This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Why more Latinos are voting Republican’
Sonja Hutson
Latino voters favoured Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a 33-point margin in 2020. By the time he dropped out of the race last month, Biden’s lead with Latinos had narrowed to single digits. And if Kamala Harris wants to stay in the White House, she’ll have to reverse that slide.
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Sonja Hutson
This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing where we talk about all of the things happening in the 2024 US presidential election. I’m Sonja Hutson, and this week we’re asking: why are Latino voters moving to the right here with me to discuss is Myles McCormick. He’s the FTs Houston correspondent. Hi, Myles.
Myles McCormick
Hey, Sonja. How are you?
Sonja Hutson
Doing well. Thanks. We’ve also got Mike Madrid. He’s a Republican political strategist and the author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy. Hi, Mike. Thanks for being on the show.
Mike Madrid
Great to be with you guys. I’m looking forward to this.
Sonja Hutson
So, Myles, I want to start with you. You recently wrote in FT Big Read about Latino swing voters. What were you seeing that made you want to write the piece?
Myles McCormick
Yeah. So what got me interested in this topic is looking at certain trends in Texas where I’m based. And the county I looked at specifically was Starr County, which proportionately is the most Hispanic county in the US, the mainland US, with about 98 per cent people. They’re identifying as Hispanic. And there was a very clear trend in recent presidential elections away from the Democrats. So in 2012, you had about 86 per cent of people there voting for Barack Obama, which was the most of anywhere in Texas, I believe. And then by 2016, it was 78 per cent for Hillary Clinton. And then in 2020, Joe Biden took just 52 per cent of the vote. So I thought it would be interesting to go down there and talk to people and get a sense of whether this time, for the first time, the county might flip red.
Sonja Hutson
And what people tell you?
Myles McCormick
There was just a general sense among people I spoke to then there of disillusionment with the Democratic Party, a feeling of being ignored, abandonment to some degree an idea that they had kind of been disregarded by the party and allowed to drift away from it.
Sonja Hutson
Now, Mike, I want to turn to you and broaden this out a little bit. You know, obviously Latinos are not a monolith. You know, Cuban Americans, for example, have been really reliable Republican voters for a long time now. But are you surprised by this broader rightward shift that we’re seeing among Latino voters?
Mike Madrid
I’m not at all surprised. In fact, that’s was the basic premise of the book, is to try to help people understand what was going on and what really accounts for the greatest amount of this shift is this younger under-30 voter is overwhelmingly US-born, but it’s also very strongly a third and now a discernible fourth generation voter that has lost so much of its sort of ethnic and racial anchor. Overwhelmingly, these voters identify as, quote unquote, a typical American. They don’t see themselves as a racial voting bloc. They view themselves as an economic populist, pocketbook issue voter, and they’re rapidly filling the voter roles and the employment roles in blue collar, working class industries. But there are very significant problems that both parties have dealt with as they tried to understand the Latino voter.
Sonja Hutson
Yeah. I’m curious, what are some of those big problems that they’ve had and understanding them? You know, what have Democrats misunderstood about Latino voters that’s caused them to lose those voters? And what have Republicans been picking up on that’s brought them into the fold.
Mike Madrid
The party that is able to capture the hearts and minds and ultimately, the votes of a multiracial or multi-ethnic working class is going to be the dominant party for the next generation in American politics. And for the moment, largely as a function of the education divide, where college-educated voters are moving rapidly to the Democratic Party and non-college-educated voters are moving equally as rapidly towards the Republican Party. It’s Latinos, predominantly male Latinos, that are making up the non-college-educated workforce. It’s happening to a much lesser degree with Hispanic women because we’ve got the widest educational divide of any race or ethnicity in the country. So Hispanic women are actually voting very strongly for Democrats. It’s men that are breaking away in voting for Republicans. And until Democrats get back to a working class agenda that is more than just kind of government spending and government programs that Latino voters and working class voters have never really bought into. You’re going to continue to see this haemorrhaging of Latino voters. Republicans, for their part, and there’s some irony here, have struggled mightily with the multi-ethnic, multiracial part. A lot of their white, rural, non-college-educated base is animated by, you know, these issues of race in a way that has sparked higher turnout levels. The more they’ve talked about being more isolationist, building a wall, protectionist, stopping the illegals from coming in. But at the same time, you are still witnessing this shift rightward as more and more Latinos of third generation and beyond relate more again with quote unquote typical Americans than they do the racial and ethnic identity of their grandparents.
Myles McCormick
If it goes back to that kind of old cliché that, like, it’s the economy, stupid. There is maybe an assumption in some parts of the country and outside the country that people of Latino or Hispanic background should identify more with people coming across the border and, thereby, should be more pro a president that takes a more humane or liberal approach to the border, i.e. Joe Biden, when compared to Donald Trump, but that this shift is happening in spite of that. And when I was down reporting in Starr, which is like right down on the US-Mexico border, the point they came back to again and again was how they felt squeezed and they were more inclined to vote based on their pocketbook, as it were than a wider kind of ethnic or demographic issues like the border.
Sonja Hutson
I’m curious, while we’re talking about the Democrats, Myles, how have they been accounting for this shift in Latino voters to the right, especially in the last several weeks since Kamala Harris became their presumptive nominee? What’s the messaging been like?
Myles McCormick
Yeah. Well, so this is really interesting because I think it gives them a chance to, as a party, kind of shake up the message. There certainly does seem to be a new buzz about it all. Polls that have come out suggest that Harris is less, let’s say, the favourite among Latino voters than Biden was. I mean, I’d be interested in hearing your view, Mike. Like, do you think this has been a game-changer to some extent or do the underlying problems for the Democrats still exist?
Mike Madrid
Well, I think it can be both. Actually, I do think that this is a really remarkable moment in the trajectory of Democratic Party politics because what you are seeing is essentially a reset. And we’ve seen a recent round of polling all showing Donald Trump sitting at a 37 to 35 point range of support. Now that has gotten better from where Joe Biden was a couple of weeks or months ago, but it’s still at a historically bad position for Democrats. So it’s not really great news. I’m not even sure it’s good news. It just means that the problem isn’t getting worse. And the solution, as Kamala Harris I think has rightfully recognised, is a 180 degree turn on the largest issue of her campaign to this point, which is going fiercely and aggressively into border security. She’s running on the Lankford bill, which is a conservative Republican reform of our border security. And not only that, it’s also devoid of the immigration reform pieces. It’s a standalone border security issue. And in many ways, I think it’s accurate to characterise this inflection point in Democratic Party politics as a recognition that the strategy that they would have been trying to employ by coupling immigration reform with border security has been a failure.
Sonja Hutson
Yeah. You know, it really is such a remarkable shift. And as you were talking, Mike, it reminded me of this campaign ad that I saw from Harris recently called ‘Tougher’.
Audio clip
And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.
Sonja Hutson
Which, you know, in a lot of ways feels almost like a Republican immigration ad. The whole thing is about cracking down on border security. It was just really stunning to see that from her.
Mike Madrid This ad, I’ve been running ads on immigration for Republicans for decades, this is one of the tougher ads I’ve run for Republicans. (laughter) So yeah, that’s why I’m kind of shocked. It’s like, it’s the right move for her politically. There’s no question about it. But the degree to which they’re leaning into this issue, of course, they’re going to expect some very withering attacks from Trump on this very issue. They have to prophylactically get out in front of it to defend against that. But it is nothing short of remarkable to see how stridently they’re leaning into very conservative Republican positions on the border.
Sonja Hutson
Myles, I want to ask you, because I feel like we’ve been talking a lot about what Democrats have done to lose the Latino vote. Do you think that the shift is more a product of Democrats losing voters or more of a product of Republicans bringing them in?
Myles McCormick
I think it’s more the former. There was a push some years back in the wake of one of the Obama victories, I believe, and you kind of a postmortem on how Republicans could do better on seizing the Latino vote, which was kind of thrown out when Trump came in and kind of doubled down on trying to appeal to white working class voters. I mean, there’s an argument that he is a drag on this shift as opposed to someone driving it. Yeah. I mean, Republicans could, if they upped their game and appealed more to Latino voters could make this more of a kind of emphatic shift.
Mike Madrid
I think Myles encapsulated it perfectly. It’s one of the main arguments I make in my book, which is Republicans are getting these games despite their best efforts, not because of them. And again, as Myles correctly pointed out, if you look at Ron DeSantis in Florida, governor of Florida, Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, they’ve all overperformed with Latino voters from Donald Trump’s numbers. They’ve either met or exceeded Hispanic support over where Donald Trump is. That’s very, very strong evidence that Donald Trump is impeding what would be an otherwise much more significant shift to the right by Latinos towards the Republican Party. In fact, it would suggest that if the Republicans had nominated anybody but Donald Trump, this would probably not be a particularly close race.
Sonja Hutson
Well, given all this, do you think this shift to the right among Latino voters is here to stay?
Mike Madrid
The short answer is yes. But in fact, the way I characterise this is less as a shift. And in many ways, it’s better to explain it as the emergence of a new vote, because 38 per centof Latino voters are under the age of 30, there’s not much opportunity to shift from pre-existing positions. It’s emerging. The Latino vote is emerging as an entirely unique voting bloc in our history because it is not racially motivated. And it does not have a strong partisan anchor to the Democratic Party. And its strong strain of populism is leading it to support and advocate for candidates like a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders, who did extremely well with younger Latino voters because of their anti-party political populist bent. From my opinion, the math would strongly suggest we’re going to see much more of an equilibrium and parity between the parties by the end of next decade. Then we will shift back to what we considered a traditional voting pattern for minority voters.
Sonja Hutson
All right. We’re going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’ll do Exit Poll.
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Sonja Hutson
We are back with Exit Poll, where we talk about something that didn’t happen on the campaign trail and apply rigorous political analysis to it. OK, so the 2024 Summer Olympics wrapped up last weekend, a great games. I was sad to see it end, but it did end with a bit of controversy. That’s because the American gymnast Jordan Chiles had a bronze medal taken away. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that her coach submitted a challenge that won her the bronze medal, four seconds past the judges deadline. Now, USA gymnastics is appealing the decision, but for now, that means that a Romanian gymnast will get bronze at the competition instead. So what do we think? Does this play better for Trump’s election chances or Harris’s?
Myles McCormick
(Laughter) I’m going to defer to Mike on this one first.
Mike Madrid
I’m going to say that the fact that there are questions and disputes about the way winners are chosen probably plays into Trump’s tendency to the legitimacy of elections, so helps Trump. (laughter)
Myles McCormick
Yeah, I’d probably agree with that. I mean, the narrower or the more contestable an outcome is, I suppose the more it favours Donald Trump.
Sonja Hutson
I want to thank our guests. Myles McCormick is the FT’s Houston correspondent. Thanks, Myles.
Myles McCormick
Thanks a lot, Sonja.
Sonja Hutson
And Mike Madrid. He’s a Republican political strategist and the author of The Latino Century. Thanks, Mike.
Mike Madrid
Thanks so much for having me. It’s a great time.
Sonja Hutson
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we’ve got a link to that in the show notes. Our show is mixed and produced by Ethan Plotkin. It’s also produced by Lauren Fedor. Special thanks, as always, to Pierre Nicholson. I’m your host, Sonja Hutson. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Original music by Hannis Brown. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.
