The David Pakman Show - BONUS FREEBIE: Trump's Hispanic support tanks, Cracker Barrel changes logo

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

-- On the Bonus Show: Hispanic voters turning on Trump, Cracker Barrel's new logo sparks MAGA outrage, Florida cities ordered to remove rainbow crosswalks, and much more... Become a Member: https://www.davidpakman.com/membership  Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com/  Buy David's book: https://davidpakman.com/book 

Hey, everybody, David here. What you're about to hear is an episode of the bonus show. We do a bonus show every day for our members. And for a limited time, we will release one of the week's bonus shows on Saturdays exclusively for our audio podcast listeners. If you'd like to get access to all of the bonus shows, simply sign up at join packman.com. Here is that bonus show episode. Welcome to the bonus show. A very interesting turn of events demographically that I want to talk about. Hispanic voters are starting to turn against Donald Trump. Now you might be saying, wait a second, Hispanic voters have always been against Republicans and Trump. Wrong. In fact, we saw more Hispanic voters vote Trump than have voted for other Republicans in a very

long time, if not ever, in the 2024 election. That honeymoon appears to be winding down. The latest poll from Reuters puts Trump with 32% support among Hispanic voters. The U-Gov Economist poll that was recently put out has the exact same numbers, essentially 28% support from Hispanic voters. And one of the interesting things here, I actually have a friend who's a comedian, Angelo Kalina, who does shows in Spanish. And I recently went to one of his shows.

And one of the funny bits he does is at when he, you know, talks to other American Hispanic voters. And they sort of like seem shocked that this entire Trump thing has been a disaster. And he's sort of like, why are you surprised that the guy who said he hates you, hates you, now he's you, this is a comedy show, right? He's using more, you know, less nuanced language. But it is this weird thing where somehow Trump was able to convince more Hispanic voters than historically has been the case to support him in 2024. We know with some communities, it's fear of communism and socialism, but it's more than that.

You're not going to get the level of support Trump did with just that. And now we are seeing it very quickly reverse, which I think is good. It should reverse. Trump should not have high support from Hispanic voters. Right. I think this all boils down to this. idea that the American public was not happy with immigration policy under Joe Biden. And that was true for Hispanics as well as the overall population. But that doesn't mean that people were all

in on Trump's immigration policy. And it seems like he way overcorrected in the minds of voters and in the minds of Hispanics. So many of these Hispanic voters, maybe they did want more hardline immigration policy. Maybe they felt upset by people who were able to stay in the country undocumented because if they're legal immigrants themselves or if they know legal immigrants, maybe in their family or their friend groups, maybe they feel as though there's something unjust going on there. So they wanted a more strict immigration policy. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're signing up for these ice raids outside the Home Depot's or that they're signing up for trying to eliminate protections for DACA recipients. It doesn't mean that they've fought in fully to Trump's agenda here. So now that's why we're seeing, I think, the backtracking going from about 46 percent Hispanic support for Trump back during the 2024 presidential campaign to now just being in the low 30s. That's exactly right. And listen, we it's very, on the one hand, there are people who say there's something weird

about categorizing support under different from different groups. Like it sounds like why are we, we're trying to get away from seeing people as their identity and yet we're categorizing. I think it's extraordinarily relevant and illuminating. I mean, when I see, hey, Jewish Americans are the most left-wing voting block of any voting block. It's not that we only see Jewish voters, myself being one, as Jewish voters. It's that we say, what are the values and history of a group that leads to significantly more

support on one side than the other? When we look at men versus women, it's not about you simply are voting as a word. woman versus you're simply voting as a man. It's what is it that is different that is leading to these different levels of support? I think it's hugely relevant. And it seems obvious that with Hispanic voters, they shouldn't be supporting Trump. Now, I want to address one of the thing, Pat. There are some conservatives who love to say, listen, of course Hispanic voters should support Trump. Although a lot of the people getting deported are Hispanic. The Hispanic voters that are here and are here legally and vote.

Number one, they're overwhelmingly from culturally conservative Catholic countries, and that aligns more with Trump than with Democrats. And also, since they came here legally, they don't want people coming here illegally. And therefore, it makes perfect sense that they would vote for the guy who's going to keep undocumented immigrants out. The second one we could talk about. The first one is that it really misunderstands the role. of religion in a lot of these countries, a lot of these Latin American countries are nominally

like on paper, very Catholic, but they are not culturally conservative in a way that applies to what they want from their government the way that American Republicans are. So I think that that's just a misinterpretation, misunderstanding. That all makes sense to me. And I do agree that it makes sense to take a look at the demographic breakdowns when it comes to support for a party or policy. because we see the trends born out by the data, right? It's not just like we're coming up with these trends ourselves.

If there was no statistical significance between, say, you know, black support and white support or female versus male support, we wouldn't need to take a look at how polling is happening across those different groups. But because we see wildly different numbers, different results when it comes to these different demographics, I think it does make sense to track it. Without a doubt, and that's what we're doing. We're looking at it and we are, we are tracking it. All right. I want to talk about Cracker Barrel.

Now, here's the thing, Pat. I deliberately avoided looking at the article for this story because I wanted to tell you my understanding of the story just from being on social media over the weekend and then have you tell me, do I correctly understand the story? Let's try it. Okay. My understanding of the actual change that Cracker Barrel made. is they change their logo from a logo that contains, let me see how I can describe it.

I guess it's like a guy with, what is this guy holding exactly? Their old logo contained a guy holding something to a logo that just says cracker barrel. And it seems that this has triggered especially right wing outrage because something about the old logo and the guy on it. was considered associated with traditional values or conservatism. And so the logo change is being interpreted as woke in some way. Do I is that kind of it? Yeah, that's mostly it. I think what this all boils down to is people are upset whenever a company decides to change its logo because there's nostalgia tied to it. Maybe they've been going to a cracker barrel their whole lives and they just don't want to see the logo change because people feel as though a bit of their childhood is taken away

from them. But because everything is viewed through this political lens these days, they come up with reasons to make it a political issue. So in the minds of these Trump supporters, maybe they figure that having the old farmer in the logo was something emblematic of the American South and companies are trying to get away from that imagery. And so that's something that upsets them. It doesn't seem to me like there was politics at play here whatsoever. It was just a company trying to shake things up, do a logo change as we see companies do all the time. But MAGA decided to make this a culture war issue. And now I'm now that I'm actually reading the article, it seems as though what the logo used to be is an older gentleman in overalls leaning on a

barrel. And that imagery, I guess, is being interpreted by MAGA as being removed for political reasons. But I guess this is bipartisan. I guess there's people on the left who just find the new logo from a design standpoint to be kind of lame. Now, I'm going to make another admission. Have you ever been to a cracker barrel, Pat? I have not. They're more prevalent in the south, right? I don't think I've ever seen one.

So growing up in Massachusetts, there was one about 20 minutes from where I grew up, but I never went. For the first, I'm just going to take a look at what they have. I'm looking at the menu here. Chicken and Turkey. Let's see what they have under chicken and turkey. You can get an herb roasted half chicken for 15 bucks. and it is over 1,700 calories, Pat.

Oh, my God. That is crazy. From a calorie standpoint, that I guess that is a good deal. That is completely nuts. Yeah, it doesn't sound like the type of place I would want to go to. So is this mostly like another IHop or Waffle House? Like they have breakfast items. No, no.

I guess it's like they do have, let's see, breakfast all day. They have something called Uncle Herschel's favorite, which is two eggs plus the sides that you want. They've got a thousand calorie hash brown casserole, which seems like a nice light dish to start. Yeah, it's like in a little, like a little cast iron skillet. I guess it's sort of like a downhome cooking type of thing, right? Is it kind of the impression I'm getting? No, I could see how it's appealing. I can see how it would be a widely successful company.

And, you know, why people would want to go there for years and years, just probably not my taste. But, you know, especially if you're trying to get some good value calories per dollar, then you could find it at Cracker Barrel. As far as vegan options, they've got impossible sausage patties, fried apples, fruit. You can have them prepare your grits with no butter or milk. And then they can steam broccoli, carrots, or corn for you, or get you a baked potato with nothing on it. So that's, those are the options. Yeah, they rolled out some of the vegan options a few years ago, and they also decided to include some pride-themed rocking chairs, at least temporarily

a couple years back. And those two reasons furthered the idea by conservatives that there's some culture war going on being fought at Cracker Barrel. And so tied with the logo change, they think that the woke have taken over their beloved restaurant chain. What a world. What a world. All right. If anyone in our audience cares about the cracker barrel logo change, let me know. That's the most interested in, that's what I'm most interested in hearing about. All right. Multiple Florida cities are now facing deadlines to paint over or removed so called rainbow crosswalks.

These are crosswalks where the lines instead of being white are multicolored to celebrate LGBTQ pride. The city I grew up in, Northampton, Massachusetts, I guess it must have been like 10 or 15 years ago. I remember installed one of these and there were like five minutes of controversy and then everybody forgot about it and no one cares. And in Florida, the municipalities have been asked by the state transportation department to remove those by early next month. And I guess they just don't want them.

These are being called safety improvements, although it's really hard to understand that in reality. I guess the argument, let's like evaluate the argument, Pat. The argument is there are universally accepted colors and shapes for elements of traffic. And so if all of a sudden you had instead of a red octagon for a stop sign, our stop sign octagons are hexagons octagons right they're octagons yes yeah if instead of a red octagon for stop it was blue and round even if it still said stop it being different than what we're used to would be a safety issue like i acknowledge that i think that that's absolutely fair to say um on the other hand i don't know that the argument that listen um drivers are used to a white crosswalk

And if the crosswalk is rainbow, it's dangerous. It may not be identified as such. It could lead to people getting run over. I kind of struggle with that. I don't know that I really believe that, but Transportation Secretary Duffy says this is all about safety. I'm not believing it either. I think it's obvious that they feel as though they'll be more likely to be successful if

they call it a safety concern rather than trying to strip it because they don't agree with the political decision so they're claiming that there's some safety issue but if anything i'd imagine that the rainbow colored crosswalk draws more attention to the crosswalk than just the regular crosswalk because if you are driving along and all of a sudden you see some rainbow colored pattern that still looks like a crosswalk it's just also has these bright colors wouldn't that make you more likely to be aware and pay attention because you have all those colors right in front of you. So if this was clearly distinct looking from a normal crosswalk, I could understand why that could potentially be a safety hazard. But the two blend together pretty well, right?

Like you have the grid of the crosswalk and then in between you have the colors. Like, I don't think that there's any safety issue at play here. I don't either. And so I'm not totally understanding this as anything other than just another one of these political things. We're going to get rid of woke and we're going to do all this different stuff. There are some municipalities that have requested extensions. There are some that have requested specific projects be exempted. Like some cities have murals that are rainbow. It's not a crosswalk, but it's in a position where it's still subject to removal.

All of this seems like such a huge waste of time to me. Yeah. I'd imagine if there were conservative areas that decided to put up red, white, and blue crosswalks or thin blue line themed crosswalks, then the Trump administration wouldn't have any problem whatsoever with that. But because it's an LGBT crosswalk, they have to go out after it in any way that they can and that's what they're doing here. The other funny thing about the red, white and blue crosswalk is not only would they not

have any problem with it politically, isn't it technically like people are driving over the flag and it's like a disrespectful use? You know, they always talk about the flag code. You're not allowed to modify the flag. So like the thin blue line ones that they do, it seems to me that that goes against their own principle of the flag code. That was actually an interesting issue that came up with these rainbow-colored crosswalks because there were people who seemingly deliberately decided to skid out over the crosswalk to

damage it. And there are questions over whether that should be considered a crime, even like a hate crime because they most likely deliberately targeted the crosswalk or the mural on the ground because it was there and because they don't agree with the political messaging of it. So yeah, it would probably be something that would be against flag code for them to start setting up American black themed crosswalks. But they're totally fine with breaking flag code. We'd see that all the time. They have the flags on their shirts. They don't know how to properly display the stars and stripes, even though they claim to. As usual, another very important sincerely held principle that is not so important and not so sincerely held as soon as there's

something different that they want to do. So not a not a surprise at all. All right, we're here all week. We will be off on Monday for the Labor Day holiday. I've got a substack live with Robert Reich this afternoon i hope you'll tune in for and we'll have it on the show upcoming as well i'll see everybody back here tomorrow