38 United States The Economist November 13th 2021
Latin hex
W
hen donald trumpdescended his elevator six years ago
and inveighed against Mexican rapist immigrants, it was as
sumed that Hispanic voters would take offence. But a short hop
across the Hudson river, in heavily Hispanic Passaic City, Angel
Castillo loved what he heard. “Trump kept it real,” recalled the 43
yearold immigrant, over a cup of strong Dominican coffee in his
oneroom family restaurant, El Primito. “He didn’t say all Latinos
are rapists. He said a lot of those coming over the border are rapists
and drugdealers and he’s right.”
Though a registered Democrat, Mr Castillo resolved to vote Re
publican thenceforth. Many of his relatives (a few of whom are il
legal immigrants) were horrified: “People said you’re crazy, you’re
voting for a racist.” Yet his wife, mother, brother, sister and teen
age daughter followed his lead. This puts them in the most in
triguing, hotly studied and potentially decisive cohort in Ameri
can politics: Hispanic Trump voters.
Their emergence as a major electoral force was the big surprise
of last year’s election. It saw a huge turnout by Hispanic voters,
helping Joe Biden to victory in Arizona and Nevada. Yet it also fea
tured a pronounced Hispanic tilt to Mr Trump. Initially thought to
have been a localised phenomenon—which cost Mr Biden Florida
and any hope of victory in Texas—it turned out to be nationwide.
With around 38% of the Hispanic vote, Mr Trump won a higher
share than any recent Republican presidential candidate apart
from George W. Bush, a proimmigrant Texan, in 2004. And last
week’s elections in New Jersey—including Governor Phil Mur
phy’s brush with political death—suggests the shift may endure.
Passaic City, a decaying factorytown where seven in ten voters
are Latino, helps illustrate it. In 2016 Mr Trump won 22% of the
vote there, almost the same as Mitt Romney had. Four years of re
lentless immigrantbashing and racebaiting later, he bagged 36%.
Mr Murphy’s Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, appears to
have held on to that gain; when votecounting finishes, a third of
the commissioners of Passaic County could be Republican.
The overarching explanation for this development is suggested
by the many alternative cuisines, Mexican, Colombian, Peruvian,
Venezuelan, Puerto Rican, available within a few steps of El Primi
to. Hispanics are incomparably more diverse than the earlierwaves of immigrants—Irish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian—who
turned Passaic from a 19thcentury fur tradingpost into an indus
trial hub. They also lack the labour unions that bound those
hordes into the Democratic fold. The assumption that Mr Trump’s
xenophobic rhetoric would make Hispanics recoil in unison took
too little note of their differences. While some have done so—es
pecially young, collegeeducated Hispanics—the extreme polar
isation of the Trump era has pushed others to the right.
Ronald Reagan quipped that hardworking, religious, commu
nismhating Hispanics were Republican even if they didn’t know
it. In his different way, Mr Trump has hammered those same is
sues. He endeared himself to Miami’s Cuban exiles by calling the
Democrats socialists. His claim to defend Christianity wooed His
panic evangelicals everywhere. Hector Fernandez, a 69yearold
evangelical minister in Passaic, was another firsttime Republican
voter in 2016. “I don’t love the Republicans but my Christian values
compel me to vote for them,” he said—and estimated that over half
his congregation voted for Mr Trump last year.
The former president’s strong ratings on the economy, based
on his wealth and claim to be a jobcreating genius, also attracted
the community. “Imagine coming to America from a poor country
and seeing Trump’s name on a building!” says Passaic’s thoughtful
mayor, Hector C. Lora, a son of Dominican immigrants. Mr
Trump’s pivot to raging against economic lockdowns after co
vid19 hit probably increased that advantage. Hispanics typically
own small businesses, which were hardhit by the lockdowns, the
mayor noted. They also have reason to dislike government diktat.
The excesses of Latin politics perhaps also made it easy for
some Hispanics to shrug off Mr Trump’s bigotry. “We are used to
vitriolic rhetoric,” says Mr Lora. Yet others liked it—as Mr Castillo
illustrates. “Immigrants used to come here to work,” said the res
taurateur. “Now they come here and jump straight into govern
ment assistance, just like other races in this country.” You need
not be Anglophone or Americaborn to find Mr Trump’s white na
tionalism and nativism seductive. And Hispanic Trump fans are
just as easily radicalised as whites. Mr Castillo is a covid antivaxx
er who suggests that Mr Biden’s election was not on the level.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this development. Re
publican strategists had considered Mr Trump’s chauvinism in
compatible with the coalitionexpanding embrace of diversity
many recommended after Mr Romney’s defeat. But it appears not
to be—and for Democrats that looks disastrous.
The party’s decadeslong decline in the white, conservative
and electorally crucial Midwest appears irreversible. Even if it
could excise its leftist fringe—a kiss of death in such places—
mainstream liberal causes such as minority, immigrant and re
productive rights are too toxic there for Democrats to progress. To
remain competitive, they must therefore build new strongholds
in diverse states such as Florida and Texas. But, as Mr Biden’s fail
ures showed, this requires them to maintain Obamaesque levels
of Hispanic support.The dwindling Democratic majority
Harping on immigration reform, the Democrats’ default response,
will not deliver that. Millions of Hispanics are hardly concerned
with the issue. Yet it is hard to identify a liberal approach to the di
verse and fracturing Hispanic community that would be more
popular. Democrats had hoped Hispanics would compensatefor
the illiberal drift of workingclass whites. Yet a sizeableminority
of them appear to be following the same inexorable course.nLexington
A large minority of Hispanic voters support Trump populism. This looks catastrophic for the left