I Went To The First Annual CPAC Latino So You Wouldn't Have To

Reports about the GOP understanding Latino voters appear wildly exaggerated.

I've attended hundreds of political events in my thirty years as a campaign consultant. Every time I think I've seen everything at an event, something new pops up, so it's rare that I'm taken by surprise.

But surprised I was as I entered the lobby of the Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, to attend the first annual CPAC Latino conference. It's been a long time since I've flown across the country to attend a GOP event, and the last time I went to CPAC was in 2016 when Trump was very close to clinching the Republican nomination. At the time, you may recall, CPAC and the Republican Party were still conservative, and there was open hostility toward the emergent populist nationalist Donald Trump, who has since eviscerated any remnant of the Reagan conservatism that fueled the CPAC movement.

While CPAC today, like the Republican Party itself, bears no resemblance to what it was before 2016, it does serve as a touchstone for where the sentiments of the most intense and committed grassroots activists lie. What was once a gathering place for conservative thinkers and policy ideas has devolved into a gaudy spectacle. So it was with some interest that I opened an email asking if I would be interested in attending the first annual "CPAC Latino" conference.

Sure, I'd seen Republicans make cosmetic gestures toward the Latino community more than a few times in my day (heck, I put on more than a few of them myself decades ago), but maybe with the historic numbers Trump got in 2024, things were changing. Maybe Republicans were finally figuring it out after all.

So I booked my ticket to Miami and decided I owed it to myself and other interested parties to see what was going on firsthand and report back.

As a student of Latino politics, I was intrigued. I'd rarely seen Republican organizations commit to building relationships with the Latino community in any meaningful way, and the fact that CPAC was taking the lead on it signified that perhaps the Grand Old Party was learning some new tricks.

I was invited as a member of the media and co-host of "The Latino Vote" podcast (thank you all for making it one of the country's top-rated Latino podcasts), and I thought it would be a great source of insightful content for my Substack.

This CPAC event was unlike any I had attended in the past. This one was co-sponsored by a group calling itself "Latino Wall Street," a direct reference to the famed "Black Wall Street" of Oklahoma that was destroyed by whites enraged by the economic success of Black entrepreneurs in the early 20th century. Most non-white Republicans emphatically downplay their ethnicity in a direct attempt to appeal to the overwhelmingly white GOP community they're trying to ingratiate themselves with; this was a decidedly different message.

This probably should have been my first clue that something was amiss. As the well-tailored suits and dresses rolled in on the clearly successful and largely Cuban crowd, I counted only one red MAGA hat on a red, white, and blue bedazzled clearly non-Hispanic white woman. The official attendee count declared 700, and there was only one MAGA hat among them. There were no performative clown shows that have come to define CPAC as the MAGA Mardi Gras of America. Very few sequined purses. No gold Trump statues.

No, this event was far more like the traditional Hispanic Chambers of Commerce dinners in Orange County, California, than the cultural spectacle that CPAC has devolved into.

The morning program was an awards show highlighting Hispanic success stories and discussions of technological breakthroughs being made by Latino entrepreneurs. This was well-received and appeared to be an expected part of what attendees were looking for.

It should be mentioned that Spanish was by far the dominant language at the program, reflective of the predominantly Cuban and South American audience in a region where retaining the language of the homeland is viewed as a point of cultural and ethnic pride. You'd never see this in Los Angeles, where sprinkled Spanish among the entrepreneurial class is common as a nod to the shared ethnic tie, but the economic and political language among professional elites is unquestionably English. I should also mention that these Floridian attendees all spoke English as well, as an imperative for commerce in America if nothing else, but in this part of red America, it is curious that Spanish is maintained as a point of cultural distinction. It's a form of ethnic separatism unique among Latinos in this country and all the more peculiar as the largest Latino GOP bastion in the country.

The vibe at the Hard Rock Hotel in Miami could only be described as Prosperity Gospel meets the Miami Sound Machine. There was a clear spiritual zeal about making money. If there was any doubt about the centrality of getting rich, it was dispelled by the conference moniker "Where wealth meets freedom."

Probably not a tagline I would use for Latinos anywhere in the country outside Miami.

None of this struck me as particularly odd. Sure, this was a decidedly Cuban-flavored affair, but we were in Miami, so my expectations were reset before lunch. Any notion that this would somehow be CPAC rolling out a smart, sophisticated new national Latino program was quickly squashed. That didn't diminish the importance of CPAC and GOP-affiliated groups finally committing to building grassroots infrastructure in new communities for them. But should Miami be the place for that? The Republicans had always done well among Cubans in South Florida and never so well as in last year's presidential election. Maybe this was some type of victory lap? I was having a lot of trouble making sense of it all.

After lunch, things really got lost in translation. It was as if two worlds completely collided and neither group had any sense or understanding of why they were all there.

The CPAC celebrities took the stage and tried to turn it into the MAGA rally we have all come to expect. Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, the leaders of CPAC, took to the stage with Katy Perry music blaring and immediately leaned into the Republican red meat extravaganza that the most rabid partisans come looking for.

The vitriolic attacks on the communist left began rolling out. Socialism! Antifa! Trans Marxists! A panel on ensuring a nuclear-free Iran was held. Then, an interview with a longtime Latina White House staffer, Mayra Flores, the first Mexican-born woman to win (and then lose) a seat in Congress. Another emotional panel with a freed Israeli hostage reminded the crowd of how important it is to support Israel.

All of this fell completely flat. The crowd offered tepid golf claps at cued moments for applause. A few people stood and politely removed themselves from the ballroom. It was as if the whole crowd felt they were suckered into a timeshare pitch they were being held captive to for an entire afternoon. None of them had signed up for this.

This was a sophisticated business crowd looking to network and find value for their enterprises, and they were suckered into a Charlie Kirk podcast.

It was deflating all the way around. If there was any belief that somehow Republicans had found the Latino keystone and figured out these voters, it was clear that this was not the case. After decades of attending these things, the best I could surmise is that something along these lines happened: A few leaders of the Latino Wall Street organization have established relationships with CPAC and MAGA world as each funds the other mutually beneficially. The Latino Wall Street leaders saw an opportunity to build an audience and crowd for their CPAC friends and decided they should partner on an event. Latino Wall Street would build an audience, and CPAC could provide the programming, and everyone wins!

Except, of course, the attendees.

Make no mistake: this audience was Republican. Yes, they undoubtedly voted for Trump. But it was clear as day these were not political junkies, grassroots activist types who are hyper-online, or even people who had a sense of what CPAC is. I'd wager most of them had never heard of it before.

These were the Latino entrepreneurs who will be central to Republican fortunes in the coming years, and they're Cuban, for goodness' sake! This was the lowest-hanging fruit out there. This was preaching to the choir, but instead of offering up gospel music, CPAC was blaring heavy metal acid rock.

The capstone that made this all clear was the speech that Congressman Byron Donalds gave. Donalds, a MAGA favorite and GOP rising star who is likely the next governor of Florida, took the stage to a polite welcome. Donalds immediately began ripping into the socialists who won in New York City's mayoral primary and started his speech by warning everyone that he would not be polite or reserved in his attacks.

Donalds, too, fell completely flat. Awkwardly so. Take a look at the video below.

I can't blame it on bad staffing, or advanced work, or politicians unable to read their crowd, though all of this is true. I can't blame it on anything.

The lesson I learned is that Republicans are buying their own bullshit about who Latinos are. In politics, you should never believe your own press releases.

For the past few years, this has been my criticism of Democrats, and rightfully so. Democrats have bought into their own partisan stereotypes of who Latinos are, and it's cost them elections. But the lesson of CPAC Latino is the same. Republicans haven't figured out Latinos any more than Democrats have. Maybe that's why the Pew Research results out last week, showing Trump got 48% of the vote, are a wake-up call to both parties. When Republicans and Democrats are splitting the Latino vote 50-50, it's time to acknowledge Latinos aren't who you want them to be, we are who we are, and it's time the parties started listening… or losing.