Failings in Democratic Party bias continued to the GOP’s benefit as strategists continued to struggle over President Donald Trump’s success with a key demographic.
Much of the 2024 presidential election postmortem involved the left seething that dividing groups into monolithic voting blocs and demonizing Trump and his supporters hadn’t proven a unifying message. Now, after the president was being credited for a wildly successful first month, Democrats still appeared at a loss over how the GOP leader had increased his support with Latino voters.
“The Biden campaign and then, by connection, the Kamala Harris campaign, had a lot of work to do with all of the groups, but I was surprised that so many Latino men were so disillusioned with Joe Biden and what happened in the last four years that they were willing to go to Donald Trump even with all of the crazy, xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric,” Democratic political strategist Maria Cardona told The Hill.
Compared to 28% of Latino voters in the 2016 race against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recorded by the Pew Research Center, AP VoteCast had measured support at 35% and then 43% for Trump in 2020 and 2024 respectively.
As then-Vice President Kamala Harris had failed to sell voters with dictatorial rhetoric about Trump, so too did Cardona maintain the narrative while burying the lede about key issues that most voters were unified around, “Trump did a fantastic job at messaging. A lot of it was misinformation, lies and conspiracy theories that, frankly, a lot of people believed. But at the end of the day, they believed that Trump was going to give them the economy that they had at the beginning of Trump’s [first] term.”
Trump’s promises of mass deportations and securing the border were among the talking points the left had most readily attempted to scare voters over with images of families torn apart and talk of children in cages.
“I think we’ve all now updated our understanding of how Latino voters make their vote choice decisions,” said Menlo College political science professor Melissa Michelson to The Hill.
She argued there had previously been consensus that “if there was a president or a candidate for office who had an immigration policy that was clearly going to hurt their community, it wouldn’t matter how much they liked their economic policies; that would just take those candidates out of consideration.”
“When Democrats were trying to make the case to the Latinos who were leaning towards Trump during the election, we would bring up the mass deportation stuff. They didn’t believe that he would do that,” argued Cardona amid claims of buyer’s remorse. “Even though they had people in their family that were mixed status, they did not believe.”
For years, the Republican National Committee had been working to support the president’s effort to grow the party’s tent, including opening community outreach centers throughout the country, especially in border states that had felt the brunt of the Biden-Harris crisis.
RNC’s strategic investment in Hispanic communities is paying ‘incredible’ dividends https://t.co/VhsP8yDmqq
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) February 3, 2022
“If Latino voters are saying election after election, ‘focus on the economy,’…and Democrats really didn’t ever have that messaging especially directed towards Latinos specifically, I think that’s really been the backdrop where immigration permeated a bit back,” noted Brookings Institution senior fellow with the Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative Gabriel Sanchez to The Hill.
“I don’t think they’re concerned enough,” added former Maricopa County Democrats Executive Director Martiza Miranda Saenz to the outlet. “Democrats just are not scared yet…but that should be the top of every single conversation.”
Disconnect with what voters cared about had been pegged by many on the left as the root cause of the Democratic Party’s problem in 2024, along with the overall opinion on now-former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Of course, the zealotry toward shifting further to the left had been highlighted for years, including by commentator Tucker Carlson who’d pointed out when he was still with Fox News that voters were learning “the basic repulsiveness of Democratic Party leaders–by the way, nearly all of whom are openly hostile to the historic Christianity of Latin America that a lot of immigrants still believe in” along with the politicians unwillingness to address violent crime.
After missing the mark on what voters truly care about, Cardona argued that the path forward included an attempt “to really pierce that bubble and tell people the naked truth: Economists have said that Donald Trump’s plans would slow growth, explode inflation and that would cost families more,” a message that would crumble under its own weight should Trump succeed at delivering tangible economic improvements for consumers.
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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