MILWAUKEE • In two decades of street outreach on Milwaukee’s south side, evangelical pastor Marty Calderon has offered Bible study, gang prevention, a safe place to stay for those battling addiction, and help getting jobs for those newly released from prison.

But as he’s watched rising crime threaten those efforts to “clean up” his impoverished neighborhood, Calderon started bringing Republican politicians to his ministry, God Touch.

He hopes the largely Hispanic, working-class community will hear what they can do for it — and the conservative candidates will learn these voters’ reality, especially their immigration journeys.

“We’ve never had the Republicans come as strong as they are. … I’m very cautious doing this because I just don’t want people thinking they’re going to come get a vote,” Calderon said in his sanctuary, adding that he doesn’t push specific candidates on his community. “I’m just saying go out and vote, and prayabout it.”

Republican candidates across the country are seeking to expand recent gains the party has made with Hispanic voters from Florida to the Rio Grande Valley to Los Angeles.

What seems to be driving them are bread-and-butter issues that Calderon’s neighbors constantly mentioned last week — rampant lawlessness, struggling schools, and food and gas prices creeping beyond their paychecks’ reach.

Those consistently matter more to Latino voters than immigration, allowing Republicans to make inroads that constitute a “big re-alignment” — if they end up splitting their vote close to 40% Republican and 60% Democratic instead of historically a third of Latinos voting with the right, said Geraldo Cadava, a Northwestern University history and Latino studies professor.

Swinging even a few thousand votes in a state like Wisconsin — which delivered minuscule margins for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020 — could impact national politics because GOP Sen. Ron Johnson is in a close reelection race with Democratic challenger Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

A month before the midterms, Johnson was talking about the importance of “renewed faith” as he met with Calderon and other community leaders in the Republican National Committee’s one-year-old Hispanic outreach center, two blocks from God Touch.

“We’re showing up,” Johnson said of the party’s outreach in communities like this. “We have a universal message.”

Minutes earlier, Republican U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, whose southeastern Wisconsin district is just a few miles south, had also made a stop at the storefront center, decorated with yard signs, an elephant-shaped piñata and U.S. and state flags.

These efforts encourage Hilario Deleon, 21, who grew up on the south side and, after losing his dishwashing job during the COVID-19 lockdown, got involved in Republican campaigning.

“We’ve failed in the past to be in the community,” he said of the GOP. He added that he likes to see political and faith leaders walking the walk, like Calderon’s weekly food distribution. “I like to see God through people’s actions.”

Wisconsin’s elections commission doesn’t collect race or ethnicity data, but the immigrant rights advocacy group Voces de la Frontera estimates there are about 180,000 voters among the state’s Hispanics, nearly 40% of whom live in Milwaukee. Most are of Mexican origin, followed by Puerto Ricans.

And 46% of Latino registered voters consider themselves independent, according to pollster Charles Franklin of Marquette University Law School. His aggregate polling data over the last two years shows that Wisconsin Latino voters fall about halfway between whites and Blacks on political issues — and 71% identify as Christian.

“Political parties can’t take this population for granted,” said Felipe Hinojosa, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies the connection between religion and politics among Latinos.

He finds the centrality of faith to many Hispanics’ daily life doesn’t automatically make them Republican, but being an ethnic minority doesn’t reflexively make them Democratic, either.

Little wonder that bilingual canvassers were door-knocking last week across Milwaukee’s south side.

They came from both Voces de la Frontera Action, which endorses Democrats, and Operación Vamos (“operation let’s go,” in Spanish), the Republican Party’s new Hispanic outreach organization.

Wisconsin Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ron Johnson and Pastor Marty Calderon shake hands at a local Republican election office in Milwaukee on Saturday.

the associated press