Donald Trump, according to exit polls, won a greater share of the Latino vote than any Republican Presidential candidate in at least the past half century, and maybe ever. At forty-six per cent—a fourteen-percentage-point increase from 2020—Trump beat George W. Bush’s record by at least two points, and perhaps as many as six. The most eye-popping results were in Miami-Dade County and in southern Texas, where Trump won almost every county along the Mexican border. According to exit polling in several battleground states—including Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania—his margin with Latino voters grew more between 2020 and 2024 than it did between 2016 and 2020.
Even more surprising, the Biden and Harris campaigns weren’t sitting idly by as it happened. They and their allied PAC’s responded to the slippage in 2020 by spending more than a hundred million dollars on Latino-targeted ads and sending thousands of volunteers to knock on doors. In the final months of the race, with Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, campaign insiders said the efforts were paying off; after months of dismal polls for Joe Biden, Harris was not far from having the same Latino support that he had in 2020, and the insiders claimed those numbers would increase through Election Day. It’s hard to say with certainty that their efforts were ineffective, because Harris might have fared even worse without them, and among Latinos in Georgia she did only one point worse, and in Wisconsin one point better, than Biden did four years ago. But that’s cold comfort. The Democrats’ version of the autopsy report that Republicans put out after their 2012 loss—which argued that they needed to fix their Latino (and Black, and Asian American, and Native American, women, youth, and L.G.B.T.Q.) problem—is already being written.
The assignment of blame came quickly. On Joy Reid’s MSNBC show, the host acknowledged that a majority of Gen X voters and white women sided with Trump, but she told Latino men, “You own everything that happens to your mixed-status families, and to your wives, sisters, and abuelas from here on in.” The liberal commentator Elie Mystal tweeted that “Black people did their job” by voting for Harris, but that “Latinos wanted this man. I hope that works out for them.” Even though working-class Latinos had said that they were struggling to afford rent, food, and gas, and that President Biden had offered little or no relief, many political analysts chalked up Trump’s gains to some collective character flaw. Mystal weighed in again, tweeting that “Latinos think they’re white.” (Many do, in fact, consider themselves white.) The journalist Paola Ramos tweeted that the inroads Trump made with Latinos weren’t just about the economy but were also “intertwined with racism, xenophobia, transphobia.”
It is beyond doubt that Trumpism is infused with white supremacy, and that this is part of its appeal to some Latinos. With people such as Stephen Miller in Trump’s inner circle, his Administration is likely to do what it can to reverse the tide of demographic change, in part through mass deportations. But shifting attention from the thing that voters themselves said motivated them, to something more insidious, is as wrong as it is perilous. It is absolutely possible for Latinos to understand racism and still vote for a racist candidate whom they think, rightly or wrongly, will help them prosper. Moreover, bluntly asserting that Trump’s Latino supporters misdiagnosed the root cause of their struggles and that they are, in fact, racist and sexist isn’t the way to begin a conversation that could lead them to vote for Democrats going forward. More concretely, it also defies logic that a fourteen-percentage-point shift in four years can be attributed to the racism Latinos hold within themselves. All of a sudden, we’re supposed to believe that the new Latino Trump voters decided that they’re white, anti-immigrant, and trans- and homophobic?
When I think about Latino Trump voters, my paternal grandfather, also named Geraldo Cadava, often comes to mind. Since he died, two years ago, I’ve been poring over his military records, looking for clues about who he was. He served in the Air Force for twenty years, from 1947 to 1968, then spent another fifteen to twenty years working as a miner and a mechanic at a copper mine outside of Tucson, and washing dishes at a local country club. In 1995, when he was almost seventy years old, he filled out a standard geriatric-depression evaluation. He checked “yes” next to questions asking whether he felt “basically satisfied” with his life, whether he was “hopeful about the future,” and whether he thought it was “wonderful to be alive now.” But he also checked “yes” in response to a question that asked him, “Do you worry a lot about the past?” Next to that question, he wrote that he had been “discriminated against.”
What did he mean? I tried to glean the answer from other records. In March, 1969, his request for G.I. Bill benefits to enroll at the University of Arizona was approved. “I do not know yet what they have to offer,” he wrote, “but I am going as far as I can go.” He never did go to college, because, he later wrote, he had a house to pay for and a wife and two kids. Instead, he took the hundred and fourteen dollars per month that the government gave him and signed up for a trade-school course in automotive mechanics. He again applied for G.I. Bill benefits in August, 1973, to “advance” himself by getting certified as a “Diesel Mechanic, First Class.” Two weeks later, his request was denied because the class he wanted to take was not on a list of approved courses. A decade later, in 1984, when he was fifty-eight years old, he applied once more for benefits to acquire some new skill. This time, he didn’t say exactly what he hoped to do, only that he was “too old to work and too young to retire completely.” The records I have don’t mention whether this last request was approved, but I remember him working only sporadically in the years that followed.
Striving toward but never quite realizing his goals was surely a source of frustration. He had been a “blue collar worker” his whole life, he wrote in one of his applications for benefits, and that didn’t stop after the military. He was laid off at the copper mine when the price of copper plummeted. He had a thirty-year mortgage that he was still paying off when he last applied for military assistance. He hadn’t always received the unemployment payments he was due. It became clearer to me why he said that he dwelled on the past, despite his over-all happiness. Yet the final line of his statement read, “The best thing I ever did was to . . . my country.” The scan I have isn’t fully legible. I’m left to fill in the blank myself. But, based on how proud he was of his time in the military, I believe that the missing word is “serve.”
My grandfather was only one Latino. He never claimed to represent anyone else. But I know this: he worked hard for a living, never aspired to be white (he was several shades darker than I am), felt let down by the institution he worked for, and voted for every Republican candidate from Reagan to Trump, some of whom I and other liberals have called racist, or at least indifferent to the concerns of nonwhite Americans. He was a first-generation American who, by the time he died, had been a U.S. citizen for almost eighty years. Because of everything I’ve learned from him, it is easy for me to believe Latinos who say they voted for Trump because Democrats haven’t always delivered on their promises of protection and prosperity. It’s far from certain that Trump will do it, either—but many Latinos have grown desperate enough to give him a shot.
