There’s a lot happening very, very quickly, and it’s why I think nobody here really has a good grasp on this.

Latinos have a much weaker partisan anchor than any other race or ethnicity in the country. We have lower turnout rates in large part because neither party is saying anything that we’re buying.

We are the moderates in both parties, and both parties are currently obsessed with playing to their extremes. There’s this massive disengagement, and the Democrats refuse to believe it because their whole worldview is “Non-white voters can’t be anything other than Democrats.”

That’s why I say Republicans are the beneficiaries of this, but it’s not because of anything that they’re doing. In fact, what they’re doing is restricting further growth.

There’s two bad options, and a lot of Latinos are opting out.

Q. So since we’re talking about there being a general misunderstanding of who Latinos are, one of the biggest misconceptions I think that still exists, and one that’s very pronounced, is this idea that we all speak primarily Spanish. Can you talk to me about what role language plays when it comes to polling Latinos?

A. This has been one of the largest public criticisms I’ve made about Democrats — generally it’s one or two firms specifically that have really led them down a road of disaster over the last 10 years.

I had my book launch (last) Tuesday, and John Perez, the former speaker of the California State Assembly, came and kicked off all the festivities. He’s a dear friend, one of the brightest members I’ve ever worked with.

He represented the most Latino Assembly district in California, and he said that when his consultants — white consultants, incidentally — wanted to start communicating to the voters, they wanted to do it in Spanish or bilingual platforms. John said, “No, let’s do polling. Let’s look at this with a number of different methodologies to determine what language these voters want to reach out to.”

And what his research showed was that only 25% of Latinos — of voters in the most Latino Assembly district in the entire state — wanted communications in Spanish. That is a shocking, striking number to most people who don’t understand the community. They all think it’s 80-85%.

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