Republicans’ growing support among Latinos is no longer guaranteed after a comedian made a racist joke at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But could it cost Trump the election? Isvett Verde, a Times Opinion editor, speaks with Mike Madrid, a Republican and an expert on Latino voting trends and behaviors, about why the election may hinge on each candidate’s ability to sway Latino voters.
Below is a transcript of their conversation for this episode of “The Opinions,” edited for length and clarity. We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Isvett Verde: I’m Isvett Verde, and I’m an editor for New York Times Opinion. And my work here focuses on immigration, the border and Latino power in America. Every four years, there’s a bunch of hand-wringing by both parties over the so-called Latino vote. This year is no different.
Since 2012, no Democratic candidate has been able to secure the level of support that Barack Obama won, 71 percent. And one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about in this election is how Kamala Harris and Democrats have or have not been appealing to Latinos. But then this happened.
Clip of Tony Hinchcliffe: I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.
Verde: And I wanted to talk to Mike Madrid, who is someone I often turn to in moments like these, because, as he writes, Donald Trump may have “finally crossed a bridge too far with Latino voters.” Mike is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and a Republican who consults on Latino voting trends and behavior. So I’m curious to hear why he thinks this could be a tipping point.
Hi, Mike.
Mike Madrid: Hi, Isvett. Great to be with you.
Verde: Mike, were you watching the Madison Square rally live?
Madrid: I was watching it on Twitter.
Verde: And what was your initial reaction to the comments that the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made?
Madrid: You know, I kind of lost my breath a little bit, which is odd in the Trump era, because I think I was so taken aback. Not just by the Puerto Rico comment, although that was the one that really hit me in the gut. But what was different about this time was that it wasn’t coming from Trump’s voice. It was coming from other voices, and that’s why it’s impacting everybody very differently, because we have become so inured by Donald Trump’s open racist vitriol that if he had said these things, we would just have rolled our eyes.
When he platformed different voices, there seems to be this shaking of our sensibilities again, that this is clearly not acceptable behavior. Perhaps most important, it wasn’t anti-immigrant sentiment, because, of course, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth. So this argument that Republicans have been using, which is, “We’re not talking about legal immigrants; we’re just talking about the illegal immigrants,” doesn’t apply here.
Verde: Let’s take a step back. I want to do a little bit of table setting about how we’ve seen trends shift since 2012. How has the Latino electorate changed since Obama?
Madrid: Well, there has been this measurable rightward shift, and the reason for it, I argue, is that there’s a demographic explanation for all of this. See, during the Obama administration, the idea that demographics is destiny, or, as the more common vernacular, the Obama coalition, was kind of cemented into the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, suggesting that all nonwhite people, essentially, will be voting overwhelmingly Democratic — 70 percent or more, Blacks and Latinos, specifically — and that through natural demography, through births and deaths, the emerging Democratic majority would see, essentially, Democrats build a permanent majority by just population change.
And at the time, I was kind of raising some alarm bells, saying: That’s not the way this work. This is not a group that is motivated primarily through racial or ethnic issues.
This is overwhelmingly an economic, pocketbook-issue voter. Something very different happens in 2021, and that is we start to see dramatic spikes in border crossings, literally to the month of when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take office. And it continues for three years. And we see the American public starts to move significantly to the right on the immigration issue not just for all Americans but for Latinos — measurably, significantly, considerably — and the emphasis then becomes on border security, not on immigration reform.
And this is a dramatic challenge to the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party. It had spent 15 years doubling down on the idea that the primary issue and concern for Latino voters was immigration reform, and this begins to prove untrue, especially during the Biden-Harris years.
Verde: And given the hurdles Harris is up against, I’m curious how you think she’s done, her campaign has done.
Madrid: I think she’s done remarkably well. And the reason is on the two issues of primary concern, both the spiking levels of undocumented immigrants coming across the border as well as the need to do something on housing specifically.
Those have really been the cornerstone, the anchor, if you will, of what she has predicated her whole campaign argument on. In fact, days after Joe Biden announces he’s not going to be running, she releases an ad called “Tougher.”
Political advertisement: As vice president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades, 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.
Madrid: And that “Tougher” ad essentially talks about her strength on the border, the fact that she’s prosecuted transnational gangs, and it includes footage of her literally on the border.
In many ways, this is 180 degrees different than the way that she and President Biden campaigned for the office in 2020, and in fact, it’s 180 degrees different than what the Democrats have been messaging on this issue since the Obama years — I would argue going back to perhaps the Clinton years in the mid-1990s. It’s a dramatic sea change in border security policy, and it’s exactly the position that she’s got to take for political reasons to move away from her party’s position over the past 15 years and re-cement in the minds of American voters, and Latino voters, that this is going to be a priority and she can be taken seriously on this issue.
The second is this brilliant plan on Latino housing. And I say Latino housing because she offers an unprecedented opportunity for down payment assistance to first-time home buyers who have generationally never had homeownership in their families. That really narrows the universe of those that are able to take advantage of that program to Latino families. And just as important, because of the number of Latinos employed in the construction industry and the average age of Latinos being 30 years, she gets kind of this double whammy of the economy and jobs but also homeownership, which is critical to middle-class ascendancy and an aspirational, upwardly mobile, ethnic middle class.
Verde: So then I’m curious: Why are those differences and appeals in her campaigning not showing up in the polls? Does she have a problem with Latino voters?
Madrid: I don’t think that she has a problem with Latino voters. I think the Democratic Party has a problem with Latino voters. And again, this is not a new phenomenon. This is something that the Democratic Party is really struggling with as it moves away from being a working-class party. And it’s happening very rapidly as this dynamic that we call the diploma divide continues to separate us politically.
The diploma divide is a phenomenon where those with a college degree are moving pretty dramatically toward the Democratic Party. Those without a college degree are moving equally quickly toward the Republican Party. And that means the coalitions of both parties are changing. It means the Democratic Party is becoming a wealthier, whiter, more college-educated, home-owning party. And the Republican Party, perhaps ironically, is becoming a poorer, more working-class, more non-college-educated and, critically, a more ethnically diverse party.
Verde: Let’s return to the backlash to the Trump rally comments now.
Madrid: Yeah.
Verde: How likely do you think this could make Trump lose with Latino voters?
Madrid: I think it’s very likely. And it’s ironic because for the past couple of years, I have been saying that it is not ethnic appeals that are going to bring these voters back toward the Democratic Party.
So why is this different? Again, the first thing, as I mentioned earlier, is that it wasn’t Donald Trump saying this. Remember also, we’re about a week out from the election, and Latinos, because they’re lower-information voters and less civically engaged, are much more late-deciding voters. So the last seven to 10 days are really prime time to be communicating with Latino voters.
And just as they’re tuning in, they’re seeing these culturally offensive messages that aren’t just being said from the stage of Donald Trump supporters, but it’s picked up immediately by very significant social media influencers, cultural leaders — Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, Residente, Ricky Martin, Geraldo Rivera, Puerto Ricans with literally, combined, over a hundred million followers on their social media handles. It begins to start penetrating into the culture.
Clip of Trump: Latin music superstar Nicky Jam. Do you know Nicky? She’s hot.
Clip of Nicky Jam: It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. President. People that come from where I come from, they don’t meet the president. So I’m really — I’m lucky. I’m going to say this, but we need you to be the president.
And when you have a musician or an artist as prominent as somebody like Nicky Jam, who just retracted his endorsement, which tells you this is not just a political discussion anymore. It’s a cultural discussion.
Clip of Nicky Jam: Renuncio a cualquier apoyo a Donald Trump y me echo a los lados a cualquier situación política. Puerto Rico se respeta. Nicky Jam.
And this injects itself into the discussions at restaurants, at soccer fields, on radio stations in a way that nothing else could break through. So it’s really hard to suggest this isn’t going to have some impact. We can debate how much, but it’s going to have some impact on the outcome of the election.
Verde: What difference could a shift in the Puerto Rican electorate in the U.S. mean come Election Day?
Madrid: Well, I mean, look, the most significant place that could have a direct impact is Pennsylvania, which is, of course, the most important state. In fact, Pennsylvania is the only one of the swing states that has a Puerto Rican plurality [among Latinos].
And so just a two-to-three-point shift in Puerto Rican public opinion, voter public opinion on these issues could have a tectonic impact. Beyond that, the diaspora does shrink considerably because most of the other Puerto Rican community lives in Florida, New York and New Jersey, which are essentially already decided. These aren’t really competitive states.
In some ways, the Puerto Rican diaspora suffers from what Mexican Americans have always been challenged with, which is even though Mexican Americans are the largest plurality of Latinos in the state, by a wide measure, they disproportionately live in states that are already either very red or very blue. And so the Latino vote won’t have a decisive impact in most of these states — Arizona and Nevada being excepted, of course, at the moment.
But there’s a very real possibility that Puerto Rican voters will begin to replace Cuban voters as the key essential bloc because Cuban Americans have had a disproportionate impact on the narrative politically of who Latinos are because they’ve been largely concentrated in one of the most important swing states over the past 50 years, which is Florida. And as Florida is no longer a swing state and Pennsylvania becomes into contention, replacing it, it’s the Puerto Rican diaspora that, curiously, could actually be the most important of the Latino subgroups in determining the next president and perhaps presidents of the United States, going forward.
Verde: You know, despite whatever happens next, something I think a lot about is this idea of Latino. And I wonder, do you think the label or even the idea of a Latino vote could become irrelevant?
Madrid: In time and probably not in the too far future, yes, the idea of the Latino voter and the Latino ethnicity will fall by the wayside. And the reason is Latinos, by definition, are a multiracial people.
And so the more we become a multiracial society, the more we blend — Latinos, by the way, have the highest interracial marriage rates of any race or ethnicity — generationally, as we become less racially and ethnically and culturally distinct, yes, we will see the end of Latinidad, or Latino identity, because it will be too complicated to measure, too complicated to figure out, and we will find other ways to kind of identify who we will be as Americans, going forward.
Verde: You know, going into Tuesday, Election Day, what do you think is going to be the headline of the role that Latino voters played?
Madrid: I think, especially with the development of what happened in Madison Square Garden, if Kamala Harris is elected president, she will be elected because she carried Pennsylvania, and she will do so by increasing her share from Joe Biden’s number with Latino voters in that state.
If, on the other hand, Donald Trump is elected, the headline will be the exact opposite, which is: Donald Trump increased his share of the Latino vote, and that is why he became the next president of the United States. This is the first time in 30 years of being involved in presidential campaigns I have said that the Latino vote will be decisive in determining who the next president of the United States is, because in all likelihood, we will.
Verde: Thank you so much, Mike. This has been such a wonderful conversation.
Madrid: Isvett, thank you so much for having me. Look forward to future conversations.
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