What A Day - Latinos Are "Defecting" From Democratic Party feat. Paola Ramos

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

In a Presidential race that will be decided on the margins – there’s evidence that Vice President Kamala Harris is losing support among Black Voters and Latino Voters. Both groups still overwhelmingly support Harris, just less overwhelmingly than Democrats in the past. Journalist Paola Ramos has spent the last few years trying to understand why a growing number of Latinos seem drawn to former President Donald Trump and his far-right, nativist message. She spoke with insurrectionists, border vigilantes, a MAGA congresswoman, and others for her new book “Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America.”And in headlines: Donald Trump spends 39 minutes dancing at a rally, Georgia sets records for voter turnout during early voting, the Biden administration threatens to withhold weapons funding from Israel unless they allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza, and North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson sues CNN for defamation.Show Notes:Check out Paola's book – https://tinyurl.com/fbxtw38eSubscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Wednesday, October 16th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is What A Day, the show that is welcoming two little pandas, Bao Li and Xing Bao, to their new home in Washington, D.C. This is a pro-panda podcast, and I hope they have a wonderful time in our nation's capital. On today's show, is Donald Trump okay? Plus, Vice President Kamala Harris is taking to the airwaves in a big way. But first, there are a lot of reasons why Democrats are nervous heading into the presidential election. For one, it's kind of our thing. But this year, it's more than just Pavlovian.

Almost every poll shows a nail-biter of a race. All of the battleground states are pretty much toss-ups at this point. And in a race that will be decided on the margins, there's evidence that Vice President Kamala Harris has also been losing support among Black voters and Latino voters. To be clear, both groups still overwhelmingly support Harris. Just less overwhelmingly than Democrats in the past. A New York Times Siena poll out this week found that 78% of Black voters say they support Harris. That's huge! But in 2020, Biden captured 90% of the Black vote. The poll also found Harris winning about 56% of the Latino vote. That's six points behind

Biden in 2020. Harris has been trying to win back some of that support, most recently during an Univision town hall with undecided Latino voters. She talked about her plans to bring down the price of groceries, build more housing, expand access to health care, and improve security at the border. By the grace of God, and hopefully with your support as well, when I am elected president, I will bring back that border security bill, and I will sign it into law and do the work of focusing on what we must do to have a orderly and humane pathway to earn citizenship for hardworking people. But Harris's polling dip also fits into a larger trend of some Latino voters moving away from the Democratic Party and toward former President Donald Trump. In fact, Trump won a larger share of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016.

He could win an even greater share this year. It's pretty shocking, given that Trump launched his political career with this infamous line. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. It's really telling that such an absurd claim somehow pales in comparison with the near

decade of Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric that has followed. Journalist Paola Ramos has spent the last few years trying to understand why a growing number of Latinos seem drawn to Trump and his far-right nativist message. She spoke with insurrectionists, border vigilantes, a MAGA congresswoman, and others for her new book, Defectors, The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. Paola, welcome to Water Day. Thank you. So excited to be here with you.

So I was interested in how you started your books, telling the story of how your first day at Barnard was when you, as you wrote, developed a sense of Latino solidarity and allegiance. How did that impact you as you started the process of writing this book? Yeah, I mean, I grew up between Miami and Madrid. So in Miami, I was in this very like Cuban American privileged bubble where even the idea of black Cubans was never at all sort of present or part of the image of what I had of what it meant to be a Latino in Miami. And then I grew up in Madrid where, again, your identity was very much seen through this like Eurocentric lens. Then imagine you leave that bubble, you go to New York City. And so it's for the first time when I'm 18 years old that I really start to get a sense of,

here's what diversity really looks like. Now this sort of bubble that I lived in Miami, I had so many blind spots. So I think part of what we're seeing now as a community is over 60 million Latino of us kind of grappling with these identities that we never really had conversations years ago of like, what does colorism mean? What do we have in common at this point? So I think being 18 and sort of navigating that has a lot to do kind of with the same questions that I'm wrestling with now. We're going to get to the idea of community in a little bit, but your book is quite literally called Defectors. What do you believe the people you spoke to are defecting from? It's really a play of words. So defectors, it essentially means abandoning this

presumed loyalty. I think for many years, the theory of change was always that as Latinos, we had to be a sort of there was a solidarity towards the Democrats, this allegiance towards the Democrats. And so I think now we're staring at a community that is perhaps telling us something different. And so it really is a question of who are we supposed to be in solidarity with? I think what the numbers tell you is that we're way more fractured. There are far too many Latinos that are finding something appealing in Trumpism. I'm not here to dictate who is supposed to be with what group. I'm here to question a lot of these stereotypes and biases that we had around allegiance. How do you think Latino conservatism has shifted since the rise of Trump?

You're talking about kind of this fracturing of the community, but George W. Bush won 44% of Latino voters back in 2004. Is what we're seeing more of a right sizing of, you know, maybe Latino folks have kind of always existed across the political spectrum and we're just kind of seeing that now. We see a huge difference between someone like Bush and Trump, right? Bush was someone that really appealed to Latinos precisely because of his pro-immigration story. And I think now we're seeing someone that is literally promising mass deportations

every single day. I also do make a difference between the traditional Republican Party and Trumpism. I find it alarming that someone like Donald Trump is polling anywhere between 35% to 40% with Latino voters. And I think the problem is that I believe there's far too many Democrats, progressives, so many of my colleagues that are trying to normalize those numbers, that don't see anything wrong with Donald Trump as he's here talking about building the wall, criminalizing Latinos and immigrants, that someone like him is doing pretty well with Latino voters. And so the difference between Republicans and Trumpism, like I find that difference needs to be questioned. Right. You know, you're seeing the New York Times that's showing polling that Latino voters, even people who are immigrants, think that Trump isn't talking about them.

Absolutely. He's talking about somebody else, some other bad guy or something like that. Yeah. When Trump says, send them back, when Trump says, they are criminals, they are here to steal your jobs, I think what we're seeing is that the majority of Latinos, according to the numbers, and really according to so many of the interviews that I've done,

the majority of Latinos don't see themselves reflected in that them. And so I think that comes back to this question of identity. Who we are today as Latinos is so different from who we were 20, 30 years ago. I think maybe 30 years ago, so much of our community was sort of based around our immigrant story. And now we're looking at a community that is more Americanized, more assimilated. It's younger and we speak a lot in English. And so, again, it goes back to this question of the way that America perceives us as sort of these immigrants, Latinos, is very different, I think, from the perception that many of us have of ourselves in the country. And I think that's what makes it so complicated. his racial background to join a white supremacist organization and was kind of thrown off by the

fact that like, you know, he got racist invective outside of David Duke rally, which like that's where they make the racist invective. What did you learn from your conversation with him about what he was looking for and also how he saw himself? I think it's kind of what I learned throughout the entire book with different people that I interviewed, whether it's someone like Christopher Monzon, who you mentioned, who called himself the Confederate Cuban, someone like Enrique Daria from the Proud Boys, some members from Moms for Liberty, Latino evangelical pastors that are super mega. I think what you find, the through line among all of them, is that in the beginning of their journey, they're really just searching for belonging. Maybe it's a belonging that they

couldn't find in their own communities, and then they find something, whether it's community, whether it's power, they find that that was lacking in the Proud Boys or in white nationalist groups or in churches. But then what's interesting is when you sort of are in conversations with them and they have some time to reflect and they're able to really understand whether or not they felt like they truly belonged in those white spaces. The answer is more often no. You point to three different pathways for how Latino voters find their way to the far right, tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma. Can you walk me through each of those?

I think there's a tendency to sort of see these small inbros that Trump is making. And there's a question, I get this all the time. The question is, is that sort of the Trump effect, the MAGA effect, or is it something deeper? I think the harder part is to understand the way that as Latinas, our sort of culture, history, the sort of them, as you mentioned, is tribalism. So that really is understanding the way that the caste system that was institutionalized by the Spaniards, like how that really ingrained in us colorism and internalized racism and this racial baggage that I think we all carry from Latin America and our families do. And when I talk about traditionalism is really taking some time to understand the weight that colonialism has had in shaping our moral compass. So when Donald Trump uses a lot of transphobic language, it gets us to understand why that resonates and it sticks so well among many of us. And then we talk about

trauma, political trauma. Of course, we know the sort of trauma of communism. We know the story of Miami and South Florida far too well. But also Latinos have a very complicated relationship with authoritarianism, another sort of idea strongman rule. It's very complicated. I think Democrats tend to think that, you know, we're sort of allergic to the word dictator, dictador, caudillo. But a lot of Latinos, again, have a very complicated relationship with that past. So an argument I've made regarding why Black Americans in the United States

tend to vote for Democrats or vote similarly is that for much of the 20th century, I mean, the part of the 20th century when African Americans were permitted to vote, they had the shared cultural experience of oppression. When you're in the kind of the vice grip of oppression, it seems pretty obvious to everyone to vote a similar way, even if you disagree, even if there's a lot of differences. But Latino Americans could come from so many different backgrounds, which is something you point out in the book, and have so many different experiences. Why do you think it is important to talk about Latino Americans as a unified community or as a community that could be unified? I mean, I think for many years, I think you're pointing to what we all believed. The idea was 20, 30 years ago. I mean, I worked in democratic politics for many years. And the idea was that we would sort of mirror the black vote, you know, that we would sort of were united around this idea of the linked fate phenomenon. Again, as a community, we would sort of all act according to certain values. I think that made sense for a lot

of time, maybe 30 years ago, because what we did have in common, what our parents and our grandparents had in common was that original immigrant story. That's how we found solidarity. And we were the first in making it in this country around this idea of the American dream. Like that was a very unique part about what it meant to be a Latino 20, 30 years ago. But now we're starting at a community that is, again, so much more Americanized and assimilated. So we come back to the same question that I think is what we're all facing, which is, what do we have in common now? I think the difference between the black vote and the Latino vote is that I kind of see it through the lens of what we call fantasy heritage. Now, there's a tendency among Latinos to kind of whitewash our origin story, to really see our

identity through this like very Eurocentric lens. You talked to someone in the book who was like, yes, I'm Spanish, famously Spanish. For sure. And that happens all the time because I think we get to do something that obviously black people can't do, which is we get to do this sort of like racial dance. Now we get to sort of like reclassify race when we want to. That's part of our history, right? Like so much of what was ingrained in us is that no matter who you are, you can always draw this direct line to Spanish colonizers and to whiteness. And in an America which criminalizes black people and criminalizes immigrants, there are a number of Latinos that when you ask them, well, where do you belong? They will say white. Even if you're, I mean, I can't tell you the amount of conversations I've had with black Latinos, brown Latinos, that when you ask them, like, who do you and where do you belong with?

Many times the answer is in Trump's white America. And it's more complicated than the politics. And it's all about this sort of racial baggage. Paola, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. This has been a great conversation. And the book is awesome. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate you. That was my conversation with journalist Paola Ramos. Her new book is Defectors, the Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. We'll get to the news in a moment. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. And now, the news.

Nobody's leaving. What's going on? There's nobody leaving. Keep going. Keep going. Should we keep going? All right, turn that music up. Turn it up. Great song. Sometimes I think it's important to ask big questions.

Questions like, is Donald Trump okay? Because that was him Monday night at a Pennsylvania town hall where he swayed for 39 minutes to music while the crowd looked on. And since this is a podcast, I'm going to direct you to our YouTube to watch Trump sway, dance, and blow kisses to the crowd. Like, you know, a normal person would. But this wasn't all Trump did in the past day. He told Bloomberg's editor-in-chief, John Micklethwaite, that he wants to add tariffs to all imported goods. Critics say your tariffs will end up being like a national sales tax.

Nope, nope, The countries will pay. If you have, America at the moment has $3 trillion worth of imports. You're going to add tariffs to every single one of them. That is going to push up the cost for all those people who want to buy foreign goods. Now, what's going to happen? That is just simple mathematics. In Trump's defense, I also say no to math. And when asked by Micklethwaite about breaking up Google, Trump responded with something about Virginia? Should Google be breaking up?

I just haven't gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes, and the Justice Department sued them that they should be allowed to put those bad votes and illegal votes back in and let the people vote. So I haven't gotten over that. A lot of people have seen that. They can't even believe it. The question is about Google. Even the Harris-Walls campaign tweeted out an image of Trump asking, quote,

Is he OK? So I guess my question is, are you okay, Donald Trump? Like, I don't know if you ever really were okay, but, um, yeah. I don't know. Early voting started in Georgia on Tuesday. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger shared his excitement about voter turnout during a press conference. At 1029 a.m. this morning, we already had 71,054 people vote early today. It looks like this is going to be a record breaker for the first day of early voting. According to Secretary Raffensperger's office, voters broke the state's early vote record,

with almost 252,000 people going to the polls by 4 p.m. Eastern. On Tuesday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that no election board in Georgia can, quote, refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstances. Welcome to 2024, where certifying election results had to go through the courts. The Biden administration warned Israel on Tuesday to improve aid deliveries into the Gaza Strip or risk losing U.S. funding for weapons. The U.S. gave Israel 30 days to meet the demands, marking the first time Biden has threatened to withhold weapons from the country. But Israel's leadership has routinely ignored the White House's requests over the past year and faced virtually no penalties for crossing multiple so-called red lines.

Israel's offensive in Lebanon has displaced more than 400,000 children in the past three weeks, according to the United Nations. Earlier this week, Israel launched a series of strikes in Gaza, bombing a flower distribution center, a school, and a hospital, where a fire started and bystanders took video of patients connected to IV tubes engulfed in flames. North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson is suing CNN for defamation. Last month, the cable news network released a report about controversial comments the gubernatorial candidate allegedly posted on a porn site's messaging board.

He spoke with reporters at a press conference on Tuesday. I said at the very beginning that what this amounts to is to quote Clarence Thomas, this is a high-tech mention on a candidate who has been targeted from day one. The report detailed racist posts where Robinson allegedly defended slavery and called himself a, quote, black Nazi. It caused many Republicans, including Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson. It also threw his campaign into crisis mode and led to four of his top staffers resigning. The lawsuit describes a CNN article as, quote,

recklessly false and suggests bad actors may have used Robinson's information to set up the porn site account after a data breach. Huh. And that's the news. One more thing. In case you haven't noticed, Kamala Harris is everywhere. OK, the last time I had beer was at a baseball game with Doug. OK, so cheers. There you go. You asked me, what's the difference between Joe Biden and me? Well, that will be one of the differences.

I'm going to have a Republican in my cabinet. I have a Glock, and I've had it for quite some time. Look, Bill, my background is in law enforcement. So there you go. Have you ever fired it? Yes. Of course I have. At a shooting range.

It's literally about, do we support a democracy and the constitution of the United States? Or are we going to go on the path of somebody who is a sore loser and lost the election in 2020 and tried to have a violent mob? Undo it. The man is really quite weak. He's weak. It's a sign of weakness that you want to please dictators and seek their flattery and favor. in's top rated podcast. But because, as I said earlier, Democrats are an anxious people, some are expressing nervousness about the potential risks of the vice president speaking to any and all comers. What if she makes a mistake? What if she gets it wrong? So I had to talk to our own Dan Pfeiffer, host of Crooked Media's Polar Coaster, to find out what he thinks and why Donald Trump gets a pass from so many media outlets. Dan, welcome to What Today.

I'm excited to be here. So I think you and I have similar perspectives on Harris making herself more available, doing more media, and that we're both into it. Very. But what are some of the risks and rewards of Harris making herself so available to the press? Right. There is no low-risk strategy for running for president, so we should stipulate that. But the risks of doing interviews are you make a mistake. In her, that initial media blitz of last week where she did The View, Howard Stern, Call Her Daddy, Stephen Colbert, she had a unfortunate answer on The View about how she would differ from Biden. And that got a lot of attention. The more often you open your mouth, the more likely it is that a mistake could happen that your opponents and the media could weaponize against you. I have to ask, though, one of the things I think that's hardest for Democrats is that you see Donald Trump doing interviews, where he does the weave and just like wanders and talks about all sorts of things that have

nothing to do with the question. It's a real double standard that Kamala Harris can't make mistakes. And all Donald Trump seems to do is what would be categorized as mistakes for any politician prior to 2015. Yeah. I mean, there is no question there's a double standard. The press expects Kamala Harris to make sense. They assume Donald Trump won't make sense. There's another double standard here, which is the mainstream political press tends to pay attention to other mainstream political press interviews. And so being on The View or CNN, that's worth covering. Donald Trump going bananas on some of these right-wing podcasts with the Nelk Boys or busing with the boys on Barstool, they don't pay attention to that because they don't understand that world. So he can be really

crazy on those places and pay no consequences in the mainstream political discourse. Is this media blitz typical for a presidential candidate in these last few weeks before the election? Or is Harris trying to make up for some lost time? What's your experience here? It's pretty typical that you would do as much as you possibly could. She is making up for lost time. She has to do more work to introduce herself to voters than anyone else at this late stage of the game.

But when I worked for Obama, he was doing everything you could possibly do. He would sit and do an hour straight of local TV interviews. The media mix is different because we're just in a very different media world where you're doing lots of podcasts and things like that. But the idea that you want to put yourself in front of as many voters as possible in the final stretch, that's pretty common. You wrote in your newsletter, The Message Box, that Fox News is not an outlet that you would usually recommend any Democrat to go on.

But you have different advice for Vice President Harris. Yeah, I think, look, there's a small handful of very talented communicators who can navigate Fox, like Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom have done it very well. This Fox interview makes sense for her for two reasons. One, she's trying to get attention. A Democrat going into enemy territory is going to get more attention. But the other thing is, is down the stretch here, her campaign has clearly targeted Republican-leaning independent voters, Nikki Haley voters, if you will, as a possible place for growth for her. And these are the kind of voters who may watch Fox News, but more importantly, will take note of the fact that she did a Fox News interview. So it's almost more the fact of doing the interview and then surviving the interview than the couple million people who

will watch it at the time it actually happens. It's also been reported that the campaign has been speaking with Joe Rogan, who is currently the most popular American podcaster with a massive audience, largely male. Obviously, he's had some controversies in the past. Do you think this is the right strategy? And I think more importantly, how would we know if it was working? Well, we'll know sometime after the votes are counted. We'll know whether it was working or not. This is as much art as it is science. Right. We know from the polling that she has some struggles with young men. We know that young men over-index as Joe Rogan listeners.

So ipso facto, go on Joe Rogan. Like, it's not that complicated. I absolutely think she should do it if she gets the opportunity to do it. I think she could thrive in that environment. He's not a contentious interviewer. She is at her best in long-form interviews. And Joe Rogan is the longest-form podcaster there is. We had heard that Rogan was refusing

to do any political interviews, Trump included. So if he changes his mind down the stretch here, I think that'd be a pretty interesting opportunity for her. Trump's campaign is not taking the same risks when it comes to press appearances. He refused to debate Harris earlier this month. He just turned down an interview with 60 Minutes shortly after agreeing to it. His campaign has largely limited him to interviews with conservative influencers and outlets.

What are the risks and rewards of that approach? Because in my view, this seems like Trump, I mean, you saw it with his vice presidential pick. You see it with everything he does. He believes that if he can just get the base, he doesn't need to convince anybody else. He doesn't need women. He doesn't need young women. He doesn't need older women. He doesn't really need anybody besides the people who already like him. What do you think? I think his strategy is a little bit more complicated this time, and his media strategy reflects that, which is he's going to get the base. They are assuming

high turnout among his voters. That's what we saw in 16 and 20. It's what we should expect in 2024. His campaign is targeting mostly young men who do not engage with politics a lot. Most of them may not have voted before, certainly didn't vote in midterms. And he's trying to speak directly to those people without speaking broadly and lighting himself on fire in front of the entire world. Dan, thank you so much for being here and being reasonable. Happy to be here and happy to try to be reasonable. That was my chat with Dan Pfeiffer, host of Crooked Media's Polar Coaster. Before we go, as we approach a pivotal election, the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will affect more than just what happens in the U.S.

It will reshape our approach to global politics. On Pod Save the World, co-host Ben Rhodes is breaking down the implications for global democracy and foreign policy in a new special election series airing each week from now through Election Day. In the latest episode, he dives into the ongoing war in Ukraine and how Trump, the guy who got caught sending COVID tests to Putin and won't confirm how many times they've talked since leaving office, would handle the war. I'm guessing not well. You can find this episode and the entire series every Saturday until November 5th

in your Pod Save the World feed or on YouTube. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, dance awkwardly to songs your Broadway-loving uncle adores, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just spreading pro-panda propaganda like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and congratulations to former President Jimmy Carter for getting to fulfill his wish, voting for Vice President Kamala Harris. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded by Jarek Centeno and mixed by Bill Lance.

Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michelle Aloy. We have production help today from Ethan Oberman, Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrienne Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Bye.