2020 ELECTIONS
Culture wars fuel Trump’s blue-collar Latino gains
“Most Latinos identify first as working-class Americans. And Trump spoke to that.”
Supporters of President Donald Trump wait for him to speak at a campaign rally, Monday, Oct. 19, 2020, in Tucson, Ariz.
Supporters of President Donald Trump wait for him to speak at a campaign rally, Monday, Oct. 19, 2020, in Tucson, Ariz. | AP Photo/Alex Brandon
By MARC CAPUTO
11/21/2020 07:00 AM EST
Donald Trump lost the presidency, but showed Republicans a way to win the culture wars with working-class Hispanics.
Despite four years of being defined as a racist for his rhetoric and harsh immigration policies, Trump improved his margins in 78 of the nation’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties. And he did better with Latinos in exit polls of each of the top 10 battleground states, a POLITICO review of election data found.
Joe Biden still won Latino voters overall. But as post-election data trickles in, Democrats are growing concerned. Trump’s notable gains weren’t limited to Miami's Cuban Americans or border-region Tejanos. Although Florida and Texas stood out for the notable shift, Puerto Ricans as far away as Philadelphia and Mexican Americans in Milwaukee drifted Trump-ward.
Trump improved his showing among Latinos by scaling back some of his immigration rhetoric and engaging in a sustained bilingual social media and TV ad campaign that courted Latinos based on place of origin, gender and religion.
But, in interviews with more than a dozen experts on Hispanic voters in six states, no factor was as salient as Trump’s blue-collar appeal for Latinos.
“Most Latinos identify first as working-class Americans, and Trump spoke to that,” said Josh Zaragoza, a top Democratic data specialist in Arizona, adding that Hispanic men in particular “are very entrepreneurial. Their economic language is more aligned with the way Republicans speak: pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, owning your own business.”
And then there’s the way the left spoke — or were framed by Trump’s campaign for speaking. Calls to “defund the police,” a boycott of Goya Foods and the threat of socialism turned off some Latino voters. And even using the term Latinx to describe Latinos in a way that’s gender-neutral only served to puzzle many Hispanics.
“About 97 percent of Latinos don’t say ‘Latinx,’” Zaragoza said, referring to a Pew Research poll on the subject. “We’re building strategies around young progressive activists and organizations — and they’re necessary and we appreciate what they do.
“But a lot of Latino voters are focused on ‘I’m a hardworking American trying to feed my family or build a business,’ and a lot of this language doesn’t speak to them.”
The backlash
Amid the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter protests and the sputtering economy during the pandemic, Trump’s campaign found that Latinos were almost as receptive as non-Hispanic whites to a pro-police and pro-jobs message.
As images of flaming cities played frequently on Spanish-language TV, Trump’s campaign tailored bilingual ads, social media posts and mailers to paint Democrats as radicals. Even though Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) lost the Democratic presidential primary, his embrace of socialism and Latin American leftist leaders was used in swing district races against congressional Democrats — who lost seats in the House and made far fewer gains in the Senate and in state legislatures than expected.
“Let’s face it, ‘defund the police’ is just not the best slogan, especially in a place like Miami, where a lot of people work in law enforcement, or along the border of Texas, where Latinos are in Border Patrol,” said Jose Parra, founder of the consultancy Prospero Latino and a past adviser to Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada.