Why Trump's Latino gains matter

Why Trump's Latino gains matter

A suggestion that progressives' theory of Trump-era politics is wrong

Matthew Yglesias

34 min ago

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Hey folks, it’s Thursday and back to just us subscribers.

As a housekeeping note, I did want to say that if you read this primarily in newsletter form and ever want to forward an item to a friend or two I am 100 percent okay with that. If you find yourself doing it over and over and over again, considering buying a gift subscription or going for a group discount, but in general I’m really happy to have people spread the word.

Today I wanted to talk about something that came up in the very first post on this blog: Trump’s gains with Latino voters.

In 2020, Democrats saw the slippage extend to non-white voters with no college degree. Once the extent of the slippage with, for example, Hispanic voters became clear we began to get headlines like “How Democrats Missed Trump’s Appeal to Latino Voters”from Jennifer Medina at the New York Times. The truth, however, is that nobody “missed” this. Medina herself wrote many good articles about it down the stretch of the campaign (NYT reporters don’t write their own headlines) and Democrats read the New York Times. It was also clearly visible in the polling starting from at least late June. The problem wasn’t that nobody saw it, it’s that there was intense desire not to discuss it. That issue started with Hispanic Democrats and Democratic Latin politics pros themselves, who would raise the issue but almost exclusively in terms of calling for more “investment” because they wanted to be good intersectional citizens and not acknowledge that there might be flaws in Democrats’ actual message.

Since Election Day, most progressives have talked themselves into a new reason for ignoring this by explaining that Trump is merely rebounding to Bush-era levels of Latino support, so it’s really not that surprising. Everyone is entitled to decide for themselves what to be surprised by, but unless you were actually sitting around three years ago saying, “I think Donald Trump is just the guy to bring GOP Latino support back up to its Bush-era levels,” then yes, you are surprised.

What’s more, Harry Enten at CNN has now compiled data that convincingly show these gains were not limited to any one Hispanic sub-ethnicity or any one part of the United States. They’re visible from Massachusetts to Miami, from the Rio Grande Valley to the Central Valley of California and everywhere in between.

But beyond the surprisingness question, I think Trump gaining in this community is worth paying attention to for the very reason that a lot of people don’t want to pay attention to it: it challenges and complicates the influential progressive view that Trump’s political success was based exclusively on mobilizing white supremacist sentiments.

The progressive theory and the Latino vote

By coincidence, the national popular vote in 2012 (51.01 percent vs 47.15 percent) and 2020 (51.27 percent vs 46.87 percent) were basically the same, so you can easily eyeball subgroups to see relative change. The Biden/Harris ticket, for example, did a lot better than Obama/Biden in Georgia and a lot worse in Florida.

More importantly, Obama/Biden were much stronger in the Midwest — narrowly carrying Ohio and Iowa while winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by enough to give the Electoral College a distinct skew in favor of Democrats. Biden by contrast won MI/PA/WI by razor-thin margins and lost Ohio and Iowa handily. You also saw internal shifts in these states with Biden doing better in Milwaukee County, and especially Dane County (Madison), but worse in a huge set of rural counties.

This trend is easy to understand in terms of narratives progressives have told about Trump for years.

Democrats lost non-college white evangelicals and non-college southern whites years ago over abortion and civil rights.

But under Obama, they retained a lot of residual strength with secular, non-southern, non-college whites.

Trump mobilized racial resentment in an unprecedented way, helping Trump juice his totals with non-churchgoers throughout the rural north.

This white backlash politics is important to understanding the electoral map. But it’s also important to progressives’ broader understanding of the political climate. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their widely-cited Trump book write, for example, that: “To advance an unpopular plutocratic agenda, Republicans have escalated white backlash — and, increasingly, undermined democracy. In the United States, then, plutocracy and right-wing populism have not been opposing forces. Instead, they have been locked in a doom loop of escalating extremism that must be disrupted.”

Progressives spent the Trump years telling themselves that this is what they were up against. Jonathan Capehart watched a Republican National Convention that went out of its way to highlight Black and Latino speakers and proclaimed it “a permission structure for squeamish White voters to pull the lever again for Trump.”

Would it work? He said he wasn’t sure: “I doubted the power of white supremacy on White Americans in 2016. I won’t make that mistake again. And neither should you.”

What’s the matter with Florida?

Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AP

If you just look at the states that border the Great Lakes, this narrative makes sense. But remember we started here with Florida, a state that was a classic bellwether in the first four elections of the 21st century. But by 2020, Trump does five points better in Florida than he does nationally — barely closer than Texas.

White racism can obviously be a factor in Florida politics (they had slaves, they seceded from the Union, they had Jim Crow) but it seems like a slightly odd Ground Zero for white backlash politics. Florida is 22 percent Black (very slightly higher than Virginia), three percent Asian, and a whopping 30 percent Hispanic. A political party that not only relies on white racism for votes but is increasingly reliant on an exclusionary vision of America as a white man’s country should be having big problems with Florida.

But of course, that’s not the case. Trump did well with Florida Latinos. And while an initial view saw that as perhaps limited to Cuban-Americans or maybe Cubans and Venezuelans, it’s clear that he in fact did well with Latinos all up and down the state. And in fact, Trump’s gains with Latinos were shockingly widespread across the country. Here are some data points Enten assembled:

Trump did 19 points better in Lawrence, MA.

He did 16 points better in the South Bronx NY-15 House seat.

He did 11 points better in Chicago’s 22nd Ward.

He did 18 points better in Imperial County, California.

These gains are broad and wide. And they suggest that while particular observations about Cuban-American outreach or courting the “Tejano vote” in South Texas are interesting, they don’t really explain the trend. It’s true, as all the Latino politics people say, that the Latino vote is not monolithic. But what’s striking about Trump’s gains is that they appear to be present in Mexican-American and Puerto Rican areas as well as Cuban or South Americans. And they are present in urban communities as well as rural ones.

Perhaps most important of all, the trend is clearly present not just in heavily contested swing states but in deep blue ones too. That’s important because it suggests that the causal factor is not a technical aspect of campaign artistry but broad public response to the messages people were hearing.

From white supremacy to anti-Blackness

One possibility is that Capehart’s analysis was imprecise. He said Trump was appealing to white supremacist sentiments. But David Atkins told me that based on his phone banking with Latino voters that Trump was successfully appealing to them with messages of anti-Blackness.

David Atkins 

@DavidOAtkins

@joanwalsh @mattyglesias A huge amount of anti-Black racism combined with dollops of QAnon. Anti-socialism and pro-police stuff also present but less prominent.

"Democrats only care about Black people"

"What are you doing for US?"

"Biden is a pedophile"

December 12th 2020

4 Retweets33 Likes

This is an important distinction. The most overtly racist stuff I’ve ever heard in my life came from an Asian immigrant convenience store owner back when my neighborhood was majority Black.

He had a lot of disparaging things to say about the bulk of his customer base and was very vocally happy to see more people like me moving in. But of course he’s not a white supremacist — to the best of my understanding in his ethnic hierarchy, Chinese people are at the top followed by other East Asians, with white people and recent immigrants from Ethiopia looking good only in comparison to African-Americans. There’s a history in America of out-groups becoming racial insiders through the mechanism of anti-Blackness, and I’ve for years thought people have been too hasty to forecast a “majority-minority” future for the United States when a more capacious conception of whiteness is an equally plausible result (see Richard Alba’s recent book The Great Demographic Illusion for more on this).

But here’s the problem.

If you look at the Blackest county in America (Jefferson County, MS), Trump did better than Romney.

If you look at the Blackest county in Florida (Gadsden County), Trump did better than Romney.

If you look at the Blackest county in Georgia (Hancock County), Trump did better than Romney.

Here, I think the Georgia example is especially telling because we know Trump did a lot worse overall in Georgia than Romney did. And we also know that Stacy Abrams has been doing much-celebrated work on organizing African-American voters in Georgia. You can’t say that Democrats failed to invest in Georgia or failed to organize there.

But Abrams herself acknowledged to Astead Herndon that Democrats’ big electoral success in Georgia largely came from upscale suburbanites:

Ms. Abrams also said she disliked “trust Black women” as a motto because it didn’t reflect the diverse coalition that had brought change to the state.

A New York Times analysis of Georgia voters found that turnout had increased among minority communities and in the diverse suburbs but that the biggest shift to Democrats was among white college graduates and wealthier residents.

“I appreciate the necessity of that battle cry,” Ms. Abrams said. “And in my approach, in Georgia in particular, Black women have been instrumental. But I chafe at this idea that we then objectify one group as both savior and as responsible party.”

It’s of course not exactly shocking that Biden did worse with Black voters than the first major-party African-American candidate. But Biden was Obama’s VP and he did tap a Black running mate. More to the point, if you want to say the big picture thing Trump did was mobilize anti-Black racism then it’s awkward that he gained Black votes. At a certain point, the theory has too many epicycles.

Republicans are gaining with less-educated voters

It’s obviously hard to definitely prove what is going on with the electorate at any given time. But I think by far the most parsimonious and convincing explanation for what’s going on is that Republicans are broadly making gains with non-college voters and losing college graduates.

Of course, non-college voters are not a monolith:

The white ones are much more GOP friendly than the non-white ones.

Among whites, the religiously observant are more GOP friendly than the secular ones.

There appear to be urban/rural divides within all these groups.

But in terms of the change, what you see is Trump first extending the long-term trend toward winning non-college whites and then expanding it to non-college Black and Latino voters. I don’t think we yet understand the dynamics of the Asian vote with a great deal of granularity. But I’ve read a couple of excellent dispatches from Terry Nguyen about political divides inside Vietnamese-American families where a key issue seems to be that older, pro-Trump people tend to be working class, whereas their younger, woke antagonists have college degrees.

Now, here I want to stop and take a break because I’ve seen conservatives who agree with me about this leap to the conclusion that Republicans are now “the party of the working class.”

So check the numbers. When we say Trump did better in the South Bronx or Hancock County, GA, he is still losing those places by overwhelming margins. He lost in Miami too! We’re talking about changes here, not levels. And fundamentally, you should assess parties based on their policies, not their electorate. The last time Democrats had unified control of the federal government they raised taxes on the rich and enrolled more people in Medicaid. The last time Republicans had unified control of the federal government, they cut taxes on the rich and tried to kick millions of people off of Medicaid.

But in terms of a big picture story about political strategy, a lot of progressives started out wanting to say that Trump was all about mobilizing white supremacy when I think the truth is more like “he has mobilized a diffuse set of different conservative cultural views found among a broad swathe of working-class people of all ethnicities.”

And the difference matters.

Who do we listen to?

There’s a kind of tedious debate that goes on endlessly in progressive circles between, on the one hand, those who urge us to “listen to Black women!” or otherwise defer to the lived experience of people in marginalized groups, and on the other, people like Matt Bruenig and Jonathan Chait who denounce what’s known academically as standpoint epistemology and what Bruenig has popularized among anti-woke leftists as identitarian deference. Here, the critics pound the table in favor of objective truth, while the proponents insist on the situated nature of knowledge.

I think a smarter critique and ultimately a better path forward comes from the Georgetown philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò who calls on us to pay more attention to who is actually being deferred to (emphasis added):

I think it’s less about the core ideas and more about the prevailing norms that convert them into practice. The call to “listen to the most affected” or “centre the most marginalized” is ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles. But it’s never sat well with me. In my experience, when people say they need to “listen to the most affected”, it isn’t because they intend to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Instead, it has more often meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to those who most snugly fit into the social categories associated with these ills – regardless of what they actually do or do not know, or what they have or have not personally experienced. In the case of my conversation with Helen, my racial category tied me more “authentically” to an experience that neither of us had had. She was called to defer to me by the rules of the game as we understood it. Even where stakes are high – where potential researchers are discussing how to understand a social phenomenon, where activists are deciding what to target – these rules often prevail.

But the piece is more complicated than the simple observation that the members of marginalized groups that we are exhorted to listen to are often a relatively elite sub-set of the groups. You should really read the whole thing (it’s not long) but I’ll just excerpt one more paragraph that I think is relevant:

Deference epistemology marks itself as a solution to an epistemic and political problem. But not only does it fail to solve these problems, it adds new ones. One might think questions of justice ought to be primarily concerned with fixing disparities around health care, working conditions, and basic material and interpersonal security. Yet conversations about justice have come to be shaped by people who have ever more specific practical advice about fixing the distribution of attention and conversational power. Deference practices that serve attention-focused campaigns (e.g. we’ve read too many white men, let’s now read some people of colour) can fail on their own highly questionable terms: attention to spokespeople from marginalized groups could, for example, direct attention away from the need to change the social system that marginalizes them.

Political “work” is overwhelmingly done by college graduates, most of them younger than the median voter. That’s true on formal political campaigns, but also inside activist and policy organizations and the foundations that fund them. Nobody would be so foolhardy as to believe that listening to the young whiter staffers at a progressive nonprofit constitutes listening to white people in a sense that would help you appeal to the marginal white voter.

But a lot of progressive spaces have, as Táíwò suggests, adopted norms that essential do this with young, college-educated non-white staffers.

And this happens even though young, left-wing, college-educated Black, Latin, and Asian people are as aware as anyone else — if not much more so! — that their older, more working-class relatives do not, in fact, share the values and language of young activists or junior faculty. But not only do progressives fail to “center” the perspectives of working-class people of color, efforts to note their cross-pressured political views are often actively stigmatized.

When African-Americans heavily backed an anti-LGBT ballot referendum in California there was a discourse about how we have to “Stop Blaming California’s Black Voters for Prop 8.”

Then in 2012, when Obama’s embrace of marriage equality was seen as potentially influencing Black opinion, we were admonished that “Society must stop blaming blacks for LGBT setbacks.”

Then there was “Stop Blaming Black Homophobia for Buttigieg’s Problems!”

So let’s be clear about this. You can see in Pew data that Black people are less likely than white ones to say that “homosexuality should be accepted by society.” And in the GSS they are more likely to say that it is “wrong for same-sex adults to have sexual relations.” This is not about blaming anybody for anything. But it is factually true that anti-LGBT views are more prevalent among African-Americans. And since anti-LGBT white people are very likely to just be Republicans, this is particularly true when you’re looking at the dynamics inside something like a Democratic Party primary. If you can’t acknowledge this as a factual matter, then you are going to struggle to do politics effectively and end up with the kind of trends Democrats saw in 2020.

At the end of the day, all the stuff progressives point to in order to paint Trump as racist is not wrong. And in electoral terms, that’s exactly the problem. It’s very easy to imagine taking the exact same policy views, pairing them with a less offensive person, and doing way better than Trump. To stop that from happening, Democrats need to pay closer attention to the actual views of the non-white population and not just “listen to” the idiosyncratic subset that does progressive politics professionally.

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