Politics
Column: Why it's wrong to blame Trump's victory on Latino men
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.
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.
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?
Politics
Opinion: Who's the vice-president elect? Elon Musk or JD Vance?
The speaker of the House, the man second in line to the presidency — Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana — had to photobomb the much-shared shot taken aboard the so-called Trump Force One airplane last weekend. There was no room for him at the four-top table where the real power bros — Donald Trump, of course, son Don Jr., world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk, and supposed health nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — were grabbing for greasy McDonald’s burgers and fries during their night out to see the UFC fights at Madison Square Garden.
But at least Johnson was in the picture. JD Vance was not.
The man soon to be first in the line of succession was cut out of the clique — as he seemingly has been since the election of the Trump-Vance ticket two weeks ago.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
That’s raised a question around Washington that would be louder but for the cacophony about whether Trump’s Cabinet picks — alleged fellow sexual bad boys Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth; fellow admirer of murderous tyrants Tulsi Gabbard, and Kennedy, the conspiracy-minded anti-vaxxer who’s usually not a fan of fast food — will win Senate confirmation to head the Justice, Defense, intelligence and health departments, respectively.
Where’s the vice president-elect?
“Y’all seen JD Vance?” former Republican Party Chair Michael Steele wondered on MSNBC over the weekend.
The future veep was finally spotted on Wednesday, not beside Trump but back on Capitol Hill, ducking in and out of offices. Vance, a senator from Ohio for less than two years, was squiring Gaetz around to his Republican colleagues’ offices in hopes of persuading them to support confirmation of the manifestly unqualified Cabinet pick. As if Vance, rather than a vengeful Trump, has that kind of pull with the senators.
Meanwhile, Musk has been so ubiquitous at the president-elect’s side that Trump advisors are reportedly getting sick of him. The satirists at the Onion headlined an item, “Trump Locks Bathroom Door So Elon Musk Can’t Follow Him In.”
For the megabillionaire (and mega Trump donor), whose fortune owes much to his federal auto and aerospace contracts over the years, the joined-at-the-hip comradery with Trump — at Mar-a-Lago, day-tripping in Washington, courtside in Madison Square Garden and then in Texas for a SpaceX rocket launch on Tuesday — is already good for business.
“He’d be worthless” but for government subsidies, Trump sniped in 2022, before the two formed their mutually beneficial bond only months ago. Since the election, Musk’s net worth has increased nearly 25% based on future growth assumptions, Bloomberg estimated. And the federal largesse he enjoys isn’t likely to be threatened by the spending cuts that Trump has promised: Welfare of the corporate kind is rarely on Republicans’ chopping block, but certainly not now, given that Trump has put Musk in charge of a Department of Government Efficiency to identify targets to slash.
In past administrations, that’s the kind of role that presidents would delegate to their vice presidents, much as Bill Clinton assigned Al Gore to “reinvent government” and George W. Bush allowed Dick Cheney to essentially call the shots in his “war on terror.”
More than two weeks into Trump’s transition back to power, we know what he wants Musk to do, as well as Gaetz, Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard and more. Vance, not so much.
Aside from shepherding Trump’s nominees, Vance has been missing in action not just in Mar-a-Lago but in the Senate, too. That provoked intraparty grousing this week, even from Trump, when Vance’s absence in the closely divided body helped Senate Democrats, who still run the joint until January, to push through the confirmations of some of President Biden’s final nominees to federal judgeships. Vance posted on X that one of his right-wing critics was a “mouth breathing imbecile” and then deleted the post.
“No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day,” the boss warned Republican senators. (That’s rich coming from the man who, after his 2020 defeat, had Senate Republicans ram through a number of judges — including U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, Trump’s judicial helpmeet who delayed and then stunningly dismissed the case against him for making off with classified documents in 2021.) As in his first term, Trump will get to fill whatever vacancies Biden leaves behind.
Vance’s deleted post did provide one clue to his activities lately: He’s been interviewing candidates to be the director of the FBI. That suggests both that Trump will indeed fire Christopher Wray, his first-term pick who subsequently enraged him by, among other things, approving the successful search of Mar-a-Lago for classified material in 2022, and that Vance may be carving a niche for himself as Trump’s retribution deputy.
When Trump tapped 40-year-old Vance for veep, the Ohioan was described by many Republicans as the future of a MAGA-fied party and country. Yet he embodies a future at odds with the nation’s challenges and trends.
Vance will play his T.B.D. part in an administration that seems hellbent on exacerbating climate change with a full-on embrace of fossil fuels. That would hasten the nation’s fiscal insolvency by further cutting taxes for the rich. That would threaten that economy (and the United States’ moral standing) by mass-deporting migrants when an aging population needs their labor. And that would purportedly make America great again by returning to a system in which white men continue to dominate, despite the country’s ever-growing diversity and women’s advancement.
Whatever Vance’s role, at least by his virtual invisibility he’s not running the risk that Musk is: Stealing the spotlight from the narcissist in chief. That never ends well.
@jackiekcalmes
Politics
Democrat Tammy Baldwin details recipe for running in a swing state after victory in Trump-won Wisconsin
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., successfully won re-election in Wisconsin all while President-elect Donald Trump simultaneously flipped the state back to red in the presidential election.
As to how she did it, the Democrat attributes much of her win to her “72-county strategy.” Baldwin made sure during her campaign to traverse the entire state, venturing far from the two large blue enclaves of Milwaukee and Dane counties.
“I think showing up matters, listening matters,” she said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “And so I go, and I really listen and get to know the challenges and aspirations of people all over the state, rural areas, suburban areas, urban areas.”
Baldwin won by a few tens of thousands of votes in the state, clinching victory by roughly the same margin as Trump.
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According to her campaign, she did more than 250 events in Wisconsin in 2024 alone. She also hosted several targeted tours during her campaign, including her Dairyland Tour and her Rural Leaders for Tammy Tour.
Further, Baldwin’s campaign microtargeted rural communities to deliver content regarding her agricultural work.
But her rigorous travel is not the only thing that sealed the deal for her. The senator acknowledged that people can go everywhere, but they also need to effectively engage voters in each place they travel to.
One thing she noted is that she’s “had years to earn the trust of Wisconsin voters,” referencing the short few months that the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris had to turn out voters for her in the state.
Baldwin also said she convenes roundtables and forums on relevant issues while she travels in Wisconsin.
“So I’ve done that on, say, the fentanyl and opioid epidemic, bringing together first responders, public health officials, concerned community members to talk about what does the epidemic look like in this community, in this area of the state? What resources do you need? What are your biggest worries?”
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She also held events geared toward agricultural issues, she noted.
Baldwin notably credits, in part, her work on agricultural issues with her re-election win. In early October, Baldwin earned the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation Board of Directors, which was a significant achievement for a Democrat in a statewide election.
“They cited a number of different measures that I either championed or actually got into law,” she said.
The senator pointed to her Dairy Business Innovation Act, which provides small grants to various dairy producers and processors.
“I went this past spring to a particular farm that had received one of these grants, and they had also invited several other farmers and processors who had received grants to show me what they were able to do with these grants in order to grow their business and improve their bottom line,” she said.
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The Wisconsin Democrat also pointed to the large manufacturing sector in her state and attributed her push for “buy America” rules in pieces of legislation as helping her win some of those voters.
On whether her campaign is a model for other Democrats, specifically those in swing states, she said, “I think it is something that would be helpful to many public officials.”
Baldwin added that she realized the need to travel Wisconsin to this extent during her first Senate campaign: “I had been in the House of Representatives representing, as you know, seven counties in [the] south-central part of the state. I had to learn Wisconsin as I was running.”
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“And so traveling to do that learning was extremely important, being exposed to, you know, the timber industry and the north woods. We didn’t have a big timber industry in the south-central part of the state.”
The Midwestern senator also said this was the first time she heard from Wisconsinites that elected officials hadn’t been spending much time in certain parts of the state.
“One thing I will say that I hear from constituents when I show up is just like, ‘I don’t remember the last time we had a U.S. senator visit our community, and especially not a Democrat,’” she said.
“It’s like, you know, the timber industry folks saying, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a senator pay so much attention to us,’” she added.
Politics
Graphic details revealed in Monterey sexual assault claim against Pete Hegseth, Trump Cabinet pick
A woman told Monterey police that Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Defense secretary, took her phone, blocked her from leaving his hotel room and sexually assaulted her, according to a newly released police report.
On Wednesday evening, the Monterey Police Department released a 22-page report revealing graphic details in the 2017 assault claim filed against Hegseth, which did not result in any charges. The report reveals two starkly different narratives about what unfolded during a sexual encounter in his hotel room while the two were attending a Republican women’s conference in the city in October 2017.
The woman, who is referred to as Jane Doe in the report, claimed that she repeatedly told Hegseth “no” during the alleged assault, and that he ejaculated on her stomach and told her to “clean it up” — an incident she said left her with nightmares, according to the report.
Hegseth told police that the pair had consensual intercourse and that he made multiple attempts to ensure she was comfortable during the encounter, according to the report.
His attorney has said that he entered a confidential settlement agreement with his sexual assault accuser for an undisclosed sum.
Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing since the accusation was revealed last week, and the Trump transition has continued to publicly support his nomination.
The recently released report brings more questions to what was already gearing up to be a controversial confirmation process for Hegseth’s nomination as U.S. secretary of Defense. Hegseth, 44, is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has been a Fox News host since 2017 and a contributor since 2014.
Hegseth was a keynote speaker at the 2017 Republican women’s conference hosted at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa.
According to the police report, both Doe and Hegseth told officers that the two of them went with a group to the hotel bar after Hegseth’s speech and an after-party hosted in a hotel suite.
Doe told police that she informed Hegseth she was uncomfortable when he touched her knee at the bar and declined his offer to return to his hotel room. The woman also reported that she observed Hegseth acting inappropriately toward woman at the conference, rubbing them on their legs and giving off a “creeper” vibe, according to the report.
The report contains conflicting information over how intoxicated each of them were. Doe had difficulty remembering some of the nights events and, during a sexual assault exam, later told a nurse that shes believed something might have been slipped into her drink, according to the report.
Doe remembered trying to leave Hegseth’s hotel room and being physically blocked from doing so. She also recalled Hegseth wearing dog tags, ejaculating on her stomach and telling her to “clean it up.” And she remembered saying “no” a lot, according to the report.
Hegseth recalled a very different sequence of events.
He told police that Doe led him to his hotel room, where things progressed between the two of them, according to the report. He told police there was “always” conversation and “always” consensual contact between himself and Doe.
Hegseth recalled Doe displaying early signs of regret following the incident and that she said she would tell her husband she fell asleep on a couch in another hotel room, according to the report.
Four days after the encounter, on Oct. 12, Doe went to a hospital to request a sexual assault forensic exam and brought with her the clothes she was wearing during the alleged assault.
Doe reported experiencing memory loss and nightmares in the aftermath of the sexual encounter, according to the report. An associate of hers also told officers that she had very little energy and would burst into tears out of the blue after the incident, according to the report.
Hegseth is a graduate of Princeton University, and has a graduate degree from Harvard University. He was decorated with two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantryman Badge for his military service. He left the military after President Biden was elected, saying he’d been ordered to stand down from guard duty at the inauguration after top brass dubbed him an extremist and “white nationalist.”
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