Anatomy of a defeat

Unless Dems change, Latino vote will be elusive

By the time I shut my eyes last night around 11, like most observers who did not have blinders on, I was confident that Donald Trump would once again be re-elected, becoming the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve nonconsecutive terms. So after pondering why Vice President Kamala Harris lost so convincingly, the caption on the Vox video above caught my attention.

But first things first: we heard for months about how this race was so close that the margins would be razor-thin. Why, then, were so many polls in the battleground states wrong? We may never know the answer but we do know that in 2016, when (coincidentally or not) the Democratic nominee was also a woman, most state-by-state polls undercounted Trump’s popularity, too.

It looks like this happened again, with fatal results in the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Most striking to me were the numbers in overwhelmingly Democratic states where Harris actually won. For example, she only won blue Illinois by 4 points. Biden won it by 17 points in 2020. Similarly, Biden won New Jersey by 16 points four years ago. Yesterday, the best Harris could muster in the Garden State was a victory of 4.3-points.

The conversation today has centered on Latin American men, who voted in record numbers for Trump. According to the Miami Herald:

According to exit polls, Trump increased his share of the Latino vote nationwide from 32% in the 2020 elections to 45% in 2024. Like with other ethnic groups, most of Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters were among men without college education.

Even in Pennsylvania, a state with a high percentage of Puerto Rican voters, Trump received 42% of the Latino vote, almost twice what he received four years ago. This despite the Trump campaign holding the now-infamous hatefest in Madison Square Garden last week in which a comedian vetted by the Trump campaign made crude jokes about the sexual habits of Puerto Ricans and called the commonwealth a “floating island of garbage.” This is to say nothing of the other racist and misogynistic comments made during the rally.

“Trump is toast,” many of us thought. “He has crashed and burned. Even his supporters are tiring of him. They’re leaving his rallies early.” The last two sentences may have been true, but that doesn’t mean the supporters heading for the doors weren’t going to vote for him anyway.

We have an enormous Latino population here in Texas — both professional and working class. I don’t pretend to be an expert on that particular cohort but during my 12 years of teaching English in private schools, I had dozens of Latino students, and some from Spain as well. The male students all had one thing in common: they felt women needed to know their places.

Hispanic culture is predominately patriarchal. The male Latino culture in particular is characterized by machismo. Among many examples, I recall a couple of students, one of them a Spaniard, who told me women should not be allowed to hold professional positions because it would take a job away from a man.

“She should be a cooker,” he insisted after I told him my sister had been a stock broker, and my sister-in-law a lawyer. Moreover, he could not understand why any man, including his own teacher, would hold a contrary view.

I’m sure progress has been made since the 1990s and that not all Latino men hold those views anymore, but are there enough men of all races who are not ready for the idea of a woman president? And would they be ashamed to admit that to a pollster? After last night’s disaster, many progressives are blaming racism. I wouldn’t be surprised if sexism was the deciding factor.

Kamala Harris disembarks Marine Two at Joint Base Andrews, 2021 -Wikipedia

Be that as it may, let’s face it: Harris wasn’t a great candidate. She improved during the course of her brief campaign but it wasn’t enough. As a result, she underperformed just about everywhere on the map.

Harris failed utterly to differentiate herself from the very unpopular president she continues to serve. In an interview on The View, she was asked if there was anything she would have done differently from Biden? Nothing was essentially her answer — perhaps out of loyalty to her boss. But there is a time for loyalty and a time to break away. That was such a time.

I would have advised her to say that Biden’s reversal of the stay-in-Mexico rule was a mistake that prompted a crisis at the border: “That’s why I and others convinced the president and congressional Democrats to work with Republicans to craft a much tougher bill that Trump rejected for purely political reasons.” If only …

Interestingly, Latino Americans aren’t terribly fond of those who cross the border unlawfully. After all, most voting Latinos-Americans signed the guest book on the way in. I’m also guessing many of them who worked their way through trade school or toil away as laborers aren’t fond of a president who tried through executive action to forgive billions of dollars in college loan debt of unemployable middle class college students regardless of whether they were capable of repaying it or not.

In a word, Democrats cannot depend on Latino support any longer. The presumption for decades has been that people of color should naturally gravitate to the Democratic Party, in part because it was a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who signed both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. That alliance has been shattered and likely will never be put back together.

Needless to say, the finger-pointing has begun. First of all, it looks like Dems vastly overvalued the raw political value of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Two friends on Threads nailed it:

Some are blaming, of all people, Attorney General Merrick Garland for not prosecuting Trump more aggressively in time to convict and jail him before the campaign began. But former Assistant U.S. Attorney and current Democratic Westchester County (NY) District Attorney Mimi Rocah had sage advice this morning (oddly it has since been deleted from her account):

So where do we go from here? First of all, the question arises as to any remaining guardrails that might prevent Trump from acting on his worst impulses. The John Kellys, Mark Milleys and Mike Pences will not be around, so if Trump tries to exceed his authority, we may have to rely on the courts. Fortunately, there are way more judges in the federal courts appointed by Democratic presidents than judges appointed Republicans who might defer to Trump. In case you want to keep track, here is a handy guide.

Also, it’s a good thing Democrats never repealed the Senate filibuster, as they had considered doing in order to codify abortion rights. Now that Republicans have taken over that body, and likely maintained control of the House as well, the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to break, might be the only way Democrats can stop the worst impulses of Republicans in the Capitol.

I have other concerns, too. Remember when Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said during the campaign that a vote for Joe Biden was a vote for Kamala Harris. Turns out Haley was right. It is obvious to anyone who is paying attention that Donald Trump, 78, is in considerable decline. Is it fair to say that a vote for Trump was a vote for J.D. Vance? The implications of that scenario are far worse: Vance is Trump with a brain.

P.S. The answer to the question posed by the graphic at the top of this page is “worse.” To what extent we do not know. I wish I could be more encouraging.