Six years ago in this newspaper, I coined the term “rancho libertarian” to describe a political ideology I was observing in many of the Latino men I knew.
Proud of their family’s rural immigrant roots but fully of this country. Working class at heart, middle class in income. Skeptical of big government and woke politics yet committed to bettering their communities. Believers in the American Dream they had seen their parents achieve — and afraid it was slipping away.
The rancho libertarians I knew were mostly Mexican Americans, but not exclusively — there were Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Colombians. They weren’t Donald Trump fans — he only won 28% of the Latino vote in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, according to the Pew Research Center — but I saw how Latino men could easily cozy up to him. An orange-tinted despot seemed relatively harmless compared to the ones in their ancestral lands, so they didn’t view Trump as much of a threat.
These guys were used to blabbermouths as bosses. They respected people who said what they wanted and didn’t care about consequences. Besides, rancho libertarians never liked to raise a fuss, so they went on with their lives while dismissing the loud opposition to Trump by activists on the streets and Democrats in Capitol Hill as little better than leftist hysteria.
After Joe Biden won in 2020 with less Latino support than Clinton, I warned liberals that the Democratic Party was losing blue-collar Latino men. Few listened to my concerns. Rancho libertarians were seen as antiquated vendidos — sellouts — who would drown in the progressive blue wave that had covered California due to GOP xenophobia and that was now spreading across the country.
Well, who’s treading water now?
Democrats are — to mix political clichés — soul-searching in the political wilderness yet again after Trump’s dominant win over Kamala Harris. Pundits are carving up poll data like a Thanksgiving ham — and the cut that’s proving the hardest for Democrats to swallow is Latino men.
An NBC News exit poll of voters in 10 states — including Arizona, Florida and Texas, which have huge number of Latinos — showed Trump capturing 55% of the Latino male vote. It’s the first time the demographic has sided with a Republican in a presidential election.
In an exit poll by Edison Research, Latino male support for Trump skyrocketed from 36% in 2020 to 54% this year. Meanwhile, CNN tracked a 42% swing toward the Republican candidate from 2016 to 2024 — by far the most dramatic change of any group.
More analysis will appear in the coming weeks and months, but the idea that Trump won by bringing Latino men into his coalition of the cruel is already a talking point for the chattering class. This happened despite Trump surrogates uttering anti-Latino jokes at rallies and despite Trump’s promises to not only deport undocumented immigrants but also to revoke birthright citizenship — a privilege more than a few rancho libertarians were blessed with.
CNN anchor Erin Burnett on Wednesday night described all this as “an unprecedented shift in American politics.” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware told the New York Times about the Harris defeat: “There’s a couple of groups in the United States, young men and Latino voters, that just did not respond in a positive way to our candidate and our message and our record.”
Screengrabs of the polls I mentioned are filling my social media feeds, along with an angry message: Trump won, and it’s the fault of Latino men.
In this 2020 photo, then-President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up to the cheering crowd after a Latinos for Trump Coalition roundtable in Phoenix.
(Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press)
The explanations for this new rightward lean are coming in as fast and hot as the Santa Ana winds: Machismo. Misogyny. Anti-blackness. Self-hatred. Straight-up stupidity. Aspirational whiteness.
We should criticize Trump-loving Latino men for their choice. But to pin the return of Trump so heavily on them excuses other guilty actors.
Much is being made of the gender gap this year between Latina women — 60% supported Harris, according to the CNN exit poll — and Latino men, only 38% of whom backed the Democratic nominee. The implication is that the women fought the good fight to save democracy, while the pendejo men essentially guaranteed its demise.
But that ignores an overall shift in Latino support for Trump. The Edison exit poll showed that 46% of Latinos supported Trump, the highest number ever tracked for a Republican presidential candidate. Support for the Democratic candidate among Latinas went from a 44-point advantage for Clinton in 2016 to a 22-point advantage for Harris in CNN’s exit poll— still sizable but a significant drop.
So it’s not just hubristic hombres who fell under the Trump spell of a better economy and an end to wokeness — it’s solipsistic señoritas as well.
The other big reason why Latino men went for Trump is the Democratic Party, which took them for granted for decades and has alienated them repeatedly during the Trump era.
Democrats pushed immigration reform and ethnic solidarity as key planks in their Latino platform, even though surveys have shown that Latinos care more about economic issues and have become increasingly hawkish on the border now that their familes have established themselves in this country. The Democratic neglect of its traditional working-class base in favor of college-educated and white collar workers hasn’t helped, either.
Then there was “Latinx,” an ungendered term pushed by progressives and used in the past by Harris and Biden. I have no issue with it, but nearly every non-progressive straight Latino male I know despises “Latinx.”
The term is such electoral kryptonite that a recently released study by researchers at Harvard and Georgetown found that politicians who use “Latinx” turn off Latino voters instead of attracting them. And it’s not just eggheads saying that. Three years ago, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona banned “Latinx” from his official communications. He argued in a social media post that Latino politicians were using the term “to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.”
Progressives blasted Gallego as insensitive. He’s now in the lead to become the Copper State’s next U.S. senator, even as Trump is ahead of Harris in a state Joe Biden won in 2020.
Jorge Rivas, a Salvadoran immigrant who owns an eatery in Arizona, in a 2020 photo.
(Cindy Carcamo/Los Angeles Times)
I’m not defending Latino male Trump supporters. I think they’re putting too much faith in someone who’s ultimately only about himself. But they are our elders, our relatives, our friends. They voted the way they did because they felt abandoned by Democrats, and the Trump campaign made a hard, successful push for them. These rancho libertarians did what liberals said Latinos would do and conservatives long insisted was impossible: They assimilated.
Demonizing them will only harden their views. Besides, where’s the disdain among Harris supporters for white women, who have sided with Trump in every election along with white men? Or for Arab Americans who shunned Harris because of the Biden administration’s stance on Israel and Gaza? Or first-time voters, moderates and all the other groups who were supposed to go with Harris but didn’t?
Nah, hating on Latino men is easier. It’s been a favorite sport of Americans for centuries. We’ve been buffoons to them, criminals, rapists — and now, traitors.
That last insult used to come from white supremacists. Now, liberals are throwing it around. That’s progress, right?