Explaining why Republicans just lost their Hispanic media director

Three year ago, in the wake of an electoral smashing by President Barack Obama, Republicans released an autopsy of the 2012 election. The report aimed to explain why the party's 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, lost some groups of voters by long-unseen margins and had only done well with white men. With the autopsy came some big announcements, rare candor about race, Republicans and politics. Among the revelations, the party would put $10 million into minority voter outreach and add staff with the expertise to oversee this work. Ruth Guerra, an experienced political operative, bilingual Spanish and English speaker and Mexican-American from Texas, was one of them. From the period just after the Republican autopsy on, Guerra served as a key part of the Republican National Committee's Hispanic media team. The week of May 30, Guerra has been at the center of another shockwave. In a highly unusual move during a presidential election, Guerra resigned her post at the RNC and decided to join the staff at American Action Network, a super PAC expected to pour millions into Congressional races.

Guerra has been circumspect about her departure and the reasons for it, but expressed concern about working to elect Donald Trump, the party's presumptive presidential nominee, apparently. "She's a professional and a party loyalist, so she will probably never say in public," said Sergio Garcia-Rios, an assistant professor at Cornell University with joint appointments in Government and Latino Studies, of Guerra's motives. But, he theorized that "it was Trump or that she was in an increasingly awkward position defending the party and Trump."