I know why so many Latino men voted for Trump. I tried to sound the alarm

Analysis: I’m a Democrat who’s never felt entirely at home in the Democratic Party. As a politics reporter and a Latino, I saw the warning signs for Harris and her whole party long ago

Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump prays during a roundtable discussion with Latino community leaders at Trump National Doral Miami resort in Miami, Florida, on October 22, 2024 (AFP via Getty Images)

I’m a registered Democrat — I even interned in the Obama administration. Pell Grants allowed me to go to community college and a public university. I’m disabled, and Obamacare ensured that I could not be denied healthcare coverage for a pre-existing condition.

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.

My dad is a classic right-winger from Texas. One year, I got him a calendar of Ronald Reagan for his birthday — that’s how much of a classic right-winger I mean. My mom, a Californian who grew up in the height of the Reagan era, admired Republicans like George H W Bush for signing the Americans With Disabilities Act and when we lived in San Antonio, she loved that then-governor George W Bush invested in special education.

These days, however, Mom — a born-again Christian if there ever was one — votes for Democrats almost all of the time, and that’s mainly because of the Iraq War.

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. Ever since Trump did better with Latino voters in 2020 — after he called Mexicans drug dealers, rapists and criminals in 2016 — I’ve been cognizant of this shift. And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out what’s behind it, particularly when it comes to Latino men.

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. Kamala Harris campaign tried to stave off her problem with Latinos by dispatching Latino surrogates in places like Arizona. 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.

Take for example Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won a little less than three quarters of the vote. But last night, Trump won 85 percent of the vote.

During Ted Cruz’s victory party in Texas last night, he talked about the decisive rightward swing among multiple demographic groups, saying, “The results tonight — this decisive victory — should shake the Democrat establishment to its core.” He’s not entirely wrong. For decades, Democrats have banked on the idea that Latinos will vote for them reflexively because Latinos would see Republican language about immigration as inherently racist (and much of it is).

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.