No, it wasn’t “the Economy, stupid.” Speaking as a Black man born into a Spanish-speaking family, let me tell you what last week’s election was really about.
It was about millions of men — many with my Latino immigrant background, some with my skin color — who don’t want any woman, especially a woman of color, in the White House.
Trump won 55 percent of Latino men nationally. He won 46 percent of all Latino voters, a 14 percent jump over his support against President Biden in 2020. That was the highest for any Republican presidential candidate in five decades.
And the key was his success with Latino men. Trump’s support from Latino men jumped by nearly 20 percentage points, from 36 percent in 2020 when he ran against Biden, a white man.
We should have seen it coming. Looking back, in 2016, most Hispanic men voted for someone other than Hillary Clinton when she lost to Trump.
In Trump’s triumph over Clinton, Latino men voted for Trump or third-party candidates over Clinton by 48 to 45 percent, according to Pew Research.
This year, as the result of Latino male voting, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed 52 percent of the total Latino vote, tied for the worst performance among Latinos for a Democrat since John Kerry in 2004.
Only 38 percent of Latino women voted for Trump, about 8 percentage points over their support for him in 2020, according to Edison Research.
The big shift in voting patterns that realigned the national political map and gave the popular vote to Trump was ignited by Latino men. Why? Allow me to differ with the conventional argument that the shift in the Latino male vote is about inflation and wages.
In my lifetime I have seen a huge jump in America’s Latino population. In 2023, Latinos officially outnumbered Blacks to become the largest racial minority group in the country. But even when there were fewer of us in number, I repeatedly saw Latinos with light or white skin, some in my own family, downplaying their ethnic identity to speed assimilation into the American melting pot as white people.
They pushed to join with previous waves of American immigrants, from the Irish to the Italians, who went from being ethnics to being generically labeled as all-American white people.
This has long been true of my friends among white-skinned Cubans in Florida. With their history of fleeing communist rule, Cubans have historically identified with the conservative, anti-communist white-majority Republican party far more than immigrants from other Latino countries.
Several other non-economic factors are also driving Latino men to the GOP.
I have personally witnessed the macho, Latino male rejection of gay and especially transgender people. From childhood, when I sat ringside at boxing matches or played organized baseball with Latin men, it was common to hear anti-gay slurs.
The focus of Trump’s most memorable campaign advertising in the 2024 campaign was his opposition to Harris’s support for transition surgery for transgender prison inmates in California.
Also, there is the Latino male attraction to the strongman, a style of politics evident in Trump’s delight in brassy, loutish, sexist behavior. Trump’s wealth, his three wives and reports of his being with a porn actress only added to his allure.
“I believe there is another painful factor that, though difficult to measure in polls, might help explain Trump’s appeal with Latino men: the allure of the ‘caudillo,’” wrote Leon Krauze in The Washington Post. “Trump represents a familiar archetype in Latin American history: the charismatic leader…the providential man, the messianic leader, deeply ingrained in Latino culture.”
Trump played into that Latino cultural memory with his so-called “Bro strategy.” It was intended to stir up young white men with frat house behavior, such as talking at a public rally about famed golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitals.
Then there was Trump’s Republican convention, featuring wrestler Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt. He also demeaned Harris as a “dumb” and “stupid” woman. He attacked another woman, former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, as “evil, sick, crazy,” before saying he wants to call her a word that “starts with a B, but I won’t say…I want to say it” before the crowd screamed the word out, of course.
Men of all races ignored the sexist vitriol and backed Trump over Harris, 55 percent to 42 percent. That was a wider gap than in 2020, when 53 percent of all men supported Trump over President Biden, another white man
Initially, alarm over the male vote focused on the possibility that Harris was losing support from Black men. But when the votes were cast, Black men gave Harris the same level of support they had given Biden in 2020.
The big shift was among Latino men.
With Trump’s election, the nation will have another male president and a white male Republican majority in Congress. Emboldened by their victory, the white male Republicans in Washington are in a position to cut social safety net benefits to the poor, who are disproportionately Black and Latino.
They will also be free to begin mass deportation and enact harsh restrictions on women’s reproductive freedoms.
Trump’s contemptuous treatment of powerful women was intended to boost his support among white and Black men. But it worked best with Latino men.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
