According to CNN exit polling, New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D) won the support of 68% of Latino voters, while Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger (D) received 67% support from Latino voters.
The results mark a shift from just one year ago, when the voting bloc helped propel Trump to victory. Republicans say the time is now to course-correct ahead of next year’s midterms.
“Unfortunately Latinos are leaving the Republican Party after giving us a monumental chance in 2024,” said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) in an video posted on the social platform X after Tuesday’s results. “In New Jersey and Virginia, Hispanics moved back more than 25 points to the Democratic Party.”
It was insane they ever had the latino vote. Too many latinos seemed to think Republicans couldn’t be populist demagogues who’ll cheat & persecute them until they saw it.
Plenty of Latinos are heavily Catholic, white-passing, and coming out of countries where the industries sponsoring their immigration are Republican mega-donors. The whole O&G industry is joined at the hip to the GOP. If you’re talking to a bunch of Venezuelan or Cuban or Nicaraguan immigrants, they’re almost certainly folks who came over on the ratlines laid out by Spook-infested extraction industries. That’s why Florida is such a hard carry for liberal Democrats - it is absolutely infested with people who believe Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton are interchangeable.
They believe Republicans parallel the “business friendly” conservatives in their own states. Folks who are more interested in doing business deals that rape the local ecology and press-ganging a bunch of native peoples into sweatshops and plantations to turn a profit.
And they’re not entirely wrong. They just don’t always recognize how much the modern GOP is saddled with the White Nationalism of the 60s/70s Nixon Era or understand that in the United States Latinos are not white.
Incidentally, if you ever get into the deep lore of the Texas Revolution, you’re going to find the exact same historical errors committed by the Tejanos - non-European anti-Mexico rebels who allied with Sam Houston’s nascent paramilitary only to get purged from the state the moment the war was over.
It’s the two-faced nature of the Republican Party to invite Latinos in when they’re needed to win a fight and cast them back out again the moment the dust settles.
It’s totally normal to shut the door behind you.
Not to slam the door into your face & crotch, though.
Lot of latinos have really conservative values passed down by families and insular communities. Trump acted like he was “pro man” and his admin empowered people’s worst insecurities about their masculinity. He saw the Tate-taint in our society and pried at it like a scab.
It’s very true that if you appeal to someone about the thing they are most insecure about or hung up on, they will look right past the knife you are digging into their back even as they vote for you. He was able to get a shocking amount of votes from people of color this way. That should be our biggest wake-up call, that we’re this vulnerable to being conned broadly, that it just takes someone petting any segment of the population for those people to fucking roll over and forget their entire brains exist, making up stories and validations for why they won’t have their faces eaten by the Face Eating Leopard Party.