Democrats Slam 'Arrogant Myth' That Latinos Would Go to GOP In Droves

The October 13 Zoom call was convened to prepare for contingencies in case a Republican red wave came to pass.

A group of Hispanic Democrats with ties to the White House moved from their Signal chat known as "The Latino Braintrust" to their first call to gird against a repeat of 2020, when the narrative around Latino voters got away from them once Florida turned redder and Donald Trump won a higher share of the vote than expected.

The messaging call focused on all possibilities, such as Senator Catherine Cortez Masto losing amid a red wave, the senator winning but Hispanic voters moving sharply toward Republicans, and other risks. It featured former White House officials Cristobal Alex and Pili Tobar, representatives of Latino groups like Latino Victory Project and the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, and many others.

What a difference a month makes.

In the Senate, Democrats retained control behind a close but critical Cortez Masto win, coupled with victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania. In the House, a much better than expected performance, one that defied 30 years of midterm history, saw nine new Latino Democrats elected to Congress.

Democrats aren't just flying high, they're also blasting over-torqued narratives about Latinos they feel Republicans pushed and the media ate up.

"Reporters were talking about realignment, theres no f******* realignment," said Arizona Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego, who won re-election. He told Newsweek he is still particularly annoyed over "absolute group think" and "narrative-hunting" from "white reporters who went and found the story they wanted to print."

Gallego is also BOLDPAC chair, the political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which spent millions helping to elect Latino Democrats.

"We weren't just winning in urban areas, we were winning in rural areas, in red states, in blue states," he said, pointing to races in suburban Oregon, rural Washington, and in New Mexico, where Gabe Vasquez was supposed to be too liberal, yet still won.

The theory that drove the narrative before the election was that continued erosion of Latino voters away from Democrats and towards Republicans would unlock wins for the GOP in heavily-Hispanic districts, such as the three along the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. While Democrats support from Latinos did drop and Republican support rose, according to exit polls from 2018 to 2022, it was not at a level Republicans needed. In south Texas, for example, high-profile Latina Republicans Mayra Flores and Cassy Garcia lost by 8.4 and 13.2 points, respectively.

Young Latinos also played a role in blunting a red wave, with the NBC News exit poll finding that 68% of Latino voters under 30 voted for a Democratic House candidate on Election Day, despite only 43% of them identifying as Democrats.

Maria Cardona, a CNN commentator who was part of the Latino braintrust call, told Newsweek that leading up to the election Democrats were "rightly and smartly concerned" about how they were going to do with Latino voters, but she knew the party was on track because it had made the investments to break a red tide.

From the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, to the Democratic National Committee, to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, she said organizations put people on the ground on radio, TV, and digital to explain what Democrats were doing to improve their lives.

"The spokespeople were going on Spanish-language media," she said, "I know because I trained many of them."

She cited Abigail Spanberger's race against Yesli Vegain Virginia's 7th Congressional District as an example of Republicans falling short after talking a big game.

"Vega was a Trump-endorsed, election-denying, super-extremist Latina, and it was another one where Republicans said we're going to win because Latino voters are running into our arms," Cardona said.

She called it an "incredibly arrogant myth that did not come into fruition."

She also pointed to under-the-radar wins in secretary of state races in the southwest, arguing they are among some of the most important victories of the cycle. Latino candidates Cisco Aguilar in Nevada and Adrian Fontes won their races in Nevada and Arizona, respectively, both defeating election-denying opponents who could have played critical roles in administering the 2024 election.

"These two races held by two Latinos need to be highlighted as historic, but incredibly important," Cardona said, "because they're on the front lines of our fight for democracy."

Throughout the runup to the election, Democrats argued that Hispanic voters weren't necessarily in danger of suddenly all going to vote Republican, but were instead at risk of staying home if their party did not persuasively make the case that Democrats were fighting for the Latino community. From groceries and gas prices to infrastructure and jobs, they said Latinos needed to be engaged and invested in early and often.

Building Back Together (BBT), the 501(c)(4) outside group started by alumni of the Obama administration to back President Biden, says that while it is not an electoral group, it made that case to Americans with an "always on" Latino program that began on day one and wasn't siloed off as might have been the case in past cycles.

The bilingual program spent $4 million reaching Latinos on TV, radio, and digital across 14 ads.

On monthly calls with top national Latino groups that included Somos Votantes, Voto Latino, Allianza, Latino Victory Project and others, senior advisor and polling director Matt Barreto armed Hispanic Democrats with data on which policies and issues they could feel comfortable talking about in the media. They included Biden's plan for student debt relief, as well as abortion, after the issue rose in importance with voters when the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision struck down federal abortion protection.

The program came close to the vision espoused by Chuck Rocha, former senior advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign, with Latinos up and down the organization. They included Mayra Macias, who serves as chief strategy officer, Sol Ortega, who ran the always-on program before leaving for a position in the White House, and Xochitl Hinojosa, who managed earned media strategy. Rocha served as a consultant along with Kristian Ramos, who played a key role in the group's efforts.

Biden administration officials on the political team, including Emmy Ruiz and Natalie Montelongo, joined the group's calls in the run-up to the election to provide policy updates on White House accomplishments. They were joined by Luisana Pérez Fernández and Ernie Apreza, who later joined the vice-president's office.

"Yes, Latinos were frustrated about inflation and costs, everyone knows that," Barreto said, while noting they were not putting the entirety of the blame on Biden like evangelicals were, for example.

Latinos supported infrastructure and relief, the group says, which helped them understand that Hispanics were "still on our side," while polling also showed they thought corporations should pay more in taxes, and rejected "MAGA extremism" on issues like health care and abortion.

Part of the Democrats' strategy on messaging around the Latino vote was to get the bloodbath that was Florida out of the way early, not just by talking publicly about how Miami-Dade would likely complete its transformation into a red county, but by also acknowledging that Governor Ron DeSantis was going to win big, likely winning the Latino vote in the state, which he did.

Like the popular GIF of Bugs Bunny taking a saw to a map of the United States causing the state of Florida to float away, Democrats increasingly see the sunshine state as an inaccessible, red part of the country.

With Florida gone, Democrats focused on Latino voters in other parts of the country, sometimes in secret.

Rocha's firm Solidarity Strategies was part of an under-the-radar Senate Majority PAC effort to boost John Fetterman to Spanish-language speakers in Pennsylvania during the final weeks of the campaign, after the Philadelphia Phillies made it to the World Series.

"I knew Puerto Ricans who are a majority of Latinos mainly living in eastern Pennsylvania and in the Philadelphia media market over-index in listening to Phillies baseball because they come from an island where baseball is a religion," Rocha said, calling back to the days of Roberto Clemente playing for another Pennsylvania team, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Rocha realized that there was one-Spanish language simulcast on radio stations in eastern Pennsylvania, and made it a point with the senior team to buy one commercial every day that would run days before the election, which would also offer a boost with Latino men, with whom Democrats have underperformed in other states.

The spend was $500,000 over six World Series games.

"It was a captured audience because Republicans weren't smart enough to do anything," he said. "We decided not to talk about this until after the election, hoping these ads would go undetected, because they had such huge listenership compared to the Spanish-language radio we had been running for months."

BBT also produced ads aimed at Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania to amplify what the Biden-Harris administration was doing to aid Puerto Rico's recovery efforts after Hurricane Fiona.

In his win, Fetterman ended with 68% Latino support, compared to 30% for Mehmet Oz.

Republicans see Democrats taking victory laps with Latino voters, and while they hoped for more success in the midterms, they point to some measurable progress made across the country. When comparing exit polls from 2018 to 2022 which offer early, if incomplete, data, Democrats lost support, down from 69% to 60, while Republicans increased from 29% to 39%.

"We've shown now over two elections we can hit this baseline level of support of 40% with Hispanic voters, so the question is how do we build upon that?" Giancarlo Sopo, the founder of Visto Media, who ran Spanish-language rapid response for Trump, told Newsweek. "There's going to have to be a broadening of the message."

He said talking about tax cuts, border security and pro-life issues got Republicans to where they are now, but he pointed to Florida, where state Republicans have shown they're comfortable expanding to other issues.

"DeSantis ran ads on his environmental record," Sopo added.

Republicans, he said, can talk about top Latino issues like the economy and crime, "but in order to continue making gains with Hispanics we need to address their concerns on health care and other issues — you can't ignore it."

Not all Democrats are renting out event venues and throwing parties over the Latino vote, however.

Andres Ramirez, a longtime Nevada Democratic strategist, was on the ground in Las Vegas leading up to and after Election Day, and correctly predicted in October that Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak would lose and Cortez Masto would narrowly win.

He said while it's true that the scale of Republican gains were overblown, there are other facts on the ground as well.

"What's also true is that Democrats could have done better with Hispanics, that's what we want to focus on," he told Newsweek, noting his plans to release a memo on the Latino vote for Democrats and publish a joint op-ed on this view.

"We lucked out, primarily because Republicans suck, but we can't bank on that being the strategy in perpetuity," he said. "We have to start giving Latinos more reasons to vote for us beyond 'Republicans suck.'"

While Gallego is still celebrating as he chides people on Twitter for their Latino vote takes, he agreed that the takeaway for Democratic leaders is how important that vote is to their success.

"The reason we did well is because we invested in Latino voters," he said. "If you don't do it you will lose elections."

"The narrative shouldn't be don't invest," Gallego added. "The narrative should be if you invest, you get high returns."