eh-kees", and some Spanish speakers argue it's difficult to know how to pronounce Latinx in their native tongue.
The term has become more politicized in recent years as the right has increasingly highlighted its use in an effort to portray Democrats as too out of touch or at least worthy of ridicule. In June, President Joe Biden was mocked by conservatives for saying that it was hard to get Latinx vaccine as well. Biden used the term during last year's presidential race.
The first Hispanic to hold the office of Virginia Attorney General said the word Latinx makes him cringe.
He told POLITICO that by using the incorrect term Latinx, progressives are engaging in a type of cultural Marxism. Latino people don't use the term because it's only used by upper-educated white liberals. They lose another Latino vote every time they use the term Latinx.
The rally in Glen Allen, Va., was held by the man known as "jason Miyares".
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, said that the word is overblown to say that it is a reason Republicans made inroads. They made inroads because they started talking to Latinos who they never talked to before.
The poll shows that usage of Latinx isn't a big deal to a majority of Hispanics, even if few choose to use the term themselves. A majority of respondents are not offended by the term, only a small number are concerned, and only a small number are annoyed by it. 49 percent said Latinx doesn't make a difference to them, compared to 30 percent who said it made them less likely to support a politician and 15 percent who said it made them more likely to support a politician.
The Amandi poll of 800 Hispanic voters has a margin of error of 3.46 percentage points and was completed last month. A survey this summer pegged the number of Hispanics who use the term Latinx at 4%, compared to a survey last year that found 3 percent.
If you are going to sit down with an activist group on the left, Rocha said you should be aware of what they are using, as well as being respectful to those folks.
The Latino Victory Project's president and CEO, Nathalie Rayes, said that Democrats are simply recognizing the complexity of the various Hispanic communities, where some prefer the term Latinx.
Rayes said that it was not one fell swoop across the Latino community.
There is a split between young activists who identify with Latinx and the general population who don't know what it means.
He uses Latinx to target the progressive and young base of the Democratic Party. It turns into a debate and then into linguistic gymnastics. Look at the people who use the word Latino. The audience is made up of Spanish-speaking Latinos. They don't use Latinx. I think they know that when they use those terms, they may lose more than 90 percent of their audience and 40 percent of their audience could get offended.
The idea of using the words Latino and Hispanic in the network was built around the idea that it reflected the Spanish language. He said that Latinx is too weird. It is dumb. It is foreign. It is not Spanish.
Blaya, a registered Democrat, said that Democrats are helping Republicans look out of touch. We have a shared culture around our Spanish language and a network of friends. Why are we trying to change something? It is offensive to a lot of people.
