During the heated last stretch of the U.S. presidential election, many Democratic Party operatives and supporters, looking for signs of hope, convinced themselves that they had just been handed the gift of an “October surprise” — a shocking news event that reshapes the last phase of the campaign in favor of one party.
At a Madison Square Garden rally for Republican candidate Donald Trump, an insult comic named Tony Hinchcliffe made a cringeworthy joke about Puerto Rico: “Like, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The attempt at edgy humor fell flat, drawing few laughs and even some disapproving murmurs from the crowd. Hinchcliffe quickly moved on, and there was little sign that attendees at the rally, which lasted several hours, dwelled on the comment.
But Trump’s opponents thought they had finally found their moment. Searching for a way to clinch the election, Democratic Party operatives believed that they had found an issue with which to galvanize Latino voters. Kamala Harris pounced on the remarks, pointing to her support from Puerto Rican celebrities. “I’m very proud to have the support of both Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez and others, who were supporting me before that nonsense last night at Madison Square Garden,” she said.
Her Latino surrogates called attention to the joke in every way they could, assuming that it was a vote killer for Trump. Harris’ campaign featured it in advertising. President Joe Biden even weighed in to condemn Hinchcliffe — insulting Trump supporters in the process by implying that they were, in fact, the ones who were “garbage.” Gustavo Torres, who runs one of the largest Latino advocacy organizations, CASA, told Newsweek in the wake of the rally that Hinchcliffe’s comment “was the October surprise for the Latino community.” But when the vote counting began, it was the Democrats who wound up being surprised.
Although final data is still being tabulated, it’s clear that Trump made massive electoral gains, not only with Latinos, but with most ethnic minority groups across America. One of the most comprehensive surveys of the electorate, administered by the Associated Press, estimated that Trump won the votes of around half of Latino men under the age of 45 while winning 3 in 10 black voters in the same age group. His campaign even won Latino-heavy Miami-Dade County in Florida, a feat that had not been accomplished by a GOP candidate in more than three decades.
Trump also picked up a plurality of votes in Dearborn, Michigan, where more than half the population is of Middle Eastern or North African descent. In one of the most surprising results, in diverse New York City — where the Madison Square Garden rally took place — Trump won around 30% of the vote, one of the best results for a Republican in decades. Rather than simply capitalizing on a white backlash against diversity, some of Trump’s biggest gains in that city were in working-class communities that are heavily Black, Asian and Hispanic.
Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist and longtime Democratic commentator who co-authored the influential book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” was not surprised by the outcome. Although Teixeria is often credited with predicting that a browner America would be a more Democratic one, his theory in that book was actually more nuanced: He and co-author John Judis argued that Democrats could use minorities to expand their coalition, but that they still needed to hold onto the white working class. The problem, according to Teixeria, is that Democrats are losing working-class voters of all varieties in a way that threatens the future of the Democratic coalition. “Not only are Hispanics bailing out now, but we actually see Black voters moving towards the Republicans as well, which is potentially a death knell,” he said during an interview for this piece.
The increasing favorability of the GOP to minorities has become clear over the past decade. Many liberals have not taken this trend well. In the wake of the vote, an explosion of vitriol by liberal commentators and politicians was directed against minority voters who had dared to vote against them. MSNBC’s Joy Reid warned Latino voters during a segment: “You own everything that happens to your mixed-status families.” Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation and a fixture of liberal cable news shows, issued a statement with a similar menacing tone. “Watching Latinos chase model minority status has never sat *well* with black people, but this is a wound the Black community won’t soon forget,” he wrote on the social platform X.
Many other liberals on social media echoed these sentiments, expressing satisfaction about Latinos or Arabs voting for their own deportations — as if none of them could be legal immigrants or citizens. On Reddit, some started asking around to see how they could get the relatives of Trump voters deported.
Even elected officials got in on the parade of resentment toward minorities. Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman told a reporter: “So, Dearborn delivered for Trump? OK, congratulations. You’re going to love the next Muslim ban.” In New York City, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards sounded a similar note in a now-deleted post on X: “Muslims for Trump are going to get the Muslim ban on fleek.”
Mehdi Hasan, a popular progressive talking head, ostensibly took the higher road. Instead of condemning their votes, he stated that minorities should simply learn to follow the example of constituencies that did choose to vote for the Democrats. “The Democrats’ most loyal voters, as ever, were Black voters and Jewish voters both of whom are under no illusions about the GOP and both of whom know the historic threat of racism and fascism,” he wrote on X. “Other minority communities would do well to learn from them.”
This outburst of sectarian generalization and recrimination in the wake of a disappointing election result has laid bare a clear patron-client relationship between the Democrats and their minority voter base. Provided that minorities like Arabs and Latinos remain loyal Democrats, the party has been glad to praise them as exemplary citizens. But if they step off the reservation and exercise their right as citizens to choose a different option, they lose their status as friends — even transforming into bona fide enemies whose suffering can be relished.
This behavior should not come as a complete surprise. Dehumanizing rhetoric has long been commonplace in liberal speech about Trump voters. Endless cable news panels, newspaper op-eds and academic papers have been published treating Trump supporters as akin to a sinister alien species, rather than fellow citizens whose views could possibly merit empathy and understanding. While some liberals may concede that they know little about the lives and beliefs of Trump supporters, these same liberals seem shocked at the disconnect between the Democratic Party and the minority voters that they had considered its staunchest supporters.
This disconnect was ironically laid bare in the reaction to Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico. While progressives were certain it would shock ordinary Latino voters, it seemed to have no bearing come Election Day, when Trump scored strong gains among Latinos across the country. This utter failure to predict or understand the sentiments of Latino voters is itself a product of class and cultural divides inside the Democratic Party establishment.
“The people who set the tone in Democratic-oriented discourse, they’re so upset when something like this happens,” Teixeira said. “They’re convinced because they think it’s so terrible, the people out there in the hinterlands and in the inner cities and the masses of honest workers and peasants, they’re all equally freaked out, particularly the minority members.”
On the contrary, Teixeira argues, many minorities and people in working-class communities are used to casual trash-talking and can take a joke. While Hinchcliffe’s comments may have mortified the consultant and professional class elites who make policy for the Democrats, there is no reason to believe ordinary Latino voters viewed them the same way. “When Puerto Ricans hear about this joke, they don’t necessarily say, ‘Oh my God, I was gonna vote for Trump, now I gotta vote for Kamala Harris,’ it’s like haha, I can’t believe he said that,” Teixeira added.
The inability to read events is a sign of a deeper malaise among Democrats, and liberals more broadly, in the U.S. Thanks to years of media-driven polarization, liberals have come to sincerely believe in a carefully curated vision of America in which every group in their coalition ultimately plays a role in upholding left-wing ideology. This means that women must be stridently in favor of abortion rights, Latinos must oppose any crackdowns on illegal immigration, and African Americans must fearfully look to the Democrats to defend them against an aggressively racist Republican Party that they believe is on the verge of rolling back their civil rights.
Yet these are all simple caricatures of these voters, who, in practice, evince a more complex set of preferences and do not follow a predictable progressive script. Despite the evident beliefs of the Democratic consultant class, now thrown into disarray by the reelection of Trump, minority voters don’t necessarily see themselves as foot soldiers in an intersectional, progressive revolution led by their party.
The statistics back up this assertion. A Gallup poll taken in the summer of 2020 — the height of Black Lives Matter protests — found that 61% of Black Americans wanted police to maintain the amount of time they spent in their neighborhoods while 20% actually wanted it increased. A Pew poll released in March 2024 found that 38% of Hispanics believed the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border was a “crisis,” and the same percentage believed it was a “major problem.” While the Democrats always go to the wall to defend policies like racial preferences in college admissions or hiring, such policies are actually unpopular with minority voters, especially Asians and Hispanics.
While Democratic consultants have long banked on the “browning” of the American population to guarantee their future electoral fortunes, exit polls from this race show that voting patterns are actually racially depolarizing. If anything, the Republican Party appears to be transforming into the party of the multiracial working class while the Democratic base is whittled down to a smaller coalition of progressives and professional-class voters.
For the Democratic Party to stay relevant it needs to recognize that minority voters, many of whom are working-class people who flipped to Trump this election, are independent actors with priorities that deserve its attention. In the face of serious issues like inflation, border control, abortion policy and war, it should have hardly been surprising to the party leadership that a comedian’s bad joke did not register as a turning point.
The same week that Hinchcliffe told his infamous joke, Mexican-American comedian George Lopez told a different one at a Democratic rally in Arizona. “Donald Trump said he was going to build the wall. And George Lopez said you better build it in one day because if you leave that material out there overnight,” he riffed, looking around himself, implying that Mexicans would steal it. The crowd, which was multiethnic, erupted in laughter. In doing so, they demonstrated the cultural difference between themselves and mainstream progressives, for whom avoiding offense has been elevated nearly to the status of a religious commandment.
The Democrats’ inability to culturally connect with the mores of the working class has now been brutally juxtaposed with the charisma and comfort of a victorious Trump, whose poor manners and off-color jokes have charmed voters of all backgrounds, even as they horrify liberals who still cannot comprehend his appeal.
Until the party looks at minority voters as they really are — not as the progressive caricatures that have been depicted to them by their media and consultant class — it shouldn’t be shocked by election results like those that we saw this month. Nor should voters be surprised by the entitled bigotry from liberals that emerged after the vote, or the growing chasm between the Democratic Party and minority communities that it once saw as its base.
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