Devastating

An extraordinary exposé in The Atlantic pulls back the curtain on a decades-long problem perpetuated by a few Latino pollsters that cost Democrats the White House…not once, but twice.

"I love Hispanics” RealDonaldTrump X

The article reveals how Democrats consistently lost Latino voters every year they faced Trump without ever asking the obvious questions about why it was happening.

This is a tale of hubris, incompetence, and naked power run amok.

At first glance, it might seem like just another typical Washington D.C. story, except the stakes couldn’t be higher. It's clear Democrats lost the White House in 2016 and 2024 to Donald Trump because key figures failed to ask some simple questions of their own pollsters. Pollsters were tasked with guiding Democratic nominees to understand Latino voters—professionals who had been getting it wrong for many years—like, for over a decade.

It is baffling that Democrats repeatedly lost Latino voters to Trump yet continued to rely on the same Latino pollsters and advisors who were clearly leading them astray. Whether it was incompetence or ignorance on the part of these pollsters remains unclear, however, it is evident that something was deeply, horribly wrong – and had been for years.

Latino voters are economic “pocketbook” voters. We always have been. Always. And this is now true more than ever. Since 2010 however, there has been an obsessive misguided focus by Democrats on issues associated with the undocumented. In many ways, this reflects the out-of-touch mentality that is particularly acute in academia but not reflective of the reality of actual blue-collar workers. In other words, there was a conscious effort to advise Democrats to speak to Latino voters not as who they were but as who they wanted them to be.

The focus on immigration as a top priority is not only misguided but also condescending. Worse, it’s profitable for pollsters and consultants, who frankly exploit this narrative to leverage liberal white guilt within the Democratic Party.

If I sound pissed, it’s because I am.

I’ve been ringing the alarm bells for years. The evidence dispelling this misguided strategy has been overwhelming and it took a cataclysmic loss of epic proportions to see what nearly all Latino observers knew to be obvious.

I even wrote a damn book about it - not as a prediction, but as a warning. Yet, the pollsters cited in The Atlantic article made millions while being, quite literally, the single biggest losing Latino consultants in American history. Three times they led Democrats to lose Latino support…against Donald Trump.

Let me repeat that.

Three times.

Against Donald Trump.

Remember all the ‘hopium’ thrown out there alerting everyone to the ‘bad Republican’ polling? What do you think was happening on the Democratic side? The same ‘hopium’ peddlers were selling Democrats bad Latino polling data as gospel truth, convincing people that a “Blue Wave” was coming.

That’s right, the same people saying the Republicans were flooding the zone with bad polling were doing the exact same thing.

Liberal columnists were citing these pollsters’ work as fact. A slew of previously credible Latino non-profit organizations undermined decades of credibility by fronting obviously flawed data for years. More than a few journalists swallowed it whole.

This fiasco went on for over a decade.

At its core, this is a story about how far out of touch some within Latino voting advising circles are from real people’s lives. It’s a story about how the Democratic Party has become captive to these voices as it evolves into a party of more and more college-educated white voters. White voters who apparently believe some within these advisory circles not because they have experience or competence, but because they are, to put it bluntly, not white. There is an opportunity to lean strongly into ethnic stereotypes to leverage power and position in institutions run by white progressives and there’s a lack of questioning the ‘authority’ of some Latino voices of authority even when faced with a lack of data, facts, or evidence to back it up.

That’s how terms like “LatinX” become part of the wealthy white college-educated vernacular when literally no working-class Latino uses the term.

This line from The Atlantic perfectly encapsulates the problem:

“[The pollster]…, who is also a professor of political science at UCLA, believes that his academic expertise gives him an edge. “Most of these other pollsters haven’t published 83 academic articles on polling methodology and don’t have Ph.D.s,” he told me. “I would invite them to attend the graduate seminar I teach on the subject.”

How humiliating.

This type of objective self-aggrandization should have been a red flag to someone, somewhere in the Democratic Party. But it wasn’t. And that’s why we’re here today.

In over thirty years of running hundreds of campaigns, there has never been an instance where I heard a political professional say “You know what we need? An academic to help us understand voters.”

That has never happened.

Ever.

Not once.

The fiasco of the past decade for Democrats is why that’s never happened.

These pollsters have no business working in actual political campaigns. I’m certain they’re very capable of working in academia and sharing findings with other academics far removed from the consequential impacts of real campaigns, but they have no business working in politics.

Politics is a profession, it requires the application of real boots-on-the-ground tactics born from a deep understanding of voter behavior. Unfortunately, a small group of academics leveraged their ethnicity and academic credentials in persuading the Democratic party to believe that being white precluded them from asking obvious questions about math and science.

This story, perhaps as much as any other, explains the revolt of voters against a party captured by these voices.

None of this had to happen. Not 2016 nor 2020.

None of it.