Ex-Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer warned on Friday that there is “no path” for Democrats to win elections unless they address their rapidly declining Latino vote.
Pfeiffer brought this up with former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau on the “Pod Save America” podcast as they looked over 2024 election exit data which showed former Vice President Kamala Harris losing ground with both young voters and minority voters.
Pfeiffer added that the Democratic Party had been losing Latino voters since 2016.
“The main story of this is that Democrats are in a huge bit of trouble,” Pfeiffer said. “There’s no way to look at this without recognizing the massive scale of our problems. And you can kind of tell yourself that things might be kind of okay by looking at just the shift from 2020 to 2024. But if you really want to assess where we are as a party, you have to look at the shift from 2016 to 2024. And it is particularly true with Latino voters.”
He pointed out that Latinos have shifted 17 points towards Republicans since 2016. While Democrats still took a majority of Hispanic voters, Pfeiffer showed concern over this trend.
“Latinos are the fastest-growing population in the country. They are particularly politically powerful because of how the population is distributed in electoral-rich sunbelt states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, et cetera. And so, they are becoming more of the electorate, and we are losing more of them at a very fast rate. If that trend continues, there is no path to Democrats winning elections,” Pfeiffer said.
Regarding young voters, Pfeiffer pointed out that Harris only got about half of new voters compared to President Donald Trump.
“If that trend continues, we’re in huge trouble,” Pfeiffer said. “The message I take from this is anyone who thinks that we can get away with just tinkering around the edges just hoping that Donald Trump becomes unpopular or they nominate some yahoo in 2028 or we’re going to ride the wave of tariffs and inflation to a narrow House victory is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We have to be willing to ask very hard questions.”
Since the 2024 election, other former Obama officials have criticized the Democratic Party for failing to appeal outside the elite.
“The only group they won among – Democrats won among – were people who make more than $100,000 a year,” former Obama advisor David Axelrod said in November. “You can’t win national elections that way.”
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