Last Updated on December 6, 2021
A new poll from Politico shows Hispanics are outright rejecting the ‘Latinx’ term, with 40% saying it offends them, and 30% saying they would not support organisations that use the term.
The poll of 800 Hispanic voters, conducted last month by Bendixen and Amandi International, showed that, unsurprisingly, most people identified as either Hispanic or Latino/Latina, with 68% and 21% identifying with the two terms respectively. Only 2% of those surveyed identified themselves primarily with the term Latinx, a term that attempts to leave the gender binary of Latino/Latina behind and be more “inclusive” to transgender and non-binary people.
Despite the low identification with rates with the term Latinx, Democrats and leftists have more frequently used it when addressing the Hispanic community. Unfortunately for them, the poll suggests that 40% of Hispanic voters say the use of the term Latinx “bothers or offends them,” with 20% saying it bothers them a lot. Another 30% of respondents claimed that if any politician or political organisation used the term, it would make them less likely to support them.
“The numbers suggest that using Latinx is a violation of the political Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no electoral harm,” said Fernand Amandi, whose firm conducted the poll and preivously advised Barack Obama on Hispanic outreach during the 2008 and 2012 election campaigns. “Why are we using a word that is preferred by only 2 percent, but offends as many as 40 percent of those voters we want to win?”
Jason Miyares, the Attorney General-elect of Virginia, a Republican who will be the first Hispanic person to hold the office, said that Hispanics were turned off by the use of Latinx. “By insisting on using the incorrect term Latinx, progressives are engaging in a type of cultural Marxism, a recast of societal norms,” Miyares argued to POLITICO. “Latinos don’t use the term, only upper-educated white liberals who hardly interact with the Latino community. I believe that every time they use the term Latinx, they lose another Latino vote.”
Mainstream supporters of the Democrats are clearly getting annoyed with the idea of Latinx replacing the other terms due to political correctness, especially because it doesn’t fit with Spanish grammatical rules. Joaquin Blaya, one of the founders of the Spanish language channel Univision said the term was too “weird… dumb… [and] foreign.”
“Democrats are helping Republicans make them look out of touch,” Blaya said. “We built a network around our Spanish language and we have a shared culture around it. Why are we trying to change this? It’s offensive to a lot of people.”
According to Merriam Webster, the term was created by online leftist individuals, and was likely thought up with “little consideration” as to how it should even be pronounced. While giving sources including the Los Angeles Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other liberal media outlets, Merriam Webster claimed that Latinx is gaining “noticeable traction among the general public,” despite the poll proving otherwise. In a Pew Research poll conducted in 2020, 76% of respondents had not even heard of Latinx.
