Why is Republican targeted messaging around socialism effective among immigrants from socialist or formerly socialist countries?

Question

A major component of Republican political messaging in the last few election cycles has been trying to tie their opponents to socialism or communism, with their target audience particularly being immigrants that have left socialist countries and their families. This argument can be seen, for example, in advertisements tying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and by extension the rest of the party, to socialist countries. Of course, while the Democratic Party has indeed become more progessive in recent years, much of this movement has been on social issues. The party's economic policy has become only modestly more left-wing, and it has not expressed its institutional support for any major socialist priorities such as nationalization of any industry. Of note, the only self-identified democratic socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, lost two successive Democratic Party primaries, and even the second one by a significant margin. The current US president, Joe Biden, is considered economically moderate.

Despite all that, the Republican messaging strategy seems to have been reasonably effective. For instance, in the 2020 election, Donald Trump won a high percentage of Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American voters, even increasing his vote share. This success, and strong Republican support among these groups more generally, is often attributed to Republicans successfully painting Democrats as socialist or sympathetic to socialism. Anecdotally, I have also seen this messaging resonate with some Russian Americans whose families left the Soviet Union.

On the one hand, one would expect these voters to have a better idea of what socialism is, on average, than most other Americans; on the other hand, the Democratic Party is far from being socialist or communist. In fact, even the few self-declared socialists in the party would likely be classified as right-wing by the standards of e.g. Venezuela or Cuba. ¹ Similarly, some popular opposition figures in such countries would be considered rather left-wing by US standards. ² So then, what accounts for the apparent effectiveness of Republican messaging around socialism among immigrants from socialist or formerly socialist countries?

_{1: For instance, even Bernie did not call for nationalizing energy production, in the sense of expropriation of existing utilities, but rather for creating a government competitor, like the Postal Service. This is far-left for Republicans but would be considered lukewarm by the standards of most socialist countries.}

_{2: For example, Juan Guiadó who enjoys or enjoyed significant popularity both in Venezuela and among the diaspora as the leader of the opposition to Nicolás Maduro, belonged to a party that was a member of the Socialist International, and has proposed such radical measures as removing the requirement for the state oil company to have majority ownership of any private venture (but not, say, denationalizing it).}

Answer 1

I think you are coming at it from the wrong angle. The Cuban and Venezuelan vote did not go against the Democrats because those people were somehow fooled about Democratic domestic policy being unduly Communist. That, as you correctly remark, would be odd, given their acquaintance with Communism in practice.

No, the Democrats and the Republicans got respectively punished and rewarded for their foreign policy towards Cuba and Venezuela.

Obama had somewhat of a thaw, by US standards, towards Cuba. Which Trump promptly rolled back when he got elected.

During the 2002 coup against Chavez, the US, under Bush, was not all that clearly against the coup at the start.

However, unlike much of Latin America, the US refused to condemn the coup, changing its position only after a popular uprising led Carmona to resign.

But the clearest indication of a vote pattern influenced by US foreign policy came from the Elian Gonzalez saga. Citing The Atlantic:

Approved by the Clinton Administration's Justice Department, the raid on April 22, 2000, to take custody of Elián González was emotional and dramatic—and so was its impact on Cuban-American voters. In the view of Miami-based pollster Sergio Bendixen, "It was humiliating to Cuban-Americans, and the 2000 election was payback."

They called it el voto castigo, or "the punishment vote." Whom did Cuban-American voters punish? Democratic nominee Al Gore and his fellow Democrats. "The Democrats first lost tremendous support among Cuban-Americans in the 1960s because of the Bay of Pigs," Bendixen noted. "But since the middle 1980s, the Democratic Party had been gaining with Cuban-American voters, from the teens [in terms of percentage of the Cuban-American vote] to the low 20s to the mid-30s. The Elián González saga reversed that pattern in a dramatic way."

Bendixen estimates that President Clinton got 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida in 1996. In 2000, Gore drew less than 20 percent. Look at the vote in Hialeah, Fla., a predominantly Cuban-American suburb of Miami. In 1996, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole outpolled Clinton in Hialeah by about 10,000 votes. In 2000, George W. Bush got nearly 25,000 more votes than Gore.

It seems to me those voters will steadfastly reward US politicians for their hostility towards Cuba and Venezuela's current Communist governments. Actual signs of domestic US drift towards socialism, let alone Communism, which are rather limited across both parties, as the question correctly hypothesized, matter much less.

In as far as they matter, not concerning either Cuba or Venezuela, Trump's hostility towards nominally-Communist China probably counterbalanced his buddy-buddy relationship with totalitarian-but-not-Communist Russia.

Answer 2

What is socialist, really?

The label socialist has been used so long, and for so different policies, that one would have to state the context to make it meaningful:

• Socialism as a precursor to communism in Marxist theory, and hence as a label for Communist regimes which acknowledged that they had not yet reached the end state of history. Hence the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
• Socialism as the common ideology of European mostly-center-left parties which favor public health systems, heavily subsidized public education, welfare for those who cannot earn a living, and so on. Hence the Party of European Socialists (PES).
• Then there are various authoritarian regimes which used the label socialist as window-dressing for their non-socialist policies. Is the PRC socialist in the sense that they're working towards Communism?
• Finally, in US political discourse, it can describe anyone to the left of the speaker. Or anyone the speaker dislikes.

Someone who had left a socialist country in the first or third meaning would probably not want to get Socialism back. Somebody who left a socialist country in the second meaning is probably less disgusted -- yes, there were high taxes, and yes, there was red tape, but generally it was a free and democratic society.

That makes targeted advertising aimed at voters e.g. with Cuban roots effective. If Biden wants socialist policies in the second meaning, tell those disposed to dislike socialist policies in the first meaning that they're socialist, without adding the necessary qualifiers and explanations.

Answer 3

Isn't it because those immigrants didn't like socialism and therefore like anti-socialist messages. That's why they went to the USA in the first place: to escape socialism.

As per @bytebuster's request, here's a "credible" source:

This WP article has an explanation for what I assume to be the general view immigrants have about it.

Like my sister, Nelson Diaz, the chairman of the Republican Party of Miami-Dade County, is ringing the warning alarms. “I’m not saying if in 2020 Biden wins we will have a communist dictatorship,” Diaz cautions. “But we will drift ever closer to socialism, and that tipping point will come quickly.” Biden’s socialist coup will begin, he explains, with the Internal Revenue Service: “They would take our businesses through an ever-increasing number of taxes.”

Answer 4

Uprooting yourself from a country and moving to another country is a huge step. Most people who move from Cuba or Venezuela to the US do so because they have some serious problem with their life at home. If they don't directly have a problem with the government, for example a political problem, they may blame the government for whatever problem they do have, for example an economic problem. In other words, immigrants from those countries are at least likely to be predisposed against the regime. Often, they oppose it strenuously.

I know several people who grew up in communist/socialist countries, and some of them are strongly left wing. But others are strongly right wing, and the main reason for that is generally because of their opposition to the government under which they grew up. Yes, such people are in a better position to recognize that current Democratic party policy is nothing like that of the country they grew up in, but that doesn't mean that they can't fear that the Democrats would move the US in that direction to a degree that they find unwelcome.

In short, the Cubans and Venezuelans in the US are not likely to be representative of Cubans and Venezuelans in Cuba or Venezuela. Rather, those groups are likely to have a rather higher proportion of anti-socialists and anti-communists. With that in mind, it is not surprising that the Republicans' painting their Democratic opponents as socialists resonates with these voters.

Answer 5

According to Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky's Manufacture of Consent, it's effective simply because very little else is given serious air time in the USA. This means that the parameters of debate is heavily policed, with perhaps the occasional leftish documentary given airtime, to show that the virtues of 'free speech' is being upheld.

The success of Bernie Sanders has shown that socialism is no longer a poisoned chalice in the USA and I think it foreshadows a much broader seachange in opinion there with a much broader canvas of policies being looked at. It also shows that the indoctrination and propaganda machine of neoliberalism is beginning to break down.

I have only heard anecdotal evidence that Cuban-Americans have, on average, voted for Republicans. Not everyone in Cuba was sold on socialism. It's likely that many fled to the USA after the success of the Castro-led Cuban revolution and right into the arms of the Republican party.