This past Friday (on Washington Week with the Atlantic), Jeffrey Goldberg reads a sentence from an article Tim Alberta wrote in 2022 about Latino voters: "The very thing that breathed life into the Democratic Party 20 years ago, the focus on identity and inclusion is making it more popular with white voters and less popular with Hispanic voters." Alberta responds:
You know, Jeff, in that piece, it's really interesting. I characterize a few different conversations I'm having with Latino men who -- in the Rio Grande Valley, in the southwest, in South Florida, and they're all telling me some variation of the same thing, which is that—
Yes, I'm pretty sure that Donald Trump is a racist. I'm pretty sure that Donald Trump doesn't like people like me. But at least he's sort of open and transparent about it, and, in a way, I can almost trust him, whereas Democrats, use us as pawns in their political game. They act like they're our friend. They sort of -- you know, they tell us how important we are to their coalition, but then they never give us a seat at the table.
And furthermore, Democrats seem preoccupied with all of these sort of cultural, social issues and the sort of virtue signaling that can accompany them rather than on the concerns of people like me in our community, namely, the economy, and, yes, illegal immigration.
If you go spend time in the Rio Grande Valley, and I've done a lot of it over the past five, six years, it is remarkable to see these counties that Hillary Clinton won by 70, 80 points, that Donald Trump has now, eight years later, flipped to red.
And what is the common theme through all of those areas when you spend time talking to people there, including Democratic mayors and Democratic sheriffs? They will say the same two things. Democrats stopped focusing on working people and Democrats stopped caring about illegal immigration.
And if you think back to even the Obama era, Barack Obama deported millions of illegal immigrants, more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton had. On a lot of these sort of core cultural and social touchstones, Obama, even though he was in his heart of hearts a progressive, was willing to at least sort of accommodate the center right in this country in ways that the Democratic Party, since his departure from office, has not been done.
The day after the election, Aaron Blake (in "The most striking and telling stats of the 2024 election: Trump won in a rout. But how he did so might surprise you.") assessed how Democrats lost so decisively, including this statistic (followed by the graph tweeted by Matthew Watkins):
16 points: Trump’s margin of victory in Starr County, Texas, the country’s most heavily Latino county on the U.S.-Mexico border. He lost the same county in 2016 by 60 points. Trump surged in many heavily Latino counties near the border.
I was surprised by this turn of events. I'm sure most Democratic voters were as much in the dark as I was. Was the Biden White House surprised? Was the Harris campaign? There are Democratic mayors, Democratic sheriffs, and Democratic Members of Congress, among other leaders, in Texas. Perhaps the Biden-Harris administration had figured out what a disaster Biden's border policy earlier in his administration had become but did too little, too late to make up for it.
Overall, a majority of Latinos (with the exception of Cuban Americans) stuck with the Democratic ticket, but in numbers far lower than in presidential elections over the past two decades. I don't think MAGA Republicans are destined to become a rainbow coalition. But Democrats, after losing the white working class, appear to be losing other ethnic groups as well. (This is a sad state of affairs for Democrats of longstanding who have regarded their party as a coalition dedicated to benefit, among others, the working class and folks who don't have college degrees. That's central.)
While I believe that structural factors may have been decisive in the 2024 election, the outcome and the continuing erosion of working class support speaks to a fundamental failure of the Democratic Party. Democrats have their work cut out for them.