The rightwing shift among Latinos in the 2024 election came as a surprise to many Democrats and liberal pundits. Writer Michael Mora joins me to discuss the aftermath and what the party can learn about the “Latino” vote.
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SER: I don’t want to put you on the spot as someone of Latino heritage to walk us through what just happened, but you’ve written about politics for a while. A lot of what we saw [in the election] was not a surprise, but I think it’s been a surprise to a lot of white Democrats. What are your thoughts in general about Donald Trump’s historic performance among Latinos? I think he did as well if not slightly better than George W. Bush in 2004.
MICHAEL: What the Democratic Party’s definitely gonna have to reckon with, if they're gonna move forward from here, is that there’s really no such thing as Latinos. So what you’re talking about is a lumping together of all these disparate countries of origin that all have different histories. The only thing that they have in common is that they were all touched at one point by the Spanish empire, and because of that, a lot of them speak Spanish. But even their relationship to Spain is totally different. Their relationship to the United States is different.
Then you get into things that are even more difficult. We’re going to have to have the conversation about race in Latino culture. Because let’s face it, we get lumped together under this [umbrella] “people of color,” and as a coalition, often when we’re talking about getting voters and outreach, but for a lot of Latinos who are white, Latinos, who for the most part in their life can pass as white, they don’t see the world in the same way that an Afro-Latino sees the world.
My experience is way different than even my younger brother, who’s only a year younger. He actually has darker skin because he tans better than I do so we could be standing in the same room and he looks more like what would be considered traditional Latino versus me, where I’ve had people actually have conversations [with me] where they didn’t even know I was Puerto Rican. They didn’t know until I said something. My accent’s pretty non-noticeable for the most part, even though I spent the first 10 years of my life in Puerto Rico speaking exclusively Spanish.
It’s s a whole conversation we have to have about that. We need to have that conversation because it is not shocking to me after a few days of processing all this, that, for example, in South Florida, a large part of the Cuban population obviously relates better to Republicans and to white people than they do to other Latinos. So they will vote for the white guy and when they see white people being “oppressed” by “pop culture” or “leftists” or whatever grievance that they have, they take the same offense even though they’re not white. They believe that they’re white and until we get to the point where [we enter] the darkest timeline of Republicans are actually now targeting every Latino, doesn’t matter what the color of your skin, is they’re not going to realize that they’re not “white” until that happens.
SER: Liberals often make the error of using the term “voting against your self-interest,” which I think is a condescending term. The idea that a Latino, whether they’re Puerto Rican or Mexican, would somehow hear Trump’s rhetoric or plans for illegal immigrants and immediately empathize with them. Whereas, a white person in their same neighborhood, no one expects that person would necessarily empathize with a white homeless person.
I saw actual Democrats saying in 2016 that obviously Hillary Clinton was going to win Florida because Trump had insulted Mexicans. And I thought, “What are you talking about?” That doesn’t translate.
MICHAEL: So I think you just nailed it on the head. We don’t expect any white person to feel bad for a poor white person because yes, they may be racially white, but they’re different people with different life experiences, different economic status, different states, different issues. So why do we expect that from Latinos?
This is why I’m divorcing myself from that term and why I think the Democrats need to divorce themselves from that term. Because as long as you keep thinking of us as “Latinos,”as one big giant group monolith, you’re going to keep making the same mistakes.
I was watching a documentary on HBO called 537 Votes. It’s about the 2000 election, the Gore v. Bush election. The premise of the documentary is that the outcome of that election was decided in April 2000 — way before the election happened because the Cuban community got galvanized around the whole Elián González thing, and the way that was handled. There was this tug of war between Fidel Castro and the United States.
Every conservative politician wanted Elián to stay here and went to Miami and made sure they got their photo op moment. Janet Reno, the attorney general at the time, sends a raid with armed agents where you have the picture of scared Elián Gonzalez being ripped from a closet with an armed officer literally training a weapon at him.
The entire Cuban community in Miami just basically being galvanized and angere from this to the point where they were talking about doing “el voto castigo,” which basically translates to the revenge vote. They are purposely gonna vote against Al Gore to pay him back for what happened. You had the fecklessness of the Miami Mayor Alex Penelas. A guy named Armando Gutierrez then became a representative for the Miami family of Elián Gonzalez, and after Elián was sent back to Cuba, became a ringleader in the whole revenge vote.
You had the entire communications apparatus of Cuban radio stations just pumping this all day every day about “We’re gonna punish them!” and obviously the Republican Party took advantage of that. I would venture to say that you could draw a line from how Florida is now as a red state all the way to that moment and that’s when Democrats completely lost the Cuban vote entirely as far as Cuban people are concerned, because if there’s one thing that Latinos have in common as a stereotype is that we have long memories and we hold grudges for a long time. They are not going to forget that moment.
SER: Someone online was ranting [to a conservative Latino] about how “Trump’s gonna deport people like you!” and she responds, “I’m Puerto Rican! I’m an American citizen!” It’s amazing what people don’t know.
MICHAEL: It goes to the ignorance of some people that they will automatically say that because they all assume everyone is Mexican or from South America and came through the southern border or whatever.
But if we want to get real, Stephen Miller's already talking about denaturalization and removing birthright citizenship. That is the core for citizenship for the most part for everyone. It is not a hard line to make if Democrats really want to explain that, yeah, right now Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans who are U.S. citizens … they’re going to eventually get to you.
If they remove birthright citizenship, every Puerto Rican loses their citizenship. Every Cuban who’s here loses their citizenship. It wouldn't be very hard to do that. There are people who are the first generation citizen. Their parents were here illegally, like the Dreamers. How hard would it be you’re going to deport their parents and then you’re going to denaturalize the kid who was born here so that you can deport them all together as one big happy family?
You can make that case but you have to explain it and you also have to not be callous about it where you are gleefully cheering that, “Oh well, you got what you paid for!” because that’s not going to work.
SER: Yeah, that’s pretty gross.
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