The Latinos Who Found Their Inner MAGA

With still-preliminary data, it’s difficult to quantify the Latino shift toward Donald Trump and Republicans this election cycle. But there’s no question that it happened across the country and in some places — California, Florida, New Jersey — was dramatic. There’s also no question that it was foreseeable. Previous election results, polls, and on-the-ground reporting provided clues that a reckoning was coming for Democrats, who had once bet that Latinos’ allegiance to the party would ensure its dominance for decades. Jack Herrera saw Latinos’ drifting rightward up close. A freelance reporter, Herrera has written deep dives about immigrant communities, from border counties in Texas to a small town in Iowa. Everywhere he found an electorate angry about the economy, disillusioned with Democrats, and increasingly willing to give Trump a chance. I spoke with him about why Latinos changed their minds, and what it might take to change them back.

There’s been a lot of debate in the aftermath of the election over whether it represents a fundamental realignment, especially among minority voters. You wrote in your postmortem in Politico, “There’s evidence that this year’s vote does not represent a pure wholesale ideological transformation of Latinos” and that, in many places, it was more a referendum on the economy. To me, this implies that if voters’ economic perceptions improve over the next two or four years, they might drift back to Democrats. But the shift toward Republicans was much more dramatic among Latinos than other groups, and we already saw it happening to a lesser extent in 2020. So is it overly simple to say that this is only about economic conditions of the past two or four years? 
I do think that this is a political realignment, by and large. My only caution is that it’s not as fundamental a shift as it looks like in the results — that if you take away inflation, and I also think Democrats are still paying the price for being seen as in favor of COVID shutdowns and for high housing costs — if you subtract the economic malaise that damages the incumbent party, I don’t think you see as big a shift this year as we saw.

But there are two warning signs for the Democrats. First off, there is a core shift here that does represent people adopting Trumpism and becoming true believers. It’s not just like, “Biden, you’re fired. The price of eggs is too high.” There are people who are like “You know what? I’m a Republican. I’m a Trump voter.” That’s a significant share. I do think a huge part of the shift, though, is people who are just making things a referendum on the economy. But I don’t think that that means that they just automatically shift back to the Democratic column in 2028. And part of it is —  I spoke with Carlos Odio at Equis, one of the best researchers.

Yeah, I actually talked to him a few weeks ago.
He knows what he’s talking about. He made the point that there’s a cognitive pathway here, that when you’ve made a decision, you tend to affirm that decision. It’s like when you buy a new case for your phone. You are primed to say to yourself, “That was a really good decision.” And I think that that will affect people who voted for Trump. Every time you see a reason to affirm yourself as being smart and making the right decision, you’re more likely to look at evidence that you’re smart and made the right decision rather than evidence that you made the wrong decision.

That ties in with another thing you’ve written, which is there’s a sort of critical mass going on here. In some places, it was once verboten to show your support for Trump, and now more and more people are. 
Yeah. I think South Texas is a peculiar place, and I think you have to really be cautious about extrapolating what’s happening there to the rest of the country just because it’s a really weird region with a really specific history. Starting before the 2020 election, there were people who were out and about saying, “I’m voting for Trump,” and they were doing Trump trains, which are pickup-truck lines, driving all around the Rio Grande Valley on the highways in South Texas. But they were seen as gadflies and hopelessly outnumbered. And you’d get a lot of shit for supporting Trump. People weren’t afraid to call you pocho or say “Tienes nopal en la frente,” phrases that basically mean you’re self-hating, you’re trying to be white.

That changed really quickly. Suddenly, Trump had quadrupled turnout, and counties Democrats had been winning with 70, 80 percent of the vote, it was closer to 50-50, like swing districts. That taboo still exists in some places — you’re going to take shit from some people — it’s not as strong as it once was. In some places, it’s really just disappeared. And I don’t think you can underestimate that social component, that interpersonal component about what happened in this election.

And some version of that is going on in other places, right? Maybe not as strongly as in Starr County, but it’s happening in the Bronx and in other major cities. 
Exactly. It’s happening in the Bronx, it’s happening in Reading, Pennsylvania — I saw it in October — and in Arizona and California. And this is where you see the masculinity angle. Trump is not doing as well with Latino men as he is with white men. But I do think masculinity is a constant across cultures, and I do think that that’s part of where Trump is doing better with Latino men, that there’s a specific cachet of being a guy and supporting Trump.

In Reading, one of the things I saw, and I think it was very canny, was that Republicans worked to organize local barbers. They have pull in the community, they have the cachet of being masculine, and they just talk to a ton of people. A lot of people come to your chair, and as you’re giving them their fade, their Edgar cut, you’ve got a captive audience. In and out of the Latino community, I think that’s a great form of organizing — organize the barbers.

Reading your work, it seems the Harris campaign was comprehensively out-organized with Latino voters even in a swing state like Pennsylvania. Which surprised me, because as we discussed earlier, the warning signs were there four years ago.
Basically, Democrats pursued what has been a winning strategy, and that really meant deprioritizing Latinos. I need to get ahead of this and say they did spend a ton of money reaching Latinos with ads, bilingual Spanish ads.

Yeah, I spoke with Odio about how they were being more strategic this time around — starting Spanish-language WhatsApp groups, for instance. 
I say that because I think that if you criticize Democratic strategy, and I’m about to, very strongly — first you need to preface it. They spent a ton of money, trotted out a ton of endorsements. Some of the most consequential were Bad Bunny and Daddy Yankee. Bad Bunny — I don’t think there’s any bigger Latino star. So yeah, that stuff is meaningful. But I joined some of the Latino WhatsApp groups, and I’m like, “Oh yes, you did it. You formed a WhatsApp group.” They felt very much like the way Democrats campaign, where it felt very focus-tested, and you knew what they were going to say before they even said it.

I think the way Trump just interpersonally or rhetorically runs circles around somebody like Kamala Harris is that he just talks. For better or for worse, often for worse, he just talks. And you hear that all the time among these communities: “He doesn’t sound like a normal politician.” Kamala Harris, even if she’s saying something like “I’m fighting for working-class people,” it sounds very focus-tested and antiseptic.

And the Trump WhatsApp groups I followed? They’re freewheeling, fact free, and very fun. Saying “Let’s make the Harris WhatsApp” might be like “Let’s make the liberal Joe Rogan.” You might have a contradiction in terms there.

It just doesn’t work that way.
Yeah. And then I do think there’s a deeper rot in the strategy. One of the shocks I had was in Reading in October. The local Latinos, the Democrats in the State House, and the mayor’s a Latino Democrat — they were all like, “Okay, listen. She’s not going to do very well in Reading. She’s going to lose a ton of votes. Is that because the city’s slipping? No, I think two things are happening. Trump is really here — literally he’s come through a few times. J.D. Vance was just here. Tucker Carlson was just here, and Harris hasn’t come.” And of course there’s a difference between the candidates showing up versus the campaign showing up. But if you follow where Harris went, she was prioritizing the places where Democrats thought they could win and thus where she went is also where the lion’s share of resources followed.

It was a suburban strategy. They’ve got an extremely sophisticated data voter list and data project that locates the most persuadable and most likely voters. And that algorithm’s not sending them to Reading, Pennsylvania, because very few people vote in Reading, Pennsylvania. Very few people vote in South Texas or Miami, actually. Latinos tend to lie behind the rest of the population in turnout.

So if you want to hit up voters who are the most likely to show up for the polls and the most persuadable to vote Democrats, you’re heading to whiter, college-educated suburbs. And for Democrats, this is at least the third election where they’ve pursued that strategy since 2012. And they’re paying the price for it. When you go to the suburbs and you track your message for the white college-educated suburbs, not only does it have an opportunity cost, where you could have been in a city like Reading or down in rural country like South Texas, it also maybe has a negative effect. If you’re talking suburb talk, maybe it actually hurts you with working-class Latinos.

It’s probably no accident that Democrats developed this strategy after 2012, because one of the takeaways from that election was that Democrats were totally solid with Latino voters. Did they take their eye off the ball after that?
I won’t pretend to be older than I am, but I remember at the time, all the op-eds were like, “This is Democrats’ perma-victory. Obama’s data voter list: That’s how Democrats are going to win forever.”

What I’ve learned in politics is whenever anyone says that, it stops being true in about four years.
Oh yeah. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that 2012 was the last high-water mark of Democrat support among Latinos. I think they learned some of the wrong lessons, and that was taking Latinos for granted and focusing your energies elsewhere on turning out voters, because they thought, “Latinos are going to vote for us anyway, and there’s only going to be six of them who show up to the polls. So we’ll get a more robust ROI if we go to the Philly suburbs or the Dallas suburbs.”

Everyone’s saying the Obama coalition is dead, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s too early to say that, but it may be true. I think more accurately, the Obama strategy — the big-data voter strategy — is dead. It has had middling results for 12 years now.

You wrote about how 80 percent of Latino voters are working class, and that “In a Latino meatpacking town, it looks a lot like his appeal in white factory towns in Michigan and Pennsylvania.” So to me, the nightmare scenario for Democrats is that this voting cohort drifts to the right, the way those white working-class voters have. And it turns out they were voting Democrat in large part because everyone else was voting Democrat, and that they are fundamentally more conservative on many social matters, including immigration. And then Democrats are fucked. What’s your take on that possibility? 
I can’t tell the future, but if you told me that the result of this is that Democrats are extremely fucked and are out of the White House for the next 12 years, I’d be like, “Makes sense to me.” That wouldn’t be a shock at all. But so much can change in four years. I think if there’s a really dour mood about the economy, the same thing that hurt Biden, you lose a lot of voters.

So that’s to say the future can change a lot. But maybe the central point I want to make is it’s not just that Democrats didn’t think a shift toward Trump could happen. They also really overestimated their hand. Let me use Starr County as an example. It’s the most Latino county in the whole country down on the border in South Texas: 97 percent Latino, mostly Mexican American. Clinton and Obama were racking up huge numbers — like 70 percent, 80 percent of the vote was going for Democrats. But do you know what percentage of eligible voters voted in 2016? It was about 14.6 percent. So if you’re winning 80 percent or, let’s say, you’re winning 75 percent of 14 percent of all eligible voters; you are not winning a majority of Starr County. You do not have a majority of support in Starr County. You have a sliver of support in Starr County. You’re not popular enough to get people off the couch. They’re choosing their couch, or more accurately their second job, over you.

I think that’s the story in a lot of Latino counties, where Democrats won by big margins. They were never winning big majorities of eligible voters. And that’s so much of Trump’s secret sauce. Again, I think a lot of credit goes to the candidate himself. He just has never, ever been afraid to chase first-time voters, irregular voters, low-turnout places. He turned that into his base.

One thing I’m hearing a lot of, seeing a lot of, is that Democrats need to go back to more pure economic populism. The problem is — what does that mean exactly?
Everyone’s been like, “It’s not just a policies’ thing; it’s a vibes thing.” I’m suspicious; I don’t believe that ideas float out in the world or vibes float out in the world unconnected to a material reality. So it’s not just vibes. But Democrats also don’t need to overthink the policies too hard. Biden, for all his faults — look how all the wages outstripped inflation for the first time in 50 years. That’s a huge victory. A set of Democratic policies are good for working-class people. I think what they need to do is — I was driving around the Southwest a lot in ’21, ’22, and I saw these stickers on gas pumps. And I saw them in some supermarkets, too, by the milk or eggs. There was a picture of Biden pointing upward, at the gas price, and saying, “I did that.” And people were posting it.

If I were Democrats, I’d be printing out a picture of Trump right now, getting it on a sticker. Every time something happens under Trump that isn’t good for working-class people, hammer him on it. If there’s a trade war with China and all of a sudden all consumer goods go up in price, hammer him on that. You don’t have to get deep into the explanations;  just be like, “He said he was going to lower prices. That’s his main thing he said he was going to do. Look at these prices going up.” If he deports all the dairy workers in Wisconsin, the price of milk doubles, quadruples — hammer him on that. Inflation was this thorn in Democrats’ sides. It was really this thing that killed them the last four years. Now every time a price increases, it’s their best friend.

A big part of this, too, is that the Democratic brand is really tainted. It’s seen as college-educated antiseptic, and when you’re talking about working people or immigrants or whatever, it sounds like you’re lying. So you need people who can speak authentically. This was really emphasized in Tim Walz’s transformation, pre and post being picked as VP candidate. He had these freewheeling interviews, talked a bit rough, and people loved it, and then he entered the bubble wrap.

That was weird, to quote him. 
I mean in Harris’s defense, it seems like Walz has a problem with lying. That was an embarrassing news cycle.

Republicans aren’t afraid of that. They’re like, “Yeah, I lie. So what?”
If everyone’s having fun, you can deal with some negative news. Again, I don’t run campaigns. I don’t advise campaigns. It’s not my job to do that, so I’m not going to pretend to know more than what I’m talking about here. But the Democrats I met in Reading — again, it’s low turnout, so it’s not like they’ve got huge movements behind them — but they’re winning their elections four to one, way ahead of Harris.

Johanny Cepeda-Freytiz, who I quote in a couple of my recent articles, runs a restaurant. She almost went out of business during the Great Recession. She almost went out of business during COVID. She almost went out of business because the cost of bread and milk went up. She really knows what that’s like. She feels it. And she talks like it too. You hear it in her voice, and it’s just very believable when she talks about needing to raise the minimum wage. It doesn’t sound like we polled this and we focus-tested it, and that’s why we’re doing it.

There are examples of Latino politicians down the ballot who did pretty well this cycle, like Ruben Gallego. Though he did face a weak opponent in Kari Lake. 
I’m going to really study Gallego, and I hope to profile him and write a lot about that race, for two reasons. The first one is, how much was that Kari Lake? And how much was he doing something right? He’s being really touted that way right now, and some of the people I really like and respect are saying that, but vamos a ver. I want to take a look under the hood before I declare him this savior. But I’ll make an early prediction, totally irresponsibly. I think he’ll run in the Democratic primary in 2028. I think that’s another reason to keep an eye on him.

Beyond all the factors we’ve discussed, there’s an idea that people who have become more right wing are consuming different streams of information that Democrats haven’t penetrated — not just the likes of Rogan but also straight-up misinformation. Based on all the reporting you’ve done, do you see that as an actual prevalent problem? Is this something that Democrats are overthinking?
I think it does tend to be a problem, but I think the condescending solutions which are like, “Oh, these people need to be educated” — going in with that attitude, you’re just going to fail. Like, let’s fix this by giving people homework?

But you do need to diagnose the problem, right? Is it more that people want something more freewheeling or something darker?
I’ll put it in three components. No. 1 — I reported from Denison, Iowa, about this very successful Spanish-language publication, La Prensa de Iowa. And so I think the first thing is that people do crave relevant, culturally competent — even that phrase sounds so college-y and insulting. I do think that a lot of the mainstream news is not useful. I’m very aware of it, and it bothers me sometimes. And I often write about Latinos not for Latinos. And that’s why I try to make anything I’m writing for South Texas useful and revelatory for South Texas. Not just explaining those Mexicans to Brooklyn.

I think the media fails there. I don’t think New York Magazine or the publications I write for are go-tos for somebody who’s living in South Texas or Reading. Why would it? So you look for other alternative sources of news. Local influencers get a ton of traction because people do crave knowledge. They want to know what’s going on. And so I think that’s a big part of the reason this — in scare quotes — “alternative media” is doing well. I see a lot of local Instagram or TikTok or Facebook Live streamers. They’re really popular in these places in a way that they’re not popular in a lot of the Democratic heartlands.

The collapse of local news isn’t helping here. 
That’s a hundred percent a part of it.

The second thing is it’s just not very fun to listen to a Kamala Harris speech. It’s really boring to listen to any Democrat talk. And I think just making it a bit more fun and more interesting or just satisfying … the Trump show is really fun to watch, and Democrats don’t have an answer for that. It doesn’t mean they couldn’t. I think it’s going to require something very fundamental to change, but they could do that.

And the third thing is that — and this is going to come across as patronizing, but I think it’s fundamentally true — people are fucking tired when they get home from work in a place like Starr County or Nogales. A lot of people are working hard manual labor, a lot of people are working more than one job, and child care is very hard to come by, and most people can’t afford it, so you’re just exhausted. So the idea that you’re sitting down with the New York Times at the end of the day — it’s not intellectual reasons; it’s really structural reasons for why people don’t do that. And so if you can have your entertainment, your infotainment, bite-size, TikTok style, Instagram-video style, that’s an easier way to reach people who are basically too busy to read this Q&A that your readers are reading right now.

Yeah, this Q&A is not going to do well in Starr County, I fear.
No, they don’t care. But if anyone in Starr County is reading this, they can email me and make fun of me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.