Historic Realignment Leaves Democrats Asking, ‘Where’d All the Latino Men Go?’

Welcome to the final edition of the Horse Race newsletter. Thanks for following along with us as we’ve charted the ups and downs of a wild presidential election.

West Palm Beach, Fla. — Even before the clock struck midnight Wednesday morning, the Democratic Party’s meltdown had already begun as dejected Kamala Harris supporters began streaming out of her election watch party in anticipation of an all but inevitable loss.

A few hundred miles away here in West Palm Beach, some of Trump’s strongest supporters were already having a ball telling National Review about the Democratic ticket’s biggest campaign blunders as election returns rolled in. It remains to be seen which explanation will crystallize as the prime mover in the minds of Democrats, and there will certainly be many contenders for the top spot.  

For Senator Markwayne Mullin late Tuesday evening, the writing on the wall came when Harris, asked on The View what she might’ve done differently from her boss, responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” For Trump adviser Brian Hughes, her biggest misstep was twofold: “Not telling Joe a year earlier that he was cooked and had to go, allowing them a primary process,” and “fast-tracking Harris with an authoritarian process, a wholly unqualified and unserious person.”

And for Trump pollster John McLaughlin, three simple words came to mind: “Their failed policies.”

In the coming days and weeks, Democrats will surely uncover a number of factors that added up to a disappointing loss for Harris — but one of the most obvious answers to emerge so far has concerned the vice president’s underperformance among Latino voters.

Some of Harris’s most disappointing results of the night came from several Texas border counties where more than five in six residents are Hispanic: the numbers there encapsulated the Hispanic shift toward Trump.

Starr County flipped red for the first time in 132 years. In Webb County, Harris received a portion of the vote 13 percentage points lower than Biden’s in 2020. She ran ten points behind Biden in Dimmit and nine points behind him in Zapata. Senator Ted Cruz, who easily won his own reelection bid in the state, said the change in South Texas “should shake the Democrat establishment to its core.” 

Trump also flipped Miami-Dade County, home to a majority Latino voting bloc that has trended redder in recent cycles after long being considered a Democratic stronghold. Just eight years ago, Hillary Clinton carried the county by 29 points.

Early exit polling from CNN finds Harris with a margin of victory of just eight percentage points among Hispanic voters, compared to the 38-point advantage Hillary Clinton enjoyed from the same voting bloc in 2016 and a 33-point lead notched by Joe Biden four years ago. 

Trump was able to whittle down the gap thanks to support from Latino men. The president-elect, who won among Latino men by ten points according to CNN exit polling, is the first Republican candidate to do so in the time that exit polling has existed, according to the network’s Harry Enten.

Democrats are getting bad guidance from Latino consultants who are the products of activist groups that are far to the left of the average Hispanic voter, says Giancarlo Sopo, a culture writer and media consultant who led Trump’s Hispanic advertising in 2020.

“You see this in their assumptions that Hispanics are offended by politically incorrect humor and that they’ll vote against their economic interests in exchange for amnesty for illegal immigrants,” Sopo tells NR. “They fundamentally misunderstand the community.”

The effect was pronounced in several heavily Hispanic deep-blue areas that went for Harris — but lurched rightward. 

In New Jersey, the vice president won with just 51.2 percent of the vote, compared with Biden’s 57.1 percent of the vote in 2020. Passaic County, which is about 43 percent Latino, flipped from Democrat +17 in 2020 to Republican +3 this cycle.

And in New York, Harris led Trump by just 11.4 percent of the vote — the smallest margin for a Democratic presidential candidate in the Empire State since 1988. In the heavily Hispanic Bronx, Trump won 35 percent more votes this year than in 2020. He also enjoyed a massive boost of support in Queens (16.5 percent) and Manhattan (20 percent) as well.

Asked about the flip on her way out of Trump’s Election Night party early Wednesday morning, Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R., Fla.) suggested that Hispanics will be the “targeted demographic” in national elections going forward. 

“President Trump treated us like anyone else by talking about issues like the economy, border security, and inflation — that’s what resonates,” she said.

Trump sailed to victory in the early morning hours of Wednesday, despite many expecting a close race that would take days to tally. As of Wednesday afternoon, the AP projected that Trump would win 292 Electoral College votes, well above the 270 threshold needed to win. The race had yet to be called in Arizona and Nevada, though Trump leads in both. Trump was also winning the popular vote with 51 percent to Harris’s 47.5 percent. 

Democrats will now be forced to take a hard look in the mirror to determine what went wrong — knowing it was less a single campaign decision or moment that did them in than the entire picture they offered voters. 

But rather than undergoing the painful process of self-reflection, Democrats may be tempted to return to their 2016 playbook. An alternative explanation for Hispanic male defection seems to be emerging among the progressive chattering class. Appearing on MSNBC on Wednesday, Joe Scarborough attributed the results to the sexism and racism of Latino men.

“Democrats need to be mature, and they need to be honest. And they need to say, ‘Yes, there is misogyny, but it’s not just misogyny from white men,’” Scarborough argued.

“It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men — things we’ve all been talking about — who do not want a woman leading them.”

Early on in the contest, the fundamentals of the race had long given Republicans reason to feel electorally confident given Biden’s disastrous approval ratings over voters’ long-running concerns about his age, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, mass illegal immigration, and inflation. The GOP nominee led him in battleground-state polls for months until a disastrous debate did him in, forcing him to drop out to renew his party’s hope for electoral success in his replacement. But Harris ended up proving politically toxic as the nominee despite the close polls, clocking in one of the worst presidential performances in modern electoral history and vastly underperforming Biden’s 2020 margins. 

As soon as she ascended to the top of the ticket, Republican strategists saw endless opportunity in her liabilities: She could reasonably be held liable for all the failures of the Biden-Harris administration, had concealed the extent of her boss’s decline from the American public, and had spent the 2020 Democratic primary staking out a buffet of left-wing policy views that proved drastically out of touch with the median voter. Her California roots and penchant for stumbling interviews were just the icing on the cake.

And even as she rode the post-Biden-dropout honeymoon and walked the red carpet at her August convention — with the entire Democratic Party united behind her — the fundamentals of the race kept dogging her campaign. Republican spending groups flooded the airwaves with brutal ads that used her own Democratic-primary words against her, and her campaign’s ultimate decision to settle on a democracy-vs.-chaos pitch proved remarkably tone deaf. 

“In the end, this one ended up being about the record of the incumbent,” longtime Trump ally Roger Stone said inside Trump’s Election Night watch party late Tuesday evening. “People were dissatisfied with conditions in the country and the country’s position in the world. So it was a referendum on Joe and Kamala.”

Another problem, as explained by one Trump campaign official on October 30, is that the Harris campaign seriously erred in chasing the news cycle.

The boost in rural areas and the Midwest that Minnesota governor Tim Walz was supposedly meant to offer Harris never produced, and the “blue wall,” which became Harris’s final hope as the vote count ticked on, turned red.

Despite this staggering chart showing a rightward shift in all but two states, progressive Democrats are out today blaming the loss on Harris’s failure to move further left. The Justice Democrats have already called for a “new era” of the party, saying that “leaders in Congress like the Squad have shown us another way of doing politics is possible and represent the promise of uniting our fractured nation.”

Democratic lawmakers are no doubt already bracing themselves for the intra-party blame game they’ll have to deal with next week when they return to Capitol Hill.

Around NR

• Mark Antonio Wright calls Trump’s win “the most remarkable political comeback in American history”:

His achievement is more impressive than Richard Nixon’s in 1968. It’s more important than Grover Cleveland’s in 1892. I don’t think there’s any question now that Donald Trump is the most consequential American political figure of the 21st century so far.

• Philip Klein offers several takeaways from Trump’s win, including that “progressivism, and wokeness, has proven to be political kryptonite for Democrats”: 

When she became the nominee, Harris was saddled not only with Biden’s failed left-wing policies, but a litany of positions she took when courting socialists in 2019 — banning fracking, confiscating guns, scrapping private health insurance, providing prisoners with gender transition treatments, etc. These provided fodder for Trump’s most effective ads. 

• Florida offered a bright spot for pro-lifers, writes NR’s editors, as the pro-abortion Amendment 4 went down to defeat. The editors nod to the state’s 60 percent threshold for passing a ballot measure as a key determinative factor in its failure, along with the Florida governor’s efforts:

A close second in the list of victory’s fathers goes to Ron DeSantis, who put a lot of his political capital on the line to stump for a pro-life position that many other Republicans feared to defend. Leadership matters, and voters respect the courage of conviction. Let that be a lesson for pro-life politicians going forward.

• New York voters passed a ballot measure on Tuesday that will significantly expand protected classes in the state constitution. It ensures that males will be allowed to compete against women in competitive sports and makes it much more difficult for the state to enforce federal law against illegal immigrants, among other progressive initiatives. James Lynch has more:

The vague anti-discrimination language will likely be interpreted to protect the right of male students to participate in women’s and girl’s sports, as National Review previously reported. The amendment will also empower progressive groups to pursue litigation to erode parental rights, permitting confused children to receive puberty blockers without parental consent.