Towards a New Latino Identity
Having spent the past eight years explaining why Democrats have been losing Latino support and why the rightward shift is happening, it all comes down to this: Latino identity is changing dramatically
One of the funny things about identity politics is how much it mirrors special interest politics. Things that start out as a goal or objective in this business always morph into something different once that objective is achieved or turns into something else.
Ultimately continuance is what politics is all about. Survival.
People establish careers, identities, reputations, and businesses in politics and the furtherance of that identity becomes the end unto itself. In fact, continuing that identity often becomes a more important objective than the original mission.
I’ve witnessed this dynamic many many times after three decades in politics. It was on full display over the past eight years as Republicans, fully aware of the threat Trump presented to the country, turned a blind eye after speaking out against him when it became apparent he would win the nomination and ultimately the Presidency. Plenty of Republican consultants, lobbyists, and staffers - nearly all of who knew better, turned a blind eye to the obvious when faced with losing years of friendships, relationships, business contacts, and job opportunities - after all, what are you in politics if you don’t have a home?
We’re about to see the same thing happen in Latino politics. Suddenly everyone is an expert on the rightward shift of Latinos. Suddenly everyone has been talking about it, predicting it, writing about it, and warning about it for years. Everyone is shifting where the ground underneath them has moved and positioning for the new piece of real estate that comes with a changing political situation.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Survival.
This moment is a little bit unique though. While the underlying premise of changing interests remains the same, it’s never happened among the country’s fastest-growing ethnic group before (At least not since Tammany Hall over a century ago when the Irish became white). Yes, the situation is different because a whole political class was built on the idea that there was a certain policy focus and issues set that defined an ethnicity. An issue set that literally defined Latino voters. Many of the new experts on the rightward shift of Latinos were trafficking in the narrative that it wasn’t even happening just a few months ago.
But it is happening. Democrats have been losing Latino voters by both increasingly low turnout numbers or vote switching in 5 of the last 6 elections. It has been happening for over a decade, not just two years ago and not just four years ago. It’s been happening for a long time.
That’s because Latino identity itself is changing. As I wrote in my book “The Latino Century” we are rapidly emerging as an economic populist and pocketbook voter and away from a racially and ethnically focused voter. This is profound. It is significant and up until a few weeks ago, it was controversial.
The Latino voter of the next thirty years is going to be foundationally different than the Latino voter we have known over the past thirty years and there is going to be a struggle on how to engage, communicate, and motivate this exploding part of the electorate. There is also going to be a dramatically different approach to reporting on and covering the stories of the emerging community (I’ll have some news on that in the coming weeks).
In June I was interviewed by De Los, a Latino-focused section of the Los Angeles Times about the upcoming election where I offered some straight medicine to the old way of thinking about Latinos. (June interview here) After the election, the reporter Felix Martinez reached out again because so much of the book and what we discussed in the interview came to pass. In the latest interview, he wrote:
“One of the first people I reached out to in the aftermath of the election was Mike Madrid. I had last spoken with the political consultant in June, after the release of “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy,” an insightful book that gave a deep analysis of the Latinx electorate and what it cared about. Back then, Madrid, a Never Trumper Republican and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, said that if Donald Trump won the election, he would do it with a historic share of the Latinx vote.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. According to exit polls, Trump received 46% of the Latinx vote, with 55% of Latinx men voting for him.
I thought a lot about what Madrid told me after it became clear that Trump would be returning to the White House, so I called him up to try to make sense of what happened, and what Trump’s victory says about Latinidad. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.”
To be clear, my book was not a prediction of a given election. I made that clear in my book and I’ve made it clear to reporters and pundits all along the way.
My book was a warning.
I think that predicting outcomes of election by-elections is a fool’s errand (one in which I, as a political junkie and fool, engage…I predicted Kamala Harris would win and with a lower level of Latino support for Trump than what he got). I’m much more interested in predicting the long-term trend of where my people are going and what our future holds and in that regard I think I’ve got a pretty good track record since I started in politics in the early 1990’s.
Changing Latino identity has been happening forever. It’s been markedly different for the past decade and it’s now on everyone’s radar. There is a natural tendency to see points in this evolutionary arc and think it’s a unique moment in time. This moment is much bigger than that. I am far more concerned about the tectonic plates shifting beneath us and I have been very vocal about that despite a lot of criticism.
We may well see Latino voters snap back towards Democrats in the next midterms in response to Trump’s mass deportation overreach, souring economic conditions, or other political developments. None of that changes the underlying premise of the dramatic change occurring.
A lot of folks will be talking about a realignment or how Latinos are the new swing voters. I think both of those are wrong and don’t capture what’s happening in the Latino community today.
What is happening is we are emerging as something unique in American history. It is not the Irish or Italian story of the last century and it is not the Black story of the past 250 years. It’s a Latino story and it defies history because it has never happened before. It is not static because it will change the way our people have changed since the Columbian exchange and the conquest. It will adapt and morph and evolve and that is the magic and promise it holds.
I am including the latest LA Times interview here
Thank you for posting here on Substack… you are one of my regular go to people for political takes and I gave up Twitter right after the election. So thanks for another way to listen and read✌️
As Chicana/o and Latina/o historians have been arguing since the 1960s the United States has never been solely a Black/White society. It has always been multiracial. However, getting the East Coast elites in politics, media and the academy to understand that fact has been a struggle. At least we are finally past the monolith paradigm.