America's Largest Minority Voting Bloc Is Up for Grabs with Mike Madrid

0:00Hello again, everybody from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center. I'm Carlo Versano, and this is The 1600. So we're coming back from a little bit of a break. I had some other things going on, but we're back here today to talk about one of the political trends that we've been discussing for a while now, which is just how Trump has fumbled the coalition that brought him back to the White House in 2024. Young men, young people in general, black people, black men, and particularly Latino voters. These are voting blocs that sort of went for the president in 24 and have since turned on him.

0:37My guest today, Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist, former California GOP political director, Lincoln Project co-founder and author of the great book, The Latino Century. Mike, thanks for coming on, man. Appreciate your time. Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to this. Yeah, I really appreciate it. You know, you're a conservative who knows the Republican Latino strategy better than anybody, right? Certainly inside out. You left the party. Well, you left the current, I guess, Republican Party over Trump years ago. So let me ask you, was the 2024 realignment that I just mentioned, was that real or was it a mirage, just sort of a wave that Trump was able to, you know, ride the crest of?

1:18It was not a realignment. I was very critical of that term. It's a term we, I think, use too much in this business. I characterize it as a de-alignment. And what I mean by that is there has been this sort of rightward shift going on for the better part of a decade now. Really, in the five of the last six elections, we've seen a noticeable, measurable rightward shift of Latinos away from the Democratic Party. And I'm saying that methodically, you know, measuredly. It's more a movement away from the Democratic Party than it is a movement towards the Republican Party. But this is a constituency that increasingly polling is telling us overwhelmingly feels like it doesn't have a real choice in this between these two parties.

1:57And so that's manifesting in rejecting whichever party is in power as the failures of government's ability to address an economic working class agenda manifests on both sides. So, no, not a realignment at all. I know that was something that Republicans were rejoicing in. I raised red flags about that at the time. And I think time is bearing out that this is a dealignment, not a realignment at all. No, I would agree with that. I mean, how is that different, though, from just sort of, you know, your your independent, your regular old swing voter who's kind of, you know, always ping ponging between the two parties based on who's in and who's out of power?

2:33What's different about sort of the Latino as a voting bloc condition? And I know everybody's different. You know, everyone obviously is has their own things. It's hard to talk in generalizations, but we'll do it. Yeah. No, no. I don't think it's that hard. And here's why. We are living in an era where the actual swing voter is a very, very small share of the electorate with one huge exception, which are Latino voters. It's like really the last Latino, the last swing voter is the Latino voter. And the reasons are twofold. The first is Latinos are the least racially polarized voter in America. So if you took working class whites and working class blacks, they both have a delta of about 3%.

3:13Working class whites aren't leaving the Republican Party in any meaningful way, no matter how bad things get. They're going to stick with Trump and the Republicans through a war that makes no sense, through bad economic conditions, through inflationary pressures, through a pandemic that kills a million people. And on the left, you've got working class blacks who are like, we're never going to leave the Democratic Party in any meaningful way. A two or three point shift is like tectonic in this era with one exception. You're seeing Latinos with these massive 25 point swings happening between 2024, 2025 and now 2026.

3:51And so the real question is not why Latinos are acting so aberrantly, like so peculiarly. It's why they're the only rational actors and everybody else is so locked down in the partisan and racial constructs. So it is different. It is unique. And it is a very large swath of swing voters in a time where American politics is characterized by rigidity and partisanship and the lack of movable voters. Latinos are redefining that whole paradigm. You know, I've never actually really thought about it like that. But that it's interesting. You're right, because it does feel like everybody is so solidified, so calcified in their thinking.

4:32And sometimes, you know, sometimes you wonder, you're like, what would Donald Trump have to do for some of these people to not support him anymore? Right. Take the war that you just mentioned. I mean, this is a guy who ran not just against wars, explicitly against this war, against doing this exact thing. And he still has more or less. Well, I mean, you know, the polls change, but 80, 90 percent. Yeah, they're not moving. They will not move. And like I was saying, as you mentioned in the intro correctly, there was a slippage of black males towards Donald Trump. But that slippage was like 2 % or 3%.

5:01And that becomes news because it is news. It's like, wow, that's a big movement. It's like, but not really. And again, it's because Latinos are much less racially polarized and much, here's a real kicker, much less partisan. The fastest growing group of independent voters are Latinos. The group with the least partisan anchor are Latinos. And so you add those two together in a political system that speaks explicitly through a black-white racial construct or a red-blue partisan construct, and Latinos don't buy into either. So they're rejecting both of it depending on who's in power. And that I think – I write in my book, The Latino Century, that that's really the hope of the American experiment going forward is we can finally break through this racially polarized, partisan polarized system with this new group of voters that are challenging both parties' understanding of race and partisanship.

5:57Well, I want to – because, yeah, you have a sense of optimism to you that a lot of political strategists, pundits don't at the moment. So I want to get to that in a minute. But I guess this is – you coined this idea that Latinos are now the only real swing voter left. So I guess you've answered my next question, which is what you meant by that. Are you familiar with – I'm sure you've read this. Ruben Gallego has this line, I think he gave it in an interview with the New York Times a while back, that the average Latino male in America, they want a big-ass truck. That was the line. I think that sort of speaks to your point of like they're not in it for – they're in it for material economic conditions and the promise of America, right?

6:41That's exactly right. And the big-ass truck I think does personify it kind of in a very important way. I would probably add a little bit more nuance to it just because I'm a data nerd and he's a politician, which is why he's in the U.S. Senate and I'm not. So, yeah. But, I mean, basically this is what I argue in my book and the argument I've been making for a couple of decades now is the data is telling us very clearly that this is an economic pocketbook voter. It's not a racial or ethnic voter. And the problem that both parties have and academic institutions, the media, all approach this voter as a racial or ethnic voter.

7:14and the data says immigration is not even a top five issue now in the current environment it's never really been that big of an issue but every time you talk about latino voters everybody's mind goes immediately to immigration like let's talk about immigration right and the politicians are going to lean into that because they're looking for a constituency and they're looking for a camera to chase but but overwhelmingly latinos by wide margins it's not even close they're saying we need to deal with the economic issues cost of living job opportunities upward mobility and neither party is talking to them that way, which is why they're continually moving away from both parties.

7:49Because in a very real sense now, what's happening is when you talk to Latinos about immigration, what you're really saying is, I view you this one caricaturized way and I have no real understanding of who it is that you are. And it's really a lack of relatability as opposed to this rejection of individual politicians. I think they're rejecting the system broadly. But the relatability issue is one that could very easily bring Latinos back en masse to either party that figures it out. It's – I've always been amazed by this assumption on the left that just because two people share some sort of like identity characteristic, whether it's nationality, whether it's their religion, whether it's their race, that those people are ipso facto aligned politically.

8:36And this is the point you're just making. It's like if you're a third generation Mexican-American, your parents have been here for – you grew up in Texas. You're an American more than anything. You don't really have any implicit – you tell me if I'm off base here, but this is my own theory. You don't have any implicit sympathy for some Venezuelan family that is fleeing persecution or even the version of you now, The Mexican kid who is just trying to come over the border for a better life or just to make money to send back to their kids or their families, I should say. Was the original sin of sort of democratic immigration policy this belief that Latinos or Hispanic Americans were going to be on the side of open borders because they're, for lack of a better word, brown?

9:30100%. Look, I think you characterized it perfectly. Let me add a little bit more texture to it. This thinking really began in earnest sort of during the Obama era where people were looking at the demographics. And this theory of that demographics is destiny starts to become real orthodoxy, heterodoxy in the Democratic Party. It becomes a sacrosanct belief that in time, every non-white person is going to vote 80 % with the Democratic Party. So we just need to wait and have more kids, which we as Latinos do pretty well, right? So that demographic is going to just change over time and the Democratic Party will be a permanent majority within a generation.

10:12That was literally – They don't have to do anything to get those voters. They will just be there for you. It just happens on the natural. This is the way race works in politics. This is when I began in earnest really kind of writing and studying and researching this because I was saying that's not a correct understanding of ethnicity or culture or race. These things are very much more fluid than we think they are. But a whole generation of Democratic politicians and political consultants absolutely believed that. And the very few, and there's not that many Latino political consultants in the Democratic Party, but some of the pollsters, and there's just a handful of them, really began to drive this narrative that it's all about immigration.

10:51and that is going to be because that was in part the California experience and that turned California blue also also missed that that's not what exactly happened but that becomes the fallacy that Democrats operate in it's the same fallacy that led the Republicans to start this racial realignment theory they both believe that this is a racial voting block it is not until it is And what I mean by that is if you attack the community like we're witnessing right now, you are going to see Cubans in Miami voting like Mexicans in the Rio Grande Valley, like Dominicans in Passaic, New Jersey, and New York City, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans in Manassas, Virginia.

11:34This is the first time I can say quantifiably Latinos are a monolithic voting bloc. They are monolithically anti-Trump. They are monolithically anti-Republicans for the moment. That doesn't mean it's a permanent coalition. In fact, I've never seen that in 35 years of studying this in great detail. But both parties make this false assumption to begin with that this is best approached as a racial voting bloc. And that is not the way Latinos view themselves or they view the country. And it's certainly not the way that they're processing political information and making voting decisions. Well, Mike, this is the – the point you're making is essentially that these are gettable voters.

12:13Yeah. Right? Are there any Democrats that you see out there who can look like they could go into 2028 with understanding the message that you're trying to get across? Yeah. I mean look, I think there's a very big change happening in the Democratic Party and that change is fundamentally this. Let me answer the question demographically why and then I'll get into some specific politicians that are doing it. the Democratic Party believes that its way back to the working class is through Tim Waltz and Amy Klobuchar and Gretchen Whitmer, like in the Rust Belt. Like to them, that is their caricature of the blue collar working class.

12:55We've got to get these Rust Belt. The white working class is not coming back. They've been fleeing you for decades. And to the earlier point in our conversation, the chances of them coming back are two to three points in any meaningful way. The future of the 270 map for the Democratic Party is through the Sun Belt. It's North Carolina into Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia. And all of those have two characteristics in common. Exploding Latino populations. that's the working class voter that they need to re-engage and try to get back they're not going to get white voters back white working class voters in any meaningful way there may be aberrations like in 2026 maybe certainly not going to get him back by having a coach walls go out there you know throwing the football precisely his cosplay yeah right precisely and they also have economies that are increasingly higher tech higher finance you know um um you know college educated workers and And the blend between college-educated workers and an increasing Latino workforce puts a Texas in play, the way it is probably right now on the Senate race.

14:04Certainly North Carolina. Absolutely Arizona. No question Nevada. Georgia. Georgia, yeah. Those two dynamics are what's changing the 270 map. So the Democratic Party has to change its cultural mindset to understand that this is a different type of minority voter, and it does intersect in the south, the sunbelt. It's no longer a Rust Belt party, and it's never going to be, again, certainly not in the short term. So what does that mean? It means that there are candidates. Quality proteins aren't just for special occasions. With Omaha Steaks, you get mouth-watering proteins delivered right to your door.

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15:20Yeah, and what he's doing is he's challenging the basic assumptions that Democrats have about minority voters, as he should be, because that's what Latinos are essentially doing. You know, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Ben Lujan, these are names that could emerge. Bobby Pulido, watch Bobby Pulido in this congressional race against Monica de la Cruz down in the Rio Grande Valley running for Congress. This guy's doing all the right things. You know, Gabe Vasquez in New Mexico, too. But also, it's not just a Latino thing. Mark Kelly won a huge share of the Latino vote, by the way, U.S. senator, by speaking about more border enforcement and a blue collar working class centrism.

16:01Latinos are not, you know, anti-border security. Tallarico is a potential, big potential, in a way that I bet the work was not. So that, you know, it's not necessarily a Latino thing, but in terms of the faces of the politicians, although those people I mentioned I think are doing it right, it is cross-ethnicity. It does transform or transcend, I should say, race and ethnicity. It's entirely possible, and that speaks to, I think, what a blended mixed-race people, which Latinos are by definition, respond to. I want to ask you a question on the border stuff before we move on, because to me, if you're going to run for president on the Democratic ticket in 2028 or just in the primary, you have got to figure out an answer to this question.

16:53And the answer to me has to be to come out and say in no uncertain terms, look, Joe Biden screwed this up in a major way, not in a minor way, in a major way. I pledge to the American people right here that I will not let that happen on my watch because I think a lot of people, including plenty of swing and Latino voters, would say, look, we elected Democrat. It's just going to be Biden all over again. They're going to open up the border. And look, if I'm elected president, I will continue to do the parts of Trump's immigration policy like keeping the border closed and deporting violent criminals.

17:23These are things that the vast majority of Americans agree with and support. But we can do it without the cruelty. We can do it without the incompetence. That strikes me as such an obvious message, but I don't hear anybody ever making it. That's such a great observation. The solution to the immigration question is not hard from a policy perspective. It has never been hard. Since 1986, when we did IRCA, the policy solution has been very simple. Strong border security and a clearly defined pathway to citizenship. Everything else is details. OK. There have been politicians over the course of the past four decades now since we last did it, including Marco Rubio on the right or Langford on the right and other politicians on the left who have basically said what you just articulated.

18:09That is the answer. The problem is the politics are very complicated. And the reason why the politics are very complicated is because Democrats have had this outdated notion, which was never really correct, that Latinos don't want border security, that they want to emphasize just allowing the undocumented here and opening up more pathways for more undocumented residents. That has never been the sentiment in the Latino electorate ever. OK, now on the right, they just want to stop at border security. They don't want a pathway. They'll say it's legal versus illegal. That is completely true. untrue that's a lie they don't want immigrants they don't want any non-white people like the sentiment they want no amnesty either they don't know and they claim everything is amnesty like if you had a 30-year process to get here they would say that that's amnesty because that's just it's nativism they just don't want non-white people anymore and those are both nuts they're both wrong the way we get to where we need to economically and i would argue culturally to reinvigorate the country is exactly what you articulated.

19:10It starts with border security. And the way you articulate it, I think, is masterful. You have to acknowledge the failings of the Biden administration because it was a failure. It was a fiasco. And you have to acknowledge that why it was and that it will never happen again. Incidentally, we don't talk enough about why Kamala Harris lost Latino voters because of that. Because again, it defies conventional wisdom. She wasn't able to break away from him. No, and should have been. But no, she owned it. She owned it and should have. And it's one of the reasons why she lost. The left will say, oh, it's because Latinos are misogynist and they're racist.

19:46No, the highest Latino vote shares ever were for Barack Obama, a black man. And the second was for Hillary Clinton, a woman. And by the way, Kamala Harris's whole career in California, 25 years, was predicated on overperforming with the Latino voters. The same voters that two and a half years of two and a half decades of supporting her bailed on her. So because it was a failure, it just was. You have to acknowledge that if you're going to be credible and then articulate what Americans are increasingly open to in the wake of this Trump craziness with ICE and the raids and the crackdowns, which is a pathway to citizenship.

20:26Ironically, the craziness of this moment and the failures of the Biden administration may be creating a moment where we can finally, after 40 years, get this done because people are tired of it and it's not that difficult to get to a policy solution. In fact, it's quite simple. We just got to lay down the political arms and quit trying to out-extreme one another. No, it's so true. And I was just thinking, you know, you talked about the left talking about how, oh, you know, you're racist or misogynist if you didn't vote for Kamala. I remember them saying that a lot about black people too, black voters who were not into her.

21:02And I remember just thinking to myself like, well, no, it's because frankly as a white guy I feel like I can say this. Black people and Latino people can spot a bullshit artist from a mile away, right, in a way that us white people can't always do. And that's why they just – they clocked her as being a sort of know-nothing or dilettante. That's why she didn't win, not because she was a woman or a black woman, at least in my opinion. Well, it was a failed administration. They failed. The economy was bad and they wouldn't acknowledge it. The borders were out of control. They wouldn't acknowledge it.

21:33I mean both were true. Those were the top two issues going into 2024, the election. They failed on both of them quantifiably. So yeah. Right. No, I know I get in this argument all the time with my with my liberal family members and friends. It's like, no, like, yes, Biden was handed a pile of crap in a lot of ways with the pandemic and everything. But they did not they did not succeed. And more importantly, that they did not succeed. They didn't explain. I don't I'm having trouble articulating, but they just they weren't able to to get it through people's heads that like, you know, the pandemic was this this major, major.

22:11We weren't going to just be able to snap our fingers and come back from that, right? It was going to take a lot of work. And they weren't able to do the work, I guess. Look, what you're articulating is really important, Carlos. So let me try to say it back to you. Help me out here. First of all, they failed on the economy, OK? The second is they failed on the immigration question. The reason why that failure was largely there is they weren't articulating where they were able to go and not able to convince people what they were trying to accomplish. If those three things sound remarkably similar to this moment, it's because that's exactly what's going on.

22:45The economy is heading in the wrong direction after Trump ran on it. He has turned his greatest strength, which is immigration, into a net negative because of the way he's handling mass deportation and complete government overreach. And he's not able to articulate a coherent strategy for any of this. So that explains the same exact reason why Kamala Harris lost a historic share of Latino support is the exact same reason that Donald Trump is losing an equally historic share of Latino support. It's not brain surgery. It's literally the same thing. Right. Right. No, it really it's your point about how Trump and, you know, people like Noam and Bovino and these people turned his best issue into one of the biggest drags on his presidency.

23:33It's really astonishing. I mean, you've been around longer than I have. Have you ever seen anything like that? No, never. It's the biggest own goal in the history of modern politics. I mean, they were on the verge potentially of a realignment. They had an opening that I had not seen with Latino voters since the early 1990s, maybe since the Reagan era. Like Latinos were like, OK, we'll listen to you now. And literally within weeks, Trump announces Liberation Day. And by the way, that's when Latino numbers started to collapse. Three and a half months. To your point about this being an economic. Yeah, three and a half months prior to the ICE crackdowns in Los Angeles, before any of the crazy stuff on ICE started.

24:15Three and a half months before, his numbers were cratering because he started talking about tariffs and introducing chaos into the financial markets. That's when his numbers start to collapse, not with the ICE stuff. I'm not saying the ICE stuff doesn't matter. I'm not saying the immigration stuff doesn't matter. It certainly does. But it was not the reason that he's at these lows that he's at right now. So in your book frames the Latino century, the name of the book, back to your point about being sort of optimistic about the future. The book frames this as, you know, you say this idea could usher in a new pluralism.

24:47What does that look like structurally in terms of just party realignment, candidate pipelines, even electoral math? You got into this a little bit, but I just want to expand on it. Yeah, and I think it is important to kind of take the context of what we were just talking about, which is there is a demographic change where a lot of these blue-collar working-class voters are more gettable for the Democrats than they have been in the better part of a decade. Where Democrats are consolidating white college-educated voters at a really fast pace, and Republicans are doing the same thing in reverse with non-college-educated voters.

25:22The education divide will be literally the largest demarcation in American politics, and Latinos follow that. We are the largest ethnic groups with the highest rate of non-college-educated voters. But the challenge is you have to speak to Latinos first through blue-collar values. And there is blue-collar values in this country, working-class people. We would call these folks Reagan Democrats, except they're Latino. They're brown, so we don't know what to do with them in this country. But look at them – if you're of a certain age like I am, look at these as Reagan Democrats. These are lunch pail, working class Democrats who will vote for a Republican who speaks to their cultural values.

26:04And that doesn't necessarily mean socially conservative, although it can be. What it means is that kind of – that Clintonian play by the rules and you've got an opportunity and a shot. We're going to give you the opportunity to rise if you put in a fair day's work, fair day's pay. You got a shot in America. That's what this voter is looking for. They're not looking for government intervention. You talk to Democrats, they're always going to say, well, we support, you know, Medi-Cal for all. And we care, you know, all of these government programs. Build Back Better, if that would have worked, Build Back Better would have resonated more than just the day after the press conference that they had.

26:41Working class people do not look to government to better their lives. They just want a fair shake. They just want a fair shake, man. They don't believe government's going to do a better job than they can, so quit trying. And that's the real tension. And I guess the best way to put it, Carlo, as I say in the book, is whichever party is able to capture the hearts and minds of a multi-ethnic aspirational working class is going to be the dominant part of the next generation. The problem is the Democrats have a real problem with the working class piece, much bigger than they realize. And the Republicans have a real big problem with the multi-ethnic piece.