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The 2024 election contained a lot of surprises. One of the biggest was the shift in Hispanic voters, particularly Hispanic men, who came out big for Donald Trump.
This shocked a lot of people because Trump has been very hard on illegal immigration, which tends to mean he wants to crack down on Hispanics trying to enter this country.
For the most part, the media did a good job of pushing the idea that this meant animosity on the grounds of them being Hispanic, not illegal immigrants, at least until this year.
And a lot of people were shocked.
I wasn’t as surprised as most. Why? Because of this.
There's a rather major re-alignment in American politics going on right now. Democrats have traditionally owned many of the various American minority groups since the early '60s. But things are changing. One major demographic group, one that is likely the minority group, is changing its political alignment. This re-alignment is one of the reasons Donald Trump won his historic non-consecutive second term, and there are good reasons for their switching to the right.
That group would be American Hispanics.
Nowhere is this upheaval more evident than in emerging House battlegrounds. Among the heavily Hispanic areas that rapidly shifted to the right in their presidential votes this year: A district that Republicans drew to combine two Democratic seats together in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. A district in northern New Jersey that Joe Biden carried by 19 points in 2020. A Central Valley district that twice rejected Trump by double-digit margins
“There’s definitely a realignment going on in American politics, and these voters are increasingly winnable,” said Dan Conston, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the largest House GOP super PAC. “We would be foolish not to compete for them.”
Donald Trump would seem to have anticipated this shift. A large part of this realignment, of course, is that Hispanics, by and large, tend to be conservative on social issues, including but not limited to abortion. And, like a majority of Americans, they aren't sanguine about the idea of boys sharing their daughters' sports teams, locker rooms, and showers.
That's a part of the Democrats' messaging that has cost them dearly in this cycle.
They banked on Hispanics seeing Trump’s aggressive stance on immigration as being racist when it’s really not. The mass deportations Trump promised were for illegal immigrants, not registered voters, and that’s a big difference that Hispanic men, in particular, recognized.
Yet Trump proved me wrong on one point in particular. I’d always figured that with the media narrative being that pushing back on illegal immigration was racist, any GOP candidate would have to soften that stance to appeal to Hispanics.
That doesn’t seem the case.
Of course, having to mortgage your home—assuming you’re affluent enough to own one—to buy groceries can clarify things for you quite nicely. Especially when one could argue that wages might well have increased even more had the demand for labor been higher.
The question now is whether this is a one-time thing or if it’s the new order for voting. Are Democrats and their focus on progressive social issues going to keep pushing Hispanics toward Republicans, or will they be able to back off and readjust their focus?
As noted at the RedState link above, most Hispanic voters are working-class voters. Democrats have been taking a dump on the working class for years now. They’re kowtowing to increasingly smaller segments of the electorate, treating larger and larger swaths of that same electorate like crap, and then telling working-class folks they need to shoulder the financial burden for all of the stupid they want to make into reality.
Yeah, you’re struggling to buy eggs, but a PhD who did her dissertation on the fact that people don’t like things that smell bad needs you to pay off her student loans. Sure, you can’t buy a house, but what really matters is that six-year-olds (meaning their parents) are free to demand sex change operations whenever they want.
Now, couple that with the Hispanic tendency to be more socially conservative and it was only a matter of time before this happened.
If Democrats can knock off the woke stupidity and try to reposition themselves as the party of the common man once again—they never were, but people thought they were—then they might have a shot. Then again, when you’re beholden to people who will lose their minds because their candidate might go on a podcast they don’t like, it seems unlikely any such change is coming.
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Politics, culture, a dose of snark, and a profound love of personal and economic freedom.
The most startling thing I've noticed is Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) seem to be completely clueless about why they lost. They're talking about toning down the aggression of the trans insanity, but still insist made up pronouns are an important tool on which to double down. What they don't seem to grasp is Christian America, which nominally, is larger than Democrats believe it is, will never accept men can be women just by wishing on a star. Some of the Democrats sincerely believe they didn't push wokeness on Americans *enough* and that's why they lost. Some just think we're all racists, bigots and homophobes and if they keep calling us that we'll start agreeing and follow the progressive narrative and finally be the obedient serfs they expect. They just can't seem to grasp that calling half the country disparaging names isn't a winning strategy and instead of self-reflection, they're just doubling down. I say, "more power to them."
I don’t have a lot to say, just thank you Mr. Knighton.