debut: 2/16/17
38,074 runs
I know why so many Latino men voted for Trump.
But I’ve never felt entirely at home in the Democratic Party. Maybe because after I graduated from a prestigious university and moved to Washington, I realized that a lot of Democrats inside the political machine lived in a bubble disconnected from the needs of real people. But another reason: my parents were Republicans for much of my youth.Notice what I did not mention in these reasons for our political persuasion, despite being Latino: immigration. That’s because, at least on my mom’s side, our family moved here 100 years ago. This was before there was such a thing as legal and illegal immigration; according to my late grandmother, her parents paid just a penny to cross the US-Mexico border. It’s not to say we didn’t care about the issue. But it was more that it was in the rearview mirror for us.That was why, of all the big shocks during Election Night, the hard shift of Latino voters to Donald Trump did not surprise me in the least. The speed at which it came to pass may have surprised me, but the fact it happened did not.
The warning signs were there. A few weeks ago, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that a majority of Latino men between the ages of 18 to 34 supported Trump.But it looks like was either all for naught or that Democrats simply didn’t reach out to them in the ways that matter. People who follow me on social media know I tend not to trust exit polls. But heavily Latino counties speak for themselves.But the results from last night show this is simply not true. Survey after survey shows that Latinos vote more with their pocketbooks than on immigration. UnidosUS also showed that in every swing state, the cost of living ranked high for Latinos, even as many of them broke for Harris.And it’s not just in border counties either. Take for example Osceola County, Florida, which has plenty of Puerto Ricans. Many Democrats thought that comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” would enrage Puerto Ricans living in the mainland United States. That proved not to be the case. Instead, Osceola went from voting for Joe Biden by 14 points to voting for Trump by 1.5 points.
This should be seen as an apocalyptic moment for Democrats that brings forward a reckoning. At their core, the Democratic Party will need to regain its focus on being the party that enables prosperity above all else if it is to have any kind of fighting chance at winning back Latinos from Trump.
But I’ve never felt entirely at home in the Democratic Party. Maybe because after I graduated from a prestigious university and moved to Washington, I realized that a lot of Democrats inside the political machine lived in a bubble disconnected from the needs of real people. But another reason: my parents were Republicans for much of my youth.Notice what I did not mention in these reasons for our political persuasion, despite being Latino: immigration. That’s because, at least on my mom’s side, our family moved here 100 years ago. This was before there was such a thing as legal and illegal immigration; according to my late grandmother, her parents paid just a penny to cross the US-Mexico border. It’s not to say we didn’t care about the issue. But it was more that it was in the rearview mirror for us.That was why, of all the big shocks during Election Night, the hard shift of Latino voters to Donald Trump did not surprise me in the least. The speed at which it came to pass may have surprised me, but the fact it happened did not.
The warning signs were there. A few weeks ago, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that a majority of Latino men between the ages of 18 to 34 supported Trump.But it looks like was either all for naught or that Democrats simply didn’t reach out to them in the ways that matter. People who follow me on social media know I tend not to trust exit polls. But heavily Latino counties speak for themselves.But the results from last night show this is simply not true. Survey after survey shows that Latinos vote more with their pocketbooks than on immigration. UnidosUS also showed that in every swing state, the cost of living ranked high for Latinos, even as many of them broke for Harris.And it’s not just in border counties either. Take for example Osceola County, Florida, which has plenty of Puerto Ricans. Many Democrats thought that comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” would enrage Puerto Ricans living in the mainland United States. That proved not to be the case. Instead, Osceola went from voting for Joe Biden by 14 points to voting for Trump by 1.5 points.
This should be seen as an apocalyptic moment for Democrats that brings forward a reckoning. At their core, the Democratic Party will need to regain its focus on being the party that enables prosperity above all else if it is to have any kind of fighting chance at winning back Latinos from Trump.
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