The New Yorker Radio Hour - Unpacking the Latino Vote, and Susan Orlean on the Queen of Tigers

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

In the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections, many pundits expected Republicans to make significant gains among Latino voters, further eroding a base of support that Democrats have arguably taken for granted for decades. “What happened instead, as you know, is a more complicated story,” the contributing writer Stephania Taladrid says, one that both parties will be examining closely as 2024 approaches. Taladrid speaks with two political consultants, Chuck Rocha and Mike Madrid, to unpack the results. Rocha and Madrid co-host “The Latino Vote” podcast. Rocha, a Democrat, was a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders and Madrid, a Republican, was a founding member of the Lincoln Project.  And Susan Orlean reads from one of her Afterword columns, about the long and fecund life of a tiger mother. “Unlike most tiger mothers,” she writes, “Collarwali was, in fact, a tiger.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last week, the state of Nevada re-elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. That was a decisive moment. Catherine Cortez-Mastow's win gave the Democrats their 50th seat in the Senate. The runoff in Georgia next month will surely be dramatic, but the deal was sealed in Nevada. Our contributor, Stephanie Ataladreed, covered the race from Las Vegas, and early on the morning of election day, she was at a rally held by the Culinary Workers Union. Catherine Cortez-Master addressed the crowd.

It's so exciting to be with all of you. Are we ready to win? So the mood in the room was ecstatic. But at the national level, many people actually thought that Senator Cortez-Master was at risk of losing this election. and beyond that, that Republicans would make significant gains among Latino voters. What happened instead, as you know, is a more complicated story. Stephanie has been covering Latino politics for the New Yorker, not only in Nevada, but in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere in the country. To better understand what happened here, I wanted to talk with Chuck Rota and Mike Madrid.

They host a podcast that I listen to called The Latino Vote. They're both political consultants. on opposite sides of the aisle. Chalk was a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders, Mike was the founding member of the Lincoln Project. And it's just been so refreshing for me, listening to their podcast, to hear two veteran political analysts

having a really nuanced and honest conversation about the state of the Latino vote. What do you make of the narrative that Latinos are increasingly turning to the Republican Party? Go ahead, Mike. That's right on a tea for you. Right there.

Don't try to pull your shirt. I'm waiting to jump in. Don't pull your shoulder when you get this now. Easy. Okay. So, yeah. So the, it's important to understand that in many ways the Hispanic shift right word happened in 2020.

David Shore, I think one of the more prominent data scientists in the Democratic Party put this really well. The realignment basically already happened. The new baseline for Hispanic support in the Republican. Republican Party is now sitting at 37, 38, 39 percent, the high 30s. It is huge. And if you had told me that six years ago, I would have said that's crazy. So it is huge. The shift happened. And we can debate whether it went down to 36 or up to 39. But the way to look at this is to understand that realignments occur over decades. When the Republican Party sought to realign the South

with the Southern strategy, that began in the late 60s, 1970 campaign. and it didn't really manifest itself until 1994. That's 25 years, and that's essentially what I think the story of the Latino community is going to be, is it's a generational change. We're not seeing, for example, big registration numbers for Republicans. The registration numbers with Latinos are staying the same for Democrats. But when you look at the precincts in the Rio Grande Valley, if you look at the precincts in southern New Mexico, if you look at the precincts in Colorado, if you look at the performance, in Nevada and in Arizona. And even in California this year,

there is a discernible rightward shift with the raw data, meaning it happened. We can argue about how big or how little, but the simple fact is if you look at the narrative, especially over time, it's undeniable that it's happening. The one place where we have a pretty clear picture

of what has happened with Latinos is Florida. Some people talk about Florida as an exception, but, you know, we saw that Miami-Dade a historically blue county when Republican for the first time in years. Mike, I want to start with you. You've made the case that Florida is increasingly isolated from the rest of the country. What do you mean by that? Well, it's not only isolated demographically and the combination of the pillars of the Republican Party that constitute the GOP is different than what you see from some of the more broader states in the unions. You also have an extraordinarily different construct

of Latino voters. As you mentioned, Cubans and Puerto Ricans tends to dominate the voter model there. It's one of the few states where Mexican Americans are not the majority, certainly the overwhelming majority of the Latino voters there. But it is undeniable that Ronda Sanchez did significantly overperform. And when I say significantly, I mean by significantly. So we have to ask ourselves, you know, what is unique, what is different. We know the Cuban story. We know the Venezuelan story. But what we're seeing with Puerto Ricans who have traditionally broken more Democrat is this consolidation under the GOP banner as well. And Mexican Americans, most surprisingly, breaking towards the Republican Party. I don't think I've ever seen, except for maybe New Mexico

back in the 80s, Republicans win the Mexican-American vote. I think a lot of it has to do with the construct of the service economy that we have in Florida, the push for DeSantis. to open the economy and keep these workers employed. But it does stand as a unique outlier in terms of not just the Latino vote, but obviously with this huge red wave, a state that does not look like the rest of the country at this moment in time. Chuck, how do you expect Democrats to respond to the transit we're seeing in Florida? Certainly when I was reporting about the 2020 election from Miami, the message that I got from voters, and even from some campaign operatives was that the party wasn't investing nearly enough as it should in the

community there. Do you think this is giving them any reason to revert course? What can we expect to see? I wish that we would go down and compete because Barack Obama taught us that if you show up with the right message, you can get the majority of Cubans, even if it's small, to vote for you. Of course, he was transformational and all you people on Twitter. I get it. You're at once in a lifetime, blah, blah, blah. But if you're a majority of you. But if you're a majority of Cubans, even if you're you just walk away national democrats and you just like that's an outlier they'll be red it's a red state forever that starts bleeding into georgia that starts bleeding into little other places that we are already underinvesting in a year round for long-term bilingual organizing and chuck i want us to

briefly focus on pennsylvania where there are a lot more latinos than people recognized and most of them were prurterican tell us about the work that you did for john federman's campaign there I wasn't working directly for the Federman campaign, but instead the largest Senate super PAC in America that spent the most money, I'm proud to say this, on bilingual advertising than any single operation in America. That means all the other congressional campaigns and Senate campaigns combined. This super PAC invested starting six months out in most of these elections and not just doing Spanish TV, but doing radio, doing mail, doing newspaper ads, and had a field team on the ground in each one of these states knocking on doors. Mike talks about a new baseline. He'll continue to talk about a new baseline. Is it 34? Is it 36? Is it 42 for God's sakes? What we know and what I know in Pennsylvania is when you spend a lot of time and effort showing up in a culturally competent way, you can get that number back to the 70-30 number, because that's what we did. And that's not an exit poll. That's a daily tracker in Spanish

in a concentrated area where all the Latinos only live in about 35 precincts. So we showed up on the radio. We showed up in their mailboxes. We showed up at their doors, but we did it more than just the last two weeks of GOTV. That is key. And then you take the importance of having me and white folks around me who agreed with me that when the Philadelphia Phillies made it to the United States World Series, United States World Series. How did you catch that, Madrid? On the World Series that we bought the Spanish language Samo Cascos, guess what Puerto Ricans really love? They love baseball, and they have a history of baseball.

So these little things don't make all the difference. It means that you have a better chance of getting more people to show up that are Latino, Latino voters. And me and Mike talked about this, and I know I've already talked too much, but also you should know that the Republicans were not competing against me in Spanish in those markets, which also helps a lot. And talking about margins, you both know all too well that this is a game of margins, right? They appear to be getting tighter and tighter. But at the same time, what we saw in places like Texas is that many Latinos cast. a vote against extremism. Mike, would it be fair to say that theirs was a vote for moderation?

I think that's absolutely one of the findings that we're going to see. If you look at precincts like Tim Ryan's in Ohio, what you saw was these dramatic shifts away from these Trumpy positions in the most Hispanic precincts in Ohio towards Tim Ryan, like a 20-point swing. It's hard to draw any other conclusions than the moderate candidates that are positioning, as working class candidates on working class issues in the Democratic Party are doing significantly

better than those that are leaning into this culturally leftward narrative that is seeing performance drop. And this is an important way to look at the vote. You've got a lot of, especially Latino Democratic members of Congress making a really big mistake saying we've got more Latino Democrats in Congress, how can we have lost a Latino vote or not improved? And the answer is very simple. math. The way that works is the margins in most of these districts are tightening and not small. They're tightening considerably. And so a lot of these candidates and the Democratic caucus, I think, are making the mistake of leaning to the left when moderation is where Hispanics are responding. It's showing up in Ohio. It's showing up in the Rio Grande Valley. It's showing up in Los Angeles County.

It's showing up in Miami-South Dade. So to me, it's pretty incontrovertible evidence. And I guess Nevada is also an example of that, right? I mean, the results that we saw during the Senate race. Nevada is a perfect example of that. And I would even argue that Arizona is an example of that. But Nevada especially, look, when the death settles and we start getting the precinct data in, Senator Cortez Masto, who's also the first Latino in the U.S. Senate, will probably win by a smaller margin than she won by six years ago. And her Latino numbers will probably come in exactly what they were six years ago, which people are.

saying that the Latinos helped improve the vote for the Senate. It's really hard to make that case. And I'm a huge advocate. I've spent my entire career of turning voters out and registering Latinos all over the country. But I'm also a believer in math. You have to look at yourself honestly to get a really good assessment of where the community is at. The Latino vote probably went down a little bit in 2022. And most of the evidence suggests that it stayed from a partisan split, if not exactly where it was in the 2020 race, that it moved a little bit even further to the right. Chuck, do you share that view about Nevada? Of course I don't. That's what make me and Mike Madrid so great. You should listen to our podcast. Absolutely. Mike does make some good

points, but I'd also caution folks and what Mike is saying is true, but you also, for those of you looking at people on Twitter and people pontificing about this election, Catherine Cortez Mastos got elected in a presidential year. I'll tell you something about Latino voters that Mike Madrid can't argue with, is that more of us show up in a presidential year. There's one thing on Tuesday night that was that born true. That is we elected Monica de la Cruz, a MAGA Latino Republican in the valley, and elected on the other side Maxwell Alejandro Frost from the far left side of the party in Orlando. They both represent each end of the Latino electorate and then we make up all the different sectors in between.

You've both dedicated your careers to raising awareness about Latino voters and making sure that political campaigns take our community's voices into considerations. I wonder in 2020 if you can speak to what's changed since you started working in politics. Is there more diversity? Are people finally getting the message? And are they pouring enough money into the community? Chuck? Oh, man, you want me to scratch that itch. So let me say this, that me and my... Madrid bring over 60 years of campaign experience. And we probably have more experience than the top Latino operatives in the country now because there's probably like maybe three other ones. That's a problem. That's embarrassing. And in the most marginal congressional and Senate

races in America, there was not one Latino campaign manager. There was not a single, there was not a single Latino majority on media and messaging firm working for a single race when 15 of these races were over 20% Latino population. That shows you we still have a long way to go. Mike, what's your take? You know, I've had the unique experience of working at the top level of campaigns in this country on both sides of the aisle. It's very, very rare. And when I remember most successfully with Republican campaigns was the George W. Bush campaigns,

it was a seamless operation from top to bottom, kind of what Bernie Sanders replicated in 2016. Right. is what George W. Bush did. And that was when you saw Republicans the most successful. Bush getting 37% in 2004 percent in 2004. What surprised me the most in working with the Democratic Party was how calcified it really was and the lack of diversity at the top of the Democratic Party. Like it's more white probably than the Republican Party, which may sound peculiar, but I can go back historically and say, in the Republican Party, there's always been Alex Castellanos. There's always been Lionel Sosa. There's always been the Frank Yeras of the world.

And the Democratic Party, I'm kind of like Sergio Ben Dixon, you know, maybe from, you know, the Carter administration. And that's kind of it when you look back. When Chuck makes the point that there are no Latino campaign operatives in the Democratic party that were running in any of these, you know, very diverse districts, that does not surprise me at all. And there's a, the problem, this is not, I'm not being critical of either party. I'm being critical of both parties.

We can't just resorts to using Google translate for commercials in English and expect that they're going to work in Spanish. And that's still happening. We can't expect people to have this hierarchical white system on both sides of the aisle and expect Latino voters to show up in higher numbers when they're not seeing themselves reflected in campaigns, when they're not hearing messages tailored to their voices and to their communities and to their experience. and it's something that I think needs to be reconciled and very quickly, not for partisan purposes, but for the health of our democracy purposes. And do you worry now that the narrative that we're hearing coming out of the midterms is that Democrats exceeded everyone's expectations that the party might take for granted the Latino vote as they have in the past?

Look, the same people that are denying that this shift has happened were the same Latino, you know, professional political operatives in the Democratic Party that denied the losses in 2014, that denied Hillary Clinton's weaknesses in 2016, that denied Donald Trump's movement in 2020. It's the same people doing the same thing. Do I think the Democratic Party is going to make an adjustment? No, I do not. Do I think that there will continue to be a gradual movement to the right? Yes, I think it will be very marginal. And I don't think it's because Republicans are doing anything right. I think it's because of simple demographics. Republicans are getting a larger incremental share of the Latino vote despite themselves, not because of themselves. The Democratic Party could absolutely make the adjustments to stop it, but they didn't do it in 2014. They didn't do it in 2016. They didn't do it in 2020. There's no evidence to suggest that they're going to make that adjustment because too many of them are vested in the system as it exists, and I don't see them making that play. And I think that the big change is, and I'd push back on mic on one piece of this,

there were groups that were doing good work that made up for a lot of the campaign shortcoming, or we would not have a senator in Arizona, Pennsylvania, or Nevada, because the Senate Majority Pack and other partners hired Latino consultants. I'm one of them, but there were at least six other Latino-owned firms that worked for these organizations to go out and reach the community, to hire canvassing crews on the ground. What worries me the most about us having such a, and I can't say this enough, historic night, is that Democrats look around at each other and be like, man, we did good. We got this all figured out now. Y'all just go back to your corners. Let's just keep on doing what we've been doing,

because now we got this stuff figured out. When I'm here to tell you, friends, once we get through the data, not that we did bad, but that we probably didn't do as good as you may be hearing we did, and there's still a lot of work to do because there's one thing beyond a shableness. shout of a doubt on the work I've done all weekend looking at these numbers, is that in Latino districts where there was a Senate campaign spending millions of dollars in Spanish, those CDs overperform compared to CDs where that investment never happened. Looking ahead to 2024, what are some of the trends that you're paying close attention to? And does the roadmap to victory look any different than it did in 2020? Mike? I think that's a great question. I was very

intricately involved with the 2020 presidential campaign with the Lincoln Project. And so, you know, I've sat in that seat and had to make those calls on those spending decisions, and I will tell you that the map to 270 in 2024 is going to look very different than it did in 2020. Florida is a Republican state. It is not a swing state. Ohio is a Republican state. It is not a swing state. The battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin are very, very tight, and they are not secure enough to ensure a democratic win. The Democrats are going to have to look to broaden their base. North Carolina becomes central.

Incidentally, the Latino vote will probably be one of the deciding votes in North Carolina in 2024. Let me say that again. The Hispanic vote will probably be decisive in a state like North Carolina. That's pretty deep. That tells you how deep this is into the fabric of America at this point. So this shift, this demographic shift, and the margins with which Democrats are winning as they get smaller are changing the calculus for the way a president finds that 270 magic number to be to be elected president of the United States, that's not going to change. That's going to every, well, I'm sure that is

going to change every year into a direction where more and more states are likely to come into play. And I think both campaigns are important. It's important that both campaigns make that adjustment. Chuck? I think that it's going to come down to six states in 2024 again. And I guess what? To Mike's point, our community has big popularity. populations in all of them. It starts with what we call the blue wall. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have an emerging great Latino population. A couple of facts for you. Three hundred thousand Puerto Ricans have moved to Pennsylvania in the last 10 years. Fact, in Wisconsin, there are more Latinos than there are African Americans. And in Michigan, I ran a statewide

Spanish language operation in the off year this year, and you would be amazed at the number of second generation explosion of all these Mexicans, mainly from Texas, that moved to who work in the auto industries in the 70s and 80s, and now all their sons and daughters have sons and daughters, and it's an explosion. And then the ones that you know, which is Georgia, where there's over a million Latinos that live in Georgia, and then Arizona and Nevada, right back to where we started.

Well, gentlemen, thank you so, so much for your time and your insights. It's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you. It's a great conversation. Political consultant Chuck Rocha, and we also heard from Mike Madrid. They both appear on the podcast, the Latino Vote, and they spoke with the New Yorkers,

Stephanie Teledreid. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Not too long ago, we started publishing a new column on New Yorker.com called Afterword. It's written by the great Susan Orlean, and Afterword is an obituary column of sorts. But instead of focusing on the lives of the highly newsworthy, Susan writes about people and animals

and even things that never made it to the front page. As we near the end of the year, we'll be taking note of some of those lives here at the New Yorker Radio Hour. So here's Susan Orlean, reading from her piece, The Ultimate Tiger Mom. Unlike most tiger mothers, Collar Wally was, in fact, a tiger. Her life was characterized by unusualness.

She was unusually large for a female, So big observers often mistook her for a male, and other tigers were scared to fight with her. She was unusually friendly. Tigers are solitary and shy, but Collarwally seemed relaxed about venturing near people and was often spotted afoot in the Pinch Tiger Reserve in Maja Pradesh in India, where she lived. Most notably, she was unusually fertile. She gave birth to 29 cubs in her lifetime, which accounts for almost 1% of all the tigers in India. She was also unusually well-known.

Her mother, Badi Matta, was the subject of the popular BBC documentary, Tiger Spy in the Jungle, from 2008. Tigers are generally said to succeed just one time out of ten, but this typeus kills on average every third try. With narration by David Attenborough, the documentary followed the life of Badi Matta and her litter of four cubs, one of which was Collarwalie. Even at this size, each cub consumes around two kilos of meat at a single sitting. After this celebrated start, Collarwally lived an unusually long time. The average tiger lifespan is 15 years, which she bettered by almost two. When she died in January, she lay in state on a flower-strewn pyre, and her funeral was attended by a crowd, including Maja Pradesh's forest minister,

and a number of other government officials. Mourning was widespread. Collarwally was formerly known, less poetically, as T-15. In 2008, she was the first Tigris in Pench to be fitted with a race. radio collar. Hence her nickname Collar Wally, which means collar wearer in Hindi. That same year, Collar Wally gave birth to her first litter, but she fumbled as a new mother and all her cubs died of pneumonia. In time, though, she developed serious motherhood skills, and her next litters flourished. In 2010, she gave birth to a megalliter of five cubs.

Tiger litters are usually three or four in size, and half of all cubs born die in the first years of their lives. To rear a whopping five cubs is world-class. Collarwally was a tough love kind of mother, letting her cubs start hunting earlier than a more helicopter parenting sort of tigris. Her methodology was so sick. successful that her cubs not only overachieved, they even stayed in touch with her after they moved away, which is said to be rare in the tiger world.

Tigers are India's national animal, and in 1973, a conservation effort called Project Tiger was launched to try to stabilize their declining population. Tigers with wanderlust that leave conservation areas are sometimes killed by farmers. and farmers are sometimes killed by tigers. The market for tiger parts, which are believed to have health benefits, including as Aphrodisiacs, continues to flourish. Nevertheless, conservation efforts, coupled with Kolarwali's fecundity, have made a difference.

An India's tiger population is slowly rising. At Kolarwally's funeral, following her death from natural causes, Social distancing was observed, but the occasion was equally stirring. The enormous tigress was covered with yellow, orange, and white carnations, and she was shrouded in white except for her magnificent head. A line of mourners approached the wooden pyre one by one and offered her flowers before she was cremated. Color Wally's remarkable fruitfulness did raise the risk of, for cubs inbreeding.

But on balance, her mothering was a net positive and her loss a tragedy. After the funeral, the chief minister of the state wrote on Twitter, The forests of Maja Pradesh will always resonate with the roar of the cubs of the queen of Pinch Tiger Reserve. Susan Orlean reading from the ultimate tiger mom

from April of this year. You can read Susan's column afterward at New Yorker.com. And we'll hear more from her on the New Yorker Radio Hour in the coming weeks. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Callalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabwelle, along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline, Meher Batia, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.