‘Nobody in Politics Is Able to Say It’: The Truth About Latino Voters
Everyone knows the Latino vote will be decisive in this presidential election year. But Mike Madrid says most of what people think about Latino voters and how to win them over is wrong.
Madrid is one of the country’s leading political strategists when it comes to Latino voters. He was a senior operative for the California Republican Party who rubbed shoulders with the likes of George W. Bush and his generation of GOP officials, but he was repulsed by Donald Trump and co-founded the Lincoln Project to oppose him.
In an interview for the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, Madrid talked about his new book, The Latino Century, and laid out a breadcrumb trail for both Republicans and Democrats to win this decisive block of voters, who he believes are very much up for grabs this year.
In fact, the biggest problem with courting Latinos might be that politicians think of them strictly as an ethnic group in the first place.
“Minority voters are voting much more along economic class lines than they are as a race and ethnic voter,” Madrid said. “The party that is able to capture the hearts and minds of a multiethnic working class will be the dominant party of the next generation.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive producer Kara Tabor. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here:
If you were advising Kamala Harris and if you were advising Donald Trump, give us the outline of what you would tell each of those candidates.
It’s a really good question because when the book launched in June, I was writing it for Biden's campaign …
I think a lot of our listeners know that you're not a Trump guy. Take us from the Biden coalition to the Kamala Harris coalition, to the opportunities that she suddenly has that he didn't.
The basic theory that became orthodoxy in the party during the Obama era was this “demographics is destiny” concept — literally every 30 seconds a new Latino is born in America, and that's a future Democrat. So all we have to do is wait until the non-white population exceeds a certain number in places like Texas and Florida, and those states are going to turn blue. And of course, that didn't happen.
I was there in the early 2000s saying, that's not what's going to happen, because it assumes ethnicity is static. It assumes racial construct is static. It assumes culture is static. But as we know, everything else doesn't stay constant. The height of immigration in this country from Latin America was the year 2007. The political difference between a first- and second-generation Latino is a pretty big leap. The step from a second- to a third-generation Latino is tectonic. And so over the last ten years, we started to see dramatic growth in third- and now a discernible fourth-generation Latino voter. And so you will hear a lot of pollsters and pundits who watch this say the problem is with US-born Hispanic males. And it is. This is this rightward shift that is happening and it's not happening incrementally. It's exploding. This is the number that's growing really fast at the time when the recently naturalized share of the vote is shrinking, it's collapsing dramatically. Spanish speakers are diminishing. So who Latino voters are in Arizona, Nevada, even in North Carolina, certainly California, Texas, Florida — those are very, very different Latino voters.
Let's talk for a second about the differences between the generations, as you go from first to second and second to third and third to fourth. What other ethnic or national groups is it similar to? I've heard analysts compare it to other groups from Europe. Is there anything to those comparisons?
There is. They're not complete. At the turn of the last century, when you had Italian Americans or Irish Americans or other nationalities, Polish, Greek, Jewish groups coming, largely they would come in these short, large spurts where there would be something happening economically or politically in the home country, and they would leave. And you hear the stories of yore: “I was a 15-year-old Italian kid, and I stowed away on a boat, and they couldn't find me for two weeks. And then they changed my name at Ellis Island and I never went home. I found Little Italy and we built a life in America.” Right? That's kind of the trajectory.
And that assimilative pattern is what we consider as Americans as a normal one. So that in New York, it's entirely possible to have a Mario Cuomo on the left and an Alfonse D'Amato on the right. Both of them proud sons of Italian immigrants, and nobody questions their ethnicity or their politics. What allows for that is there's an end to the immigration and there's a never-return. So the diaspora becomes isolated. And then over third and fourth generations, the ethnic tie to the mother country weakens considerably and it becomes its own unique American, Italian-American. And it's very different than going back to Italy and saying, “I'm Italian” and they're like, “You're not Italian.”
I've had this experience going both to Ireland and Italy as I have that on both sides.
OK.
So the identity with the home country breaks?
The identity with the home country breaks. It becomes something unique. So Mexicans start to come. Look, we were here before the country was here. California, 90 percent of the cities and counties names are Hispanic surnames, Spanish surnames, all that history. But there really weren't that many people in California when it became a state. The really big numbers start to come in the 1980s. The difference between what's happening now and what happened with your grandparents is, first of all, the mother country is right next door. Like literally some people were working across the border. There was never, “We crossed the Atlantic and we're never going back.” A lot of people go back for Christmas or for the holidays. The other part is there's a technological connection where everybody's talking on WhatsApp or even on Spanish language mediums. A lot of this stuff is produced in Latin America, so there's a continual cultural reinforcement. And the third distinction from what happened 150 years ago was, there's still migratory waves coming. So it has both slowed the assimilation process because of this continual cultural reinforcement for those reasons, but also the size and scope of what is happening is literally transforming the old idea of the melting pot. So much so that in 17 years or so, 15, 17 years, America will become a nonwhite majority country, driven almost entirely by the growth in Latinos and Hispanics.
You’ve talked about the Latino agenda. Let’s lay that out because I think that's a good starting place. A lot of people have a fuzzy idea of what that might be.
You hear all the time, Latinos are not monolithic. Some are Cubans, some are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans. But also we have to understand that Latinos overwhelmingly in this country are of Mexican descent; 60 percent of all Latinos are of Mexican descent. There's no other group that hits double digits. The Mexican demographic that is coming is the fastest growing segment of the blue collar, non-college educated workforce. Latinos, U.S.-born Hispanic men specifically, are not going to college at rates faster than any other race or ethnic group. Those with college degrees are increasingly Asian and white in this country. Those without are Black and brown. The white share of the blue collar workforce is shrinking dramatically, as is the voter base. And minority voters are voting much more along economic class lines than they are as a race and ethnic voter. The party that is able to capture the hearts and minds of a multiethnic working class will be the dominant party of the next generation. The Democrats have had a real problem with the working class piece as the diploma divide has consolidated college-educated voters into their ranks. And what has happened as college-educated people have become more aligned with the Democratic Party is they've become a less diverse party.
The exact opposite is happening with the Republican Party and again, most of this is for cultural, educational and economic reasons, not racial reasons. And the Democratic Party's whole heterodoxy is premised on the idea that if you're nonwhite, you are needing the party and the government's intervention to help you to either right past wrongs or assist you with a government program to help you economically.
And that doesn't work anymore.
That does not work anymore.
Because these cultural issues are becoming more salient.
That's exactly right. Well, that and economic populism is taking root amongst younger people. And one of the great ironies is Gen Xers and Baby Boomers always wanted to have a generation of Americans that were colorblind, that didn't see color. And the irony is, these young Gen Zers grew up in the most racially, ethnically diverse generation in history and they don't see color. They're looking more at this economic populist consideration and the racial-ethnic considerations are either taken as granted or aren't as driving as they were for a generation or two generations prior. And so the Democratic Party has really needed to get out of this racial identity cul-de-sac that it's driven itself into.
At the same time, the Republican Party is doubling down on white identity and white nativism under Trump, and yet getting a bigger share of these voters for that exact same reason that the economic populist elements and a blue collar culture both are bringing more of these voters — I would argue — away from the Democratic Party more than to the Republican Party. There's a difference.
I want you to unpack something because you pointed out two contradictions in how the two parties are trying to appeal to these voters. On the Democratic side, it's overemphasizing, identity and race.
Yeah, for voters of color.
What is your explanation structurally and institutionally for why that is in the Democratic Party? Obviously you have quite a few groups that are influential in the Democratic coalition who claim to speak for the voting groups you're talking about and who do have a very race- and ethnicity-first agenda.
The roots of this were when Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and he famously said or didn't say, depending on which lore you believe that we've written off the South for a generation, right? The Democratic Party made a conscious effort essentially to realign its coalition with Black voters. Black voters and northerners. That was a conscious move by Johnson. And the ramifications are still being felt today. Republicans, of course, leaned into the Dixiecrats and the Southern strategy developed in the late 60s, 1970, Nixon's campaign, and has been determinative of the Republican Party and where it's gone over the same amount of time. But as Black voters were welcomed into this coalition, they became central to the messaging of who the Democratic Party was.
What happened in the mid-1960s was this third wave of Latinos coming. And this is where you see the beginnings of what we call the Chicano movement, the Mexican-American movement, who really started to take on the characteristics of the civil rights based oppression model, even though there was not the same type of history of oppression that Black Americans faced. Both sides looked at each other and said, “If Black and brown people work together, we can actually increase the size of our coalition and leverage our power.” And that became the model from the mid-1960s up until very, very recently. And so that was where the term people of color was originated. That's it's really a meaningless term, but it's used to leverage a coalition. It essentially means nonwhite, right. Unless you're white, you can be a person of color and we can kind of claim some sort of oppression-based model off of that.
This idea becomes really central during the Obama years for the demographic reasons that we mentioned, which was there was a belief because of that idea set in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and for 20 years afterwards that all we needed to do was create more voters of color and as this demographic would increase the numbers, they'll keep voting 75 percent plus with the Democratic Party. And we'll just beat them in the maternity wards. Latinos needed to create an issue that would galvanize the Latino vote that was based off of this racial and ethnic model. It became sort of evident because of what was happening in the country at the time, which was California was going nuts with Proposition 187, this anti-immigrant measure. Latinos were responding negatively to that and organizing with the Democratic Party. California goes from this huge purple state to a now deep blue state, in large part to the demographic change.
Let's use the immigration issue as a model now. There was never, ever any evidence that immigration was a top five issue, even for the recently migrated. And it is rarely a top seven or eight issue — or has been up until recently, for Latinos broadly. But even now where it’s starting to pop up in importance, it's on border security, not on immigration reform. And that's largely because the growth, again, is with the third- and fourth-generation Latino voter. This is not a voter that is ever, ever worried about waking up in the middle of the night and being deported. And I hear it constantly: “How can you vote for somebody who wants to deport you?” And it's like, “I'm not going to be deported any more than an Irishman, who does or doesn't remember the potato famine.” So increasingly, Democrats are pushing these third- and fourth-generation voters, a very fast growing segment of the Latino electorate, out of their party by emphasizing this racial paradigm.
All of the evidence that I outline in the book starts to play out with Joe Biden. His numbers start to collapse with Latino voters. He and Kamala Harris run on a campaign of saying, “We're not going to build an inch of the border wall. We're not going to separate families.” He runs on basically the most permissive border proposal maybe in history, but certainly in the last 30 or 40 years. And what happens is immigrants hear that throughout the world and they start coming literally within days of his taking office and the numbers start to explode. And what happens in public opinion polls is not just Americans start to grow concerned, but Latino Americans grow increasingly concerned.
When you tell that story to Democrats, do you find that there's a lot of denial about that narrative that you just laid out?
Only with the professional ones who've made contacts and money and are waiting for the White House invitation to Christmas card parties. What I'm saying is not novel or unique. It's kind of commonsensical and everybody sort of knows it. It's just nobody in politics is able to say it because you give up a lot of leverage in the Democratic Party once you start to say things like, “We're not that different than everybody else.” But lo and behold, Biden signs the executive action on asylum. The border shuts down. CBS puts out a poll saying 69 percent of Latinos support Biden's proposal compared to 70 percent of all Americans. Within a matter of weeks, Kamala Harris becomes the presumptive nominee. Literally the first ad was a tough-on-the-border, a border security ad. It’s thousands of new officers on the border, building the border wall, fighting transnational gangs. This is a Republican ad.
What did that tell you?
It tells me that the adults in the Democratic Party have finally figured it out, and the data became so overwhelming that they were willing to push back on the left voices in their party. And it's a healthy thing for democracy, because what it means is the Democrats have fixed their racial identity problem, or at least are well on their way to fixing it and realizing how damaging it's been to them since the Obama era. One of the great ironies is it took a Black woman to do that. Joe Biden could never really do that.
Help us understand this Republican Party that is anti-woke, anti-racial identity, sometimes it’s white identity ascendant, yet Trump is doing better and better with Latinos. What's going on there that those things are happening simultaneously?
I would argue that the white identity is now dominant in the Republican Party. I think it's the dominant motivating factor in today's GOP because it's closely correlated to the fear of technological change, economic disruption and ethnic demographic transformation. All three of these are hitting the country at the same time. So when Donald Trump is saying “Make America Great Again,” it's a broad way of saying, “Let's get back to what we know.” And it doesn't have, I don't think, necessarily a direct racial appeal, but the undertones are there.
So having said that, what I'm arguing is the massive movements, the 8 point shift, that's pretty significant from 2016 to 2020 for Trump. That 8 point movement is almost entirely third-and fourth-generation Latinos. It's not like Latinos are changing their voting behavior and saying, “I voted for Hillary Clinton and I voted for Barack Obama, but now I'm going to vote for Donald Trump.” What's happening is almost 40 percent of Latino voters are under the age of 30. 20 percent of all Latino voters this year will be voting for their first time in November — 20 percent. The numbers are going to start growing exponentially for every election cycle going forward. So we are literally on the cusp of a massive wave.
But these are not immigrants. These are English-exclusive, in most cases, English-dominant certainly. Pew Research says overwhelmingly about two thirds of them identify as quote unquote typical Americans. They know of their Hispanic heritage, but it's not something that's central to their lives. And I don't want to suggest that there isn't some sort of nativist element to it. There clearly is. But what I believe very, very firmly, and I think the data bears this out, is this is far more about economic populism and generational change than it is about race or ethnicity.
You heard a lot of people, especially earlier this year, saying “We're witnessing a racial realignment.” That is not true. A realignment presupposes that these voters had a position and are changing it, the way Black voters did in the mid 60s and the way Southern whites did during the Southern strategy. This is the emergence of a new political perspective that is much more economically populist.
I'm using that as a setup to get to the Trump question which is, “How is Trump bringing these people into the fold?” What I'm arguing is this demographic change is stronger than Donald Trump and if Donald Trump were not in the way, it would be even bigger. If you look at Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas, Doug Ducey, last Republican governor of Arizona, even a guy like Brian Dahle, the sacrificial Republican lamb in California that ran in the 2022 midterms. All of those, very large Hispanic populations — and get this — every Republican member who holds office in a swing House district, every single one of them, all met or exceeded, in some cases considerably, Donald Trump's numbers with Hispanic voters. If Trump were not in the way, you could easily see the other Republican nominees breaking the 40 percent threshold easily. I don't want to say that that was the concerted decision that Trump is making because I don't think he makes any concerted decisions. But if they would just ride the demographic wave instead of continuing to resist it, they would be doing much better in the polls. I don't think this race would be particularly close, by the way. The Republican nominee would be in a much better position.
What is Trump saying that is preventing him from doing as well as you think another Republican might be doing?
It's the racism. It's the negativism. Because this growth of the Republican share is happening despite their best efforts, not because they're doing anything. It's a demographic shift. And as they leaned into blue collar, white blue collar workers, they were talking about economic populism, the white workers being replaced by a Latino by aging out. This group that doesn't have a strong ethnic anchor that is working in these same workplaces, on the job site, on the assembly line, in the energy patch, are naturally going to take on the same political views of their colleagues. And they are. It's only when he introduces the “Judge Curiel, he can't be a good judge because he's Mexican” or “They're drug dealers or rapists or some, I guess, are very fine people.” It's like, even if you don't feel that direct connectedness, you've lived enough life experience to know what he's talking about and you're less comfortable with that as a Latino third-generation than you are somebody who's white four or five generations back. That's what's limiting it. If you just set that stuff aside, you would see a Republican candidate doing significantly better. Measurably better, anyway.
Your advice is to de-emphasize racial and ethnic identity generally. We're talking about an ethnic group, and you're advising candidates not to lead with that. So what's the balance?
I'm not going to say that the White House was reading my book, but I'm not going to say they weren't either. This housing policy that Kamala Harris put out is brilliant. I was saying,”You guys need to put together what I call the Marshall Plan for housing.” 1 in 5 Hispanic men work in the residential construction space or related field. When you live in an era when the currency has been devalued by 20 percent over the last 4 or 5 years and interest rates have tripled, you've killed the housing market. It's a sucker punch to 20 percent of Hispanic households out of the gate.
How do you have a Latino housing plan without saying it's a Latino housing plan? The answer, and they nailed this masterfully, was by saying this housing plan is specifically targeted to those that have never owned a home or come from homeowners in their families. That's pretty brilliant, right? Because what that does is they're not saying this is specific to Latinos or whites or African Americans or Asians. It's open to anybody. But overwhelmingly, they're talking to Latinos there. When you have such a demographic distinction and social policy is so particular to a younger, poorer, working class demographic, speak to it that way and you don't have to say Latino, but the message gets across.
It should not surprise anybody that after Kamala Harris made a 180 degree turn away from racial identity politics, started talking about housing and economic policy in those terms, and adopted essentially a Republican plan on border security, her numbers started to immediately correct back into the normal historical range. Now, that happened broadly with every group, to be honest and to be fair. But the old way of thinking was this is the exact opposite of what you should do to get Latino voters. It's proven quantifiably false. And that's why I think this moment is so significant. You speak to this demographic where it's at, and you don't need to say Latino. Speak to the class distinctions and policy distinctions that it has outside of race and ethnicity.
Take us through the general Latino advice for Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia and the three Midwest states. Apply what we've talked about here to the campaign and the seven battlegrounds.
So this is the first election cycle where Latino voters, as a whole, will be larger than the margin of victory in every one of the seven battleground states.
Let's take North Carolina, for example, a state that will probably come down to 60,000 votes. There's now almost 300,000 Latino voters, none of which are polled because it's a 3 percent sample, and no one's going to put that in a public poll. But the raw numbers have grown by 80,000 in the last year alone. Mathematically, what you're seeing is North Carolina, is going to come into play in a way that most people don't think. You’ve got to talk about economics. You’ve got to talk about populism. And you absolutely must talk about housing. If you don't have a blue collar industrial policy, you're not talking to Latino voters. You have to talk about border security in Arizona and Nevada. And increasingly it's going to be the way that you win in Nevada. And Nevada is unique because you hear a lot about the Culinary Union, which is absolutely true. Over half of the Culinary Union are Latinos. Latinos are the essential workforce that keep Vegas running, unionized or not. But we're starting to see growth there now, which is the children of those immigrant union workers who are now turning 18. They're this under-30 voter and every year they're going to get bigger. Are they as much union? I mean, they’re certainly more union-sensitive. Are they as ethnically identified? They're certainly more so, but not nearly as much as their parents.
There is an opening for Republicans, probably in the post-Trump era, to go in and make inroads based off of these economic issues once race gets out of the way for both Democrats and Republicans. They're both going to have to stop using race the way Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have been using it for the past 30, 40 years.
For which party do you think it's going to be easier to do that?
If you had asked me that question four months ago, I would have said the Republicans. Now I'm going to say the Democrats, because they've done all of the right things and now the Republicans are kind of stuck with Trump. Whether or not they can get beyond him, win or lose in November, I think will be a big indicator of how significant inroads they can possibly make with the Latino vote.
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