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.”
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.