The Daily Signal - How the Radical Left Helped Trump Win Hispanic Voters

Episode Date: November 10, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump won 46% of the Hispanic vote in the 2024 presidential election, a record for any Republican presidential candidate in recent history, according to Reuters. Trump did not have success with Hispanic voters because of “anything conservatives did,” but rather “things that the Left has done,” according to Mike Gonzalez, author of “A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans.”  The “Left has actually done 95% of it of the work” of driving Hispanics to the Republican Party “by going crazy, completely crazy over woke issues that are completely rejected by Hispanics,” he said.  Gonzalez, who serves as a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the central issues that drove Hispanic voters across the aisle to Trump.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the stories of real Americans to in-depth policy conversations, we are going beyond the headlines to discuss the issues and events that have and are shaping this nation. Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast weekend edition. I'm Virginia Allen, your host today. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be right back with today's conversation. Your government is out of control. It's doing things it has no business doing. It spends way too much money. It gets involved in way too many wars. It not only tells you what you can and can't say, it actively censors you. And the things your government should do, it can't, or worse, won't do it all. It can't keep your streets clean of crime and filth. It can't keep your neighborhoods safe enough for kids to play outside.

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I am so pleased to be joined by senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Mike Gonzalez. Mike, you are the author of multiple books, but one of your books is specifically relevant to our conversation today. Back in, I believe it was 2014, you published A Race for the Future, how conservatives can break the liberal monopoly on Hispanic Americans. Has it happened? Did this election truly break the liberal monopoly on Hispanic Americans? Yeah, I would say it did.

Not because of anything conservatives did. They didn't follow my advice. It's because of things that the left of them. The left abandoned the working class. The left abandoned and many of the Americans that are labeled as Hispanics of working class. I'm a big believer in that Hispanic is a synthetic class. label produced and demanded by the left, and that it doesn't really inform a lot because what you have is a very diverse group underneath.

You have Cubans that are one way, Puerto Ricans or another, Mexican Americans are another way, Central Americans. And this election, 2024, so the biggest wave of support for a Republican that I think we have ever seen since Hispanics were created in 1980. So, no, they were created in 1977 by the Office of Management and Budget, and they were then put on, slapped on the census of the 1980 census. Prior to that. So in other words, putting them in a specific category.

Yeah, but before that, nobody was known as Hispanic. I remember, you know, in New York, in the 70s, when my uncle came home sometime in the mid-70s and said, well, they're thinking of calling us as a... Hispanics and we were all perplexed. Like, what? So what I mean is before Hispanics had created. So apparently Nixon enjoyed a lot of support among Mexican Americans, certainly among Cuban Americans. He had his best friend was B.B. Rubozo, a well-known Cuban American born in this country. But Trump has done better than anyone else previously has done. And not by following, in very Trumpian fashion, not by following any formula, just by being Trump.

And then the left has actually done 95% of it, of the work by going crazy, completely crazy over Wook issues that are completely rejected by Hispanics. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about some of those issues that you say Trump has won the Hispanic vote on just by being Trump. I mean, he got, if you go back to the 2020 election, he had 32% of the Hispanic vote in this election overall, he had 46% with Hispanic men, he had 55%.

Why? Plus he won, this is historic. He won all the four counties in the Rio Grande Valley, which is south of San Antonio on the Mexican border in Texas, and he won 14 of the 16 counties in Texas that border on Mexico. That is historic. I mean, the nature of this is historic.

He won Star County. Star County is 97% Mexican-American. He won that substantially. He won Star County by 58%. This is going to be digested by many people in the following weeks and months. A lot of stuff is going to be written about this. I mentioned Wook issues. I forgot actually the key issue was

how, and Democrats are beginning to say, why did this happen? Biden and Harris throwing the border open and allowing millions upon millions to stream in for a reason that we haven't really yet understood was the deciding factor. As far as the Rio Grande Valley goes, as far as these 14 counties on the border with Mexico, 14 or 16, as I said, went for Trump because of the insanity, the utter insanity,

well, you've been on the border, you know yourself, of letting in, what, between 10 and 20 million Americans? I mean, there's 10 and 20 million illegal immigrants stream across the border. Nobody understands what they did that. So I think that accounts a lot for the support in the Rio Grande Valley, for example. But I think the woke issues that I would explain the phenomenon in Michigan where a majority of the voters known as Hispanics voted for Trump or in Pennsylvania, which is mostly Puerto Rican on the Puerto Rican corridor between the Poconos and Harrisburg, between Scranton and Harrisburg or the area, you know, where Bethlehem Steel used to be. That is, I think, explained by things like the craziness of gender theory, the support for minors being able to mutilate themselves or to castrate themselves, either surgically or chemically, which is, again, bizarre. I mean, this administration deserved to lose.

Biden Harris, it wasn't just, it wasn't just, you know, that had run in the government. It was insane to support, you know, to support gender theory, to support what they called euphemistically gender affirming surgeries in therapies, which is really a lie. It's not affirming anything. It's destroying bodies forever. permanently, scarring boys and girls. The support for that, I think, accounts a lot for the vote among Puerto Ricans and Cubans and Mexicans for Trump. Also, the racial issues, the racial craziness, which is really, it was done for the same reasons as the gender craziness. This idea that the whole world must be seen through the prism of an epic struggle of the oppressed and the oppressor.

and you have some races that are oppressed and some races that are oppressors and that we live in a systemically racist country, which is a lie and insulting. I think Hispanics voted against this. So it's not really anything that conservatives have done. They just benefited. It was a windfall. It was a windfall from the fact that we had four years of insanity.

Yeah. So then given those issues, that you've listed the traditional values that the Hispanic communities have and concerns for the border and those issues of being hyper-focused on race. And do you think that Trump won the Hispanic vote because Hispanic voters really like Trump? Or do you think they just really dislike the Biden-Harris administration? Well, they disliked the incompetence of the Biden-Harris administration. They disliked the open borders and they disliked that they were deeply, deeply offended by being called Latin-X.

by the latte elite class, by coastal latte elite class, which is really what the left is now. It's just a regional party with Minnesota and Illinois thrown in, in the middle, and Colorado and New Mexico. Other than that, it's just New England, the Middle Atlantic States, Oregon, Washington, California, and Hawaii. I think they may have also identified with Trump's persona. I think his freewheeling style, his, you know, I think the stunts that he pulled,

which were sophisticated, they're dressing up in the Garbage Man's outfit. They're going to McDonald's. He created content. Yep. You know, for the first time, we have, conservatives like me have complained bitterly about allowing the left to take over the culture, the sense-making institutions. We have said, you know, conservatives used to understand a narrative. Yeah.

You used to understand the culture and we let it go. Trump was a content creator. So Sam Stein speaking this morning, I was watching Morning Joe because it has become a morning with a you, Morning Joe. For the last two days, I've had a great degree of shudden fraud. I'm watching the liberals. My wife comes in and watches MSNBC and says, don't touch that. dial. I want to see Rachel cry.

Oh, Mike. So they had Sam Stein this morning. I think he was quite good. He was saying that where the Harris campaign hired content creators to come to her rallies, you know, Trump was the content creator in chief. Yeah. Yeah. And people ask me why she's doing dumb stuff like that, you know, dressing up as a garbage man, driving in a garbage truck. He's creating content. He's creating content.

Well, and during his interview on Joe Rogan's podcast, Joe Rogan complimented him on essentially having comedic timing and his ability to deliver lines in many ways, like a comedian is. Like, he reads an audience really well. He apparently watches his TV appearances twice, once with a sound on and the other one with the sound off. Interesting. And he wants to see, so he doesn't want to have the sound pollute the image. He wants to see how the image looks. go back again and look at that photo of Trump hanging out the window of the McDonald's waving a car goodbye. It looked like a commercial from the 1950s.

It looked like madman, you know, produced his commercial. It's done that way on purpose. You know, he, obviously, the apprentice, you're fired. He is a, and I agree with his policies, by the way, I thought it was a good precedent. So I'm not minimizing his policies by any means. I thought, for example, his DEI, the ban on government contractors and government employees being forced to go through the demeaning coercion of so-called anti-racism trainings was fantastic, a very good policy, liberating Americans. But you also have to praise his theatrical side, his deep understanding of the message of content. And I think Hispanics really

Intuitive that and appreciated it and supported it. There's something real about it that I think people can relate to. They see themselves in it. They see their family members in it, I think as well. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you live in a cramped apartment in the Upper West Side

and have no children because you don't want to inflict that on the environment and you have three degrees in gender studies from Barnard, you do not get it. Yep. But normal people do. Normal people do. Well, do you think, going back to a conversation of Hispanic voters, do you think that this is indicative of a real shift among the Hispanic community that maybe...

Will it last? You're asking if it will last. You're asking if it will last, exactly. If it will last. If it will last in 2028. Yeah. And beyond. If JD Vance or DeSantis.

or Glenn Yonkin or whoever it is. Whoever it is, whoever emerges, they carry the same level of, I don't know, you know, they say that you vote three times one way and you vote that way for life. That used to be they, they used to, and if for a very long time, you voted like your parents said. Yeah. I keep waiting for that to happen with my children.

They're still young. Yeah. But we'll see. Now that many of them have pulled the lever for Trump twice because in 2016 they didn't really, you know, they didn't really know him, so they didn't vote in those great numbers. The big change came between 16 and 2020

when he made great strides in the four counties in the Rio Grande Valley, and he won't Zapata County. he won the fighter county out right in the Rio Grande Valley and that's what people began to take notice I had already notice before the election I wanted to go I had a trip I had planned a trip to the Real Grand Valley

in March of 2020 and then something happened that kept me at home pinned at home not able to travel not to cancel all my meetings but I was going to go because I knew that something was brewing in the Rio Grande Valley and I am not too surprised that he flipped the entire... This cannot be over-emphasized enough, Virginia.

That the Cubans vote for Trump is dog bites man. Why? Why is that so surprising? Because Cubans are conservative. Yeah. Cubas are conservative. I remember being met at the airport by my family in the early 70s when I arrived at the Kennedy airport. Hey, welcome to America.

We're Republicans. That's pretty much, you know. That was a long story short. Yeah, right. I think I was, I think me and my cousin Ray handed out Gerald Ford bumper stickers before I learned how to speak English on Northern Boulevard in Jackson Heights. So, so Cubans are traditionally being Republican and I think they have voted for Trump at the 70, 75% range. That's not a surprise. The real Grand Valley is a surprise.

Overall, were you surprised to see how. big Trump won with the Hispanic vote? Or would you think? No, no, I mean, if you go back, I've been calling it. Okay. I've been calling and saying that I didn't know that he was going to do 46, 47. Yeah. I thought he was going to do 43, 42.

42, 42, maybe I said 44. Yeah. The high watermark was George W. Bush in 2004 when he got 44% Trump went past that. Okay. Okay. On policy issues, what do you think the Hispanic community is looking for Trump to do, especially in his first year in office? Yeah, that was an easy one. So what I wrote in a tweet that got a lot of attention yesterday is this is the first election

when Hispanics, Hispanic Americans shed the qualifier. They're just Americans. They want the same things that all the other Americans want. In fact, what I hope will happen, and I will advocate for this, is for the Hispanic category to be taken off the census, to be taken off the government documents. It was put there by the left, by leftist activists, who mao-mowed the bureaucracy in the 70s had to do this.

They had, you know, it was really, they, they, they showed up. They demanded these things, and they extracted this concession. First from Nixon and then from Carter. And there's no reason. They do this because they did this with the knowledge that they wanted to balkanize the nation and have this captured group to whose member they could teach that the Americans, that America's an awful place, that America is systematically racist, that America has been systematically bad to the newly created group, Hispanics.

There's a law passing in 1976. 94 311, public law, 94311, which is the only law that actually describes what a group is. And it calls, and doesn't use the term Hispanic because it's not created yet. I understand. This is 76, 12 months before OMB creates the term and officializes it. But public law 94-311 says this is a group of Spanish Americans, 12 million of them. And you know what they have in common. So it mentions that these are, come from populations that were Spanish speaking at one point

because many of these people do not speak Spanish. Yeah. So they can't say that these are all Spanish-speaking Americans. Yeah. They say these are descendants of people who were. If your name is Garcia, this is a good chance that you spoke, that your ancestors spoke Spanish. They think it just so happens. My name is Gonzalez.

And about five generations ago, before five generations ago, only like 20% of my ancestors spoke. Spanish. The rest of the dialect. In fact, when I go to visit my cousins in Spain, I don't speak Spanish. I must speak dialect. Interesting. So, or they kill me if they hear the word dialect because it's a recognized Ghalesian language. But so, so anyway, it says what this group in public law 94-311 have in common is that. they have been victims. They're victims of discrimination. They are victims of oppression. It just happens that I was around in this country at the time in 1976. I remember screaming my head off during the 76 bicentennial, loving America so much. I'm not going to sugarcoat it.

Back in the 70s, especially in Jackson Heights, Queens, everybody was called something. You know, every group was called something. The Irish were called something. The Italians were called something. The Puerto Ricans were called something. You know, and it was not anything good. Yeah. But other than that, my goodness, no, I didn't feel oppressed.

It's a very proud American already in 1976. By celebrating 200-year, 200-year bestennial of the United States, if I had read that law, I would have been perplexed. Yeah. Well, that makes me think of we've got the 250th, and Trump's already made some announcements on plans for that, which is exciting. Yeah, yeah, no, he's going to make it happen. And it's going to be the best in history. Yeah.

It's going to be big and beautiful. Big and beautiful. You never seen anything like it. Exactly. Exactly. Well, Mike, thank you. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your analysis and perspective.

As always, this is fun. Oh, thank you very much. We're going to leave it there for today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Do you never miss out on new shows from the Daily Signal podcast? Every weekday, catch top news in 10 right here in this podcast feed. Keep up with the news that you care about in just 10 minutes every weekday around 5 p.m. And go deep with us right here every weekend for the Daily Signal's podcast interview edition.

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