When several candidates broke into Spanish during those back-to-back performances, they quickly faced criticism from some quarters for “Hispandering.” (Others said it was an attempt at displaying cultural competency that they appreciated.) But perhaps even more concerning for the organizers who spoke with me was how many of the candidates focused exclusively on immigration when speaking about “Latino issues.”

“Yes, there are Latino citizens and voters who are more comfortable in Spanish, but people are interested in what kind of a candidate you are and … what are you planning to do,” said Clarissa Martinez de Castro, the deputy vice president for policy and advocacy at UnidosUS, one of the oldest Latino advocacy groups in the country. “I think a lot of times, where Latino voters are concerned, they tend to be either taken for granted and/or attacked. And so our biggest fear is that we see a continuation of that.”

She and other organizers are concerned that both parties are following an outdated political playbook that casts Latino interests as alien to the concerns of working-class white Americans in the Midwest and Rust Belt states that Democrats are determined to win in the general election. As my colleague Ron Brownstein wrote last week, demographic trends suggest that the Rust Belt states Democrats are trying to wrest from Trump will only lose political influence as Americans move south and west—lending more political power to the states where Latinos already reside.

Read: Democrats’ future is moving beyond the Rust Belt

Jacqueline Martinez Garcel, the head of the California-based Latino Community Foundation, points to the Democratic sweep of longtime Republican strongholds in Southern California during the midterms as evidence that candidates should think of Latino interests beyond immigration as part of their mainstream agendas. Democrats managed to flip four House seats in Orange County because of a significant increase in Latino participation, driven by candidates who went door to door and collaborated with grassroots activists in their communities, Martinez Garcel said.

Representative Norma Torres of California told me that some candidates seem to overlook how issues such as education, affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and college affordability dominate the minds of many working-class and young Latinos in particular. Torres, who immigrated to the United States from Guatemala as a child, said three candidates had met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political arm, of which she is a member. In those meetings, the candidates “regurgitate old policy,” she said, and “forget that the majority of Latinos live in communities like mine, which are very, very poor, working-class.”

Still, beyond their concerns about throwaway lines and policy blind spots, the organizers I spoke with said they fear that the candidates are struggling to understand a key fact about Latinos in America: They are a tremendously diverse group ideologically and culturally. And that diversity means there’s an opening for Republican overtures.