The Daily Signal - Why More Hispanics Voted for Trump in 2020

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

President Donald Trump did historically well in terms of the Hispanic vote.  In both Texas and Florida, the Republican nominee did well among Hispanics. Per NBC News, “55 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, according to NBC News exit polls, while 30 percent of Puerto Ricans and 48 percent of 'other Latinos' backed Trump.” Nationally, he went from 28 percent among Hispanics to 32 percent. What happened here? Were particular issues at stake in the 2020 election affected the Hispanic community’s votes? What about Trump's immigration policies? And lastly, is there even a Hispanic voting bloc--or should we look at these voters in a different way? Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss all this and more.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today's show is a special election edition. We still don't have all the election results, but we will be talking with Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, about the significant amount of support Trump received from Hispanic voters and why Biden lost ground to Hispanic voters that Hillary Clinton gained in 2016. And please don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. We're joining today on The Daily Signal podcast by Mike Gonzalez. He's a senior fellow in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Mike, it's great to have you with us on the Daily Signal podcast. It's entirely my pleasure to be able to speak to you and to your audience of the Daily Signal. Well, thanks. It's great to have you back on. So while votes, Mike, are still being counted and we still don't know for sure if you're the next president will be. President Trump did historically win well in terms of the Hispanic vote per NBC. 55% of Florida's Cuban-American vote went to Trump, according to NBC News exit polls, while 30% of Puerto Ricans and 48% of other Latinos backed Trump. What is your perspective on all this?

Well, I mean, one thing that it did do is that it showed what you just said, the Hispanic vote does not exist. I don't know how often I need to say it. There is no Hispanic vote. there's a Cuban vote in Miami just like there is an Irish vote in Boston. The Irish vote in Texas is very different from the Irish vote

in Boston. The Irish vote in Texas is more conservative, more Republican, more GOP. The Irish vote in Boston is traditionally Democrat. The Irish, the Cuban vote in Miami has been strongly pro-Trump. I don't believe it's 55%. I think it's much higher.

Paul's going in, put it at, Trump had a at 38 percentage point lead on Joe Biden in the polls going into the election. So I don't think it was 55%. That, I mean, that's what they gave Trump in 2016. They gave him 56%. And if anything, it will be much, much, much higher this year. So I'm looking at probably, I think what they did, the numbers that I've seen today is 69%.

But yes, Trump, 69% for Trump, 30% for Biden. among Cuban Americans in South Florida. The Puerto Rican vote in the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando was also very important. It is, again, a very different Puerto Rican vote from the one, for example, in New York, or at Hartford, Connecticut, or Philadelphia. It is much more conservative. The Puerto Rican vote in the northeast is very, very liberal. This vote in the I-4 corridor, Central Florida, is very much more conservative.

And then there was a very impressive Trump outperformed with Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley. There's one county, Zapata, which he actually won, which Hillary had won by 30 points. That county is 95% Mexican-American. Trump won that county, and he improved in all the other counties of the RGV. So what we're looking at here, oh, and let me mention, by the way, I don't know if you want to get into this later is the defeat of Proposition 16 in California. That's a Chinese American parents organized this. Their own affinity groups, like Asian Americans advancing justice, were against them.

And they defeated Proposition 16 at an even higher rate than Proposition 209 in 96, which is the first one. to get rid of affirmative action, racial preferences. So all in all, this is a very good defeat of identity politics all over the country. Well, in Texas, per Vox, Biden won the Hispanic vote by 19 points this year, according to the exits. But that's down from Hillary Clinton's 27 point margin in 2016. What do you make of this, Mike? Well, as I just said, there is no Hispanic vote in Texas or any.

It doesn't exist. I know that the media likes to talk about it in that sense. It's a Mexican-American vote. And in the Rio Grande Valley, in the heartland, traditional Mexican-Americans have lived in Texas, it actually, Trump really outperform there compared to 2016. And the numbers, I have them here in Idago County. He improved by 25 percentage points in Zapata County. He won that one outright.

And I think James Hogg County, he did, let me get it for you right now. In Jim Hogg County, he improved by 39 percentage points. So the improvement from 16 this year in all these counties, Apata County, Star County, Webb County, Zavala, Brooks County, Idaho County, Idaho County in Southern Texas. And this is not a Hispanic boat, right? this is a Mexican-American vote. This is the heartland of the Mexican of the Tejano vote. This is a Tejana vote in Texas. Well, do you think, Mike, there were any particular issues at stake in the 2020 election

that had a particular impact on Mexican-American community's votes? Yeah, I think they like the economy. I think they like the, you know, the Trump economy was very good. I think people understand that what happened with COVID-19 had nothing to do with the economic gains that had been made in the first three years. what is clear is that there was no repudiation of Trump. In fact, Trump did very, very well. And he brought together a very different coalition.

And I think the liberals are very surprised by what they're seeing here. And one of the reasons why liberals have been taken aback is because they continue to believe there's such a thing as a Latino vote. There's no Latino vote. I understand that consultants need to feed their families, and they must push this idea, there's a Latino vote. You have, as I said, very different groups. Again, as I said before, the Irish vote in Boston is very, very different from the Scott's Irish vote in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Well, Nicole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times Magazine and the leader of the 16-9 project tweeted on Tuesday. One day after this election is over, I'm going to write a piece about how Latino is the contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with black Puerto Ricans and indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate. Mike, you've written about this. Can you tell us your perspective? Yeah, I've been tweeted back at her, and I mentioned her in an op-ed that I'm publishing tomorrow. She's completely right. I mean, I hate this.

I don't get to say very often. Nicole Hannah Jones is 100% right. She is 100% right. She gets it wrong in a subsequent tweet when she said last night that these are categories created by whites. Now, these are categories created by leftist activists and ideologues, but nothing to do with their color. On that tweet, she was 100% right.

What is your response, Mike, to the narrative? We've heard for so many years that President Trump is racist with him doing so well now in 2020 with the Hispanic vote. So again, there is no Hispanic vote. He did not do well in the Hispanic vote. He did well with Cubans, Cuban Americans in Florida. He did relatively well with Puerto Rican voters in central Florida. He did well with Mexican American voters. He did vastly better with Mexican-American voters in the Rio Grande Valley. The New York Times actually ran a very good piece, a very good essay about a month ago, in which they described how these, first of all, they found out that 75% of quote unquote Hispanics do not think of themselves as people of color, which through the New York Times for a loop. And the people who wrote this op-head, only the most leftest 25% consider themselves as people of color. And they don't see themselves as victims or minorities. And they actually agreed with a lot of the messages.

that President Trump was giving that to the New York Times sounded like a racist dog whistle quote unquote messaging. These Hispanic voters that was surveyed in this New York Times op-ed, agreed with that. So it's almost like this apparel world

being lived where you have a lot of super woke, very white elite people who think they understand their country, who think they understand their countrymen, but do not really understand not just they do not understand, you know, mainstream people, non-minority people, if you want to put it that way. They don't understand minority people either. They live in a Twitter world, which is relegated to the coasts.

They do not understand their country or their countrymen. Well, President Trump's rhetoric and policies on immigration have been harshly criticized by the media and DC pundits. Do you think that his share of the Mexican-American? vote shows that there's diversity of thought on immigration policies and others. Absolutely. I mean, the quote-unquote Mexican-American voters of New Mexico have been there since 1600s. They're not, a lot of them are not just not immigrants. They're not the grandchildren of immigrants.

I think that a lot of immigration never comes up as a top issue for people of Americans with their roots in Latin America. What do they care about? They care about jobs. They care about education. They care about health care. they care about the same things that countrymen cares about. Why do you think as a whole that President Trump was so successful with Mexican Americans

and are there lessons for conservatives here? Yeah, just be yourself. Don't buy into this idea of Hispanic votes or Latino votes or we need to cater to minorities. But no, treat people like Americans, treat people like adults. If both parties began to do this to just treat people not. like members of a victim group, of an agreed group, but treat people like American voters and pay attention to what they say back to you and not have assumptions as to what they think about or how they think just because they're members of a category that was created by the

bureaucracy in the first place. If politicians begin to do that, they'll be rewarded. Well, and finally, Mike, you did hit on this a little bit, but do you think the media understands the Mexican-American vote, why or why not? And how would you change media coverage of this demographic? The media has to do everything different. I mean, obviously, this election was a repudiation, okay? It was a repudiation of the media. The media was repudiated here.

They felt that it was their job to remove Donald Trump. They wanted to have Donald Trump repudiated, repudiated. That didn't happen. So the media, to tell the media how to better coverage, better cover Mexican Americas in Texas, it's a minuscule part of all the things that the media needs to do differently. But they're not going to learn because they think they're right. They live in Brooklyn or Manhattan or they live in Washington. And all they know is people like themselves. Washington, D.C. voted 93% for Biden, 5% for Trump. If you live in Washington,

in D.C. Well, over 9% of the people you meet are liberals just like you. So, and that's where a lot of the media is based. So the media is so far removed from real America that I wouldn't begin with how to cover Mexican Americans. I would just tell them, for Pete's sake, stop using the term Hispanic or Latino. And of course, Latin X. NPR, which uses it all the time, nobody, nobody, there's nobody in a bodega in New

or a coffee stop in Miami, has ever used the term Latin X? It's only the super liberal people at NPR that use Latin X, and they're not Hispanics. Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining us on The Daily Signal podcast and unpacking the Mexican-American vote with us. We appreciate having you. Great. Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure to have.

Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening. You can find the Daily Sigma podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. We will be back with you all tomorrow to share more election updates.

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