Hey, uh, mainstream media folks? You forgot to mention something in your coverage Monday night.
Ted Cruz is the first Hispanic-American to ever win the Iowa Caucus. And not only that, he is the first Hispanic-American to win any presidential primary – for any party – ever. And it was the religious right that pushed him to victory.
51 percent of Iowa caucus-goers – some of the whitest voters in the country – voted for Latino candidates. Cruz received 28 percent of the vote, while Marco Rubio placed third with 23 percent.
Three of the top four finishing Republican candidates were minorities – Dr. Ben Carson placed 4th with 9 percent of the vote.
And again, I can’t emphasize this enough – Iowa is white. Like, really, really white.
This is a big story. One might even call it “yuge.”
But the mainstream media generally remained silent. Outside scant mentions at Fox News Latino and NBC News, the historic nature of Cruz’s victory was glossed over. Instead of reporting on the importance of Cruz’s victory – to Hispanics, to the Republican Party, and to the country as a whole – the media focused instead on white people – namely, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders.
Let’s not forget that this is a media that obsesses over race. When then-Senator Barack Obama won Iowa in 2008, you struggled to find an article that didn’t highlight the fact that this was the first time an African-American had won the Iowa Caucus – or any primary election for that matter.
This is an almost identical moment. Except instead of a win for African-Americans, it’s a win for Latinos, and instead of it occurring in a Democratic caucus, it occurred in a Republican caucus.
So why didn’t this merit more coverage? Shouldn’t this have been the number one takeaway from the Iowa Caucus?
Here’s the problem. There’s a nasty narrative – often illuminated in pop culture by great minds like Kanye West, or even in the pages of the Washington Post – that Republicans are racist. That we really don’t like minorities. That we can’t stand the idea of a black or Latino President.
This is, of course, absurd. Minorities just received 60 percent of the vote in Iowa! Like Democrats were with Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans are clearly hungry to make history by electing the first Latino President – and a conservative to boot.
But leave it to the liberal elements of the mainstream media to keep an incredibly dishonest narrative alive – and hide the evidence when it flies in the face of such a ridiculous notion.
Maybe they’ll get it right in New Hampshire if Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio shock the world again and beat the white guy. Maybe they’ll report on the incredible feat of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, sons of first-generation immigrants, winning primaries and potentially becoming President.