Complicating the Latino-Voter Story

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During the immediate election postmortem, many political panelists on TV struggled to explain why 46 percent of Latinos had voted for Donald Trump. There seemed to be a sense of surprise and confusion—a result, perhaps, of a prevailing narrative that portrays Latinos as a homogeneous group. The lack of nuance misrepresents Latino voters and undermines their political agency. But a number of Latino journalists, attuned to the community’s trends—a rise of Independents; the many younger Latino voters disillusioned with both major parties—have laid a reporting trail for others to follow.

Take the case of insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s “garbage” joke about Puerto Rico at the Madison Square Garden Trump rally about a week before Election Day. The story was picked up by virtually every major outlet. Democrats seized the moment. Celebrities including Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny, and Jennifer Lopez urged Latinos to vote for Kamala Harris. “Puerto Rico ‘Garbage’ Comment Turned Voter Against Trump,” the Wall Street Journal reported. 

To many Puerto Ricans, myself among them, the conversation felt too tied to how American political campaigns have used Puerto Rico as a prop. This was just the latest insult, I argued, in a long, bipartisan tradition of mocking Puerto Ricans. Being insulted might motivate someone not to vote for a candidate, but it was naive to think that it would guarantee a Harris landslide. A story from Sabrina Rodríguez in the Washington Post, for which she interviewed Latino voters in Allentown, Pennsylvania, was similarly skeptical. For every Puerto Rican who vowed to vote for Harris, she noticed, there were many other Latinos who didn’t think the “garbage” controversy was important. “He wasn’t talking about the Dominican Republic, so what do I care?” one person said. Several expressed greater concern over the state of the economy. 

Soon after, Jack Herrera filed a story for Politico, “Trump’s Gains with Pennsylvania Latinos Are Real. Maybe Enough to Withstand ‘Island of Garbage.’” The piece revealed so much, including this: “As more Latinos vote for Republicans, pundits tend to attribute that shift to an ideological transformation, and, too often, they neglect the impact of community organizing. It’s not all about messaging or policy proposals. In low turnout neighborhoods, just going out and knocking on doors can make a huge difference in one party’s share of the vote year-to-year.”

Other stories from recent weeks surfaced growing Latino support for Trump. Jennifer Medina, of the New York Times, reported from the Sun Belt on how people, especially working-class Latino and Black residents, had been struggling with high housing costs—and how they placed blame on the Biden-Harris administration. A consistently Democratic voter in Nevada, a Latina woman named Maria Ocampo, expressed her disillusionment: “When we got the new president, I didn’t hear nothing, I didn’t see any changes.” Ocampo told Medina that she would not vote this time around, expressing a feeling—pervasive among Latinos—of insurmountable invisibility.

In Arizona, Maritza Félix and her team at Conecta Arizona, an independent Spanish-language outlet, have been dedicated to sharing stories that empower “those voices that have been ignored for so long, willingly ignored for so long,” as Félix said on the Latino Newsletter podcast in August. “The voices that don’t speak English, or they speak English with a very thick accent.” (Conecta Arizona is a founding member of the Latino Media Consortium, along with The Latino Newsletter and five other outlets.)

If you listen to those voices—as Christian Paz, a senior politics reporter at Vox, has—you will hear not one consistent message, but a collection of different, at times conflicting interests. “There should be no more talking about Latino voters as a whole. But we do have to talk about college-educated Latinos, working-class Latinos. We have to talk about Latino men and Latina women and gender divides,” he told me recently. “We have to talk about regional differences. Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania aren’t the same as Puerto Ricans in Florida. Mexican Americans and Tejanos aren’t the same as folks in California. Even though we’re seeing different, similar shifts, the degrees are different. Our coverage has to be different.” 

New exit polling of Latino voters released on Tuesday found that Harris won the majority of Latino voters, with 62 percent to Trump’s 37, the lowest margin for any Democratic presidential candidate since 2004. A “new coalition” of right-leaning Latinos reveals a more complex picture, and a shift away from historical patterns. “This is a thirty-year story,” Paz told me. “My big question is, will Latinos be a cohesive group for the next thirty years? Who knows?”

Last week, Herrera appeared on The Kicker to speak with CJR’s Josh Hersh about the gains Trump made among Latinos this year. In some areas, Herrera said, “it flipped in 2020, and now he’s just running up the score.” This election was no fluke. Even so, “if you look at the numbers, what you see is a grand ideological shift,” Herrera said. “When you go report from the ground, that’s not the story.” In his Politico piece, and while talking to Hersh, Herrera observed that “Latinos vote strategically.” Yes, Trump has said racist things, some Latino voters’ logic went, but so have a lot of Americans. Top of mind—as with so many demographic groups—was inflation. “A disproportionate number of us are working-class; a disproportionate number of us are living paycheck to paycheck,” Herrera said. “And so those effects of inflation—and increased housing and gas prices—are just more keenly felt.” To understand the story of Latino politics requires serious engagement with people about what matters to them most. You can listen to Hersh’s whole conversation with Herrera here.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, the satirical site The Onion announced that it had prevailed in the court-mandated auction to acquire Alex Jones’s conspiracy empire InfoWars, which stemmed from legal action brought by families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones repeatedly described as a hoax. Executives at The Onion told the New York Times that its winning bid was supported by the victims’ families, who pledged to forgo some of the damages that they are owed in order to support it, as well as the anti-gun-violence nonprofit Everytown, and that it planned to relaunch InfoWars as a parody of itself. Later in the day, however, the bankruptcy judge overseeing the sale temporarily paused it, citing “concerns about a lack of transparency in the secret bidding process and a need to clarify which assets the winners are buying,” per the Times.

• For CJR, Lachlan Cartwright reports that in the days before the election, an attorney for Trump sent a “discursive ten-page legal threat” to the Times and the publisher Penguin Random House over a book and several articles written by Times journalists—part of “a wave of other litigation from the former and future president that emerged around the same time.” Also for CJR, Feven Merid examines how Americans consumed election news, finding that a fragmented new media is rising as the unified old media is falling. And Meghnad Bose assesses how the polls performed, arguing that while they “mostly got the story right,” it might not feel that way because of how they “were presented, and the conclusions that journalists (and news consumers) drew from the data.”

• The publishing company Dotdash Meredith is planning to lay off more than fifty staffers, mostly from its print business; Sara Fischer, of Axios, has more. Elsewhere, it’s been a busy week for media moves and jobs news. The veteran anchor Chris Wallace left CNN, telling the Daily Beast that the world of streaming is “where the action seems to be”; Puck now reports that CNN was preparing to downsize his role, though Wallace said he’d already decided to leave. Don Lemon—who agreed to make content on X after being fired by CNN, but then fell out with Elon Musk—said that he is quitting the platform entirely. And Craig Melvin will succeed Hoda Kotb as co-anchor of NBC’s Today show.
  
• In the aftermath of the election last week, Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief of Scientific American, disparaged Trump voters in a series of posts on social media, describing them as “fascists” and sending “solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high school classmates are celebrating.” Helmuth subsequently apologized, describing the posts as a “mistaken expression of shock and confusion” that did not reflect her views or those of Scientific American. She has now resigned as editor; the magazine’s president said that Helmuth was the one who made the decision.
  
• And Trump announced yesterday that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his secretary of Health and Human Services (barely two weeks after the co-chair of Trump’s transition team told CNN that this would “of course” not happen). The news was received poorly even in right-wing precincts: the editor of National Review described it as “a monumental disaster,” while the New York Post, which endorsed Trump, wrote that appointing Kennedy would break “the overriding rule of medicine: First, do no harm.”

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Julio Ricardo Varela is an award-winning journalist, founder of The Latino Newsletter, and an MSNBC columnist. He founded the pioneering digital site Latino Rebels in 2011 and was president of Futuro Media from 2022 to 2023.