Why Trump's Latino gains matter

A suggestion that progressives' theory of Trump-era politics is wrong

Hey folks, it’s Thursday and back to just us subscribers.

As a housekeeping note, I did want to say that if you read this primarily in newsletter form and ever want to forward an item to a friend or two I am 100 percent okay with that. If you find yourself doing it over and over and over again, considering buying a gift subscription or going for a group discount, but in general I’m really happy to have people spread the word.

Today I wanted to talk about something that came up in the very first post on this blog: Trump’s gains with Latino voters.

In 2020, Democrats saw the slippage extend to non-white voters with no college degree. Once the extent of the slippage with, for example, Hispanic voters became clear we began to get headlines like “How Democrats Missed Trump’s Appeal to Latino Voters”from Jennifer Medina at the New York Times. The truth, however, is that nobody “missed” this. Medina herself wrote many good articles about it down the stretch of the campaign (NYT reporters don…