America’s Shifting Latino Vote: Tectonics Trumps All?

>> Bill Whalen: It's Wednesday, November 20th, 2024. And welcome back to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the world. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism. I'm not the only Hoover Fellow who's podcasting these days.

I recommend you go to our website, which is hoover.org, tap on the top of the homepage link that says Commentary, then head over to Multimedia. And up there, you'll see an option that says Audio Podcast, and you'll see at least a dozen or more Hoover podcasts. We cover the waterfront, everything from policy and politics to economics, history, you name it, we got it.

My guest today on this podcast is David Leal. David is a senior fellow adjunct at the Hoover Institution and a professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin, Hook ' Horns. His primary academic interest is Latino politics. His research exploring the political and policy implications of demographic change in the United States.

Given the results of this month's election here in the United States, including some eye raising returns in David's home state of Texas, it seemed like an apt time for Professor Leal to explain the evolving presence of Latino vote in American politics. David, thanks for joining us today.

>> David Leal: Thank you.

Good to be here.

>> Bill Whalen: And it's good to see you too, my friend. So question for you. Here we are in the sort of immediate aftermath of the election. It's been a couple of weeks now, and you're starting to kind of process what happened. You're an academic, you're a researcher, you're a numbers guy.

Where do you turn to for information?

>> David Leal: Well, the initial data are going to be the exit polls at the national level and at selected states. These aren't perfect data points, but no survey is. Every survey of any kind always represents choices by the surveyors about who to sample, where to sample, when to sample.

And so you'll hear data points will emerge from academic surveys over time, but by that point, by the time the academics get around to it, you know, the political world has moved on. And so the exit polls, the AP VoteCast, but also the ADP are the main ways that we're looking at the election results right now.

And I think there's really no denying that not only did the Republicans have a good year, but they had a really good year among Latino voters. The Latino electorate has really been moving toward the GOP, and my work has been documenting that since 2016. It's potentially a realignment in American politics, but it's also, other people have taken another perspective on it.

And that's part of the post election debate, is that everybody is not just analyzing but also spinning. And so people are talking about how the election reflects exactly what they had always been predicting all along and what they also want to be true going forward. So you have Democrats saying it was just an inflation election, it'll all go back to normal, quote, unquote.

You have other people who are saying, well, you know, if you look at certain parts of the electorate, and my own work looking at Latinos suggests that, you know, I'm sure inflation had some role, but I also see Latinos moving to the middle in all sorts of social and economic and political ways.

And so I don't think this is just a temporary phenomenon that the Democrats are gonna go back to their two to one or three to one vote margin anytime soon. It's really heading more toward possibly like a 50, 50 kind of alignment.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, and that's what I was looking at too.

I always look at the spin coming out of the losing side of the election to see if they try to sell it as a one off. This is not gonna happen again, this is just a function of a bad economy. Is it just a function of running against kind of a unicorn in the form of Donald Trump?

Or those Democrats who say, no, we have some serious institutional problems ahead.

>> David Leal: That's right, yeah. And so you can see all sorts of spins out there. But if you look from 2016, when Donald Trump did about as well as Mitt Romney did, that was a moment of dispute.

There were pollsters who were saying no, that Donald Trump had really gotten into the teens for the Latino vote. But I think that our work, looking at 16 and then 18, 20, 22, 24, you see a variety of patterns that are happening that you haven't seen before. First of all, you see a consistent rise.

You don't see like a dramatic rise of 10 percentage points or 20 percentage points. Whenever people talk about the Latino vote, they always use these scary geological metaphors like waves and tsunamis and earthquakes. But my metaphor has always been more like plate tectonics, maybe like the slow but steady change in a population is what really matters here.

And so as Latinos have been slowly and steadily moving toward the GOP across elections in presidential and midterm elections, and they haven't been going back like they did in the past. If you look at Reagan's Latino vote, if you look at George W Bush's Latino vote, they did really well.

It didn't transfer to other candidates, congressional candidates, subsequent presidential candidates. In fact, there were drop offs. You're not seeing that now. You're seeing the Latino vote, it stayed about the same, as I said, for Romney. And then it went up in the midterm elections, and there was debate about that.

 

And then in 2020, it continued to go up, and in the next midterm election. So this kind of aggregation has taken the Latino population from about like, you know, maybe like, you know, mid to high 20s up to maybe mid-40s right now. And so no one year did that.

But this is really adding up and I'm not quite sure what the argument would be that it's going to go down.

>> Bill Whalen: I wanna talk about some of the numbers, David, but first, a housekeeping matter. Can you explain the difference between Latino and Hispanic? Because you see the two words interchange a lot in journalism, the Latino vote, the Hispanic vote.

Is there something geographically important here or is this more nuanced? For example, Mexican voters of Mexican descent, Central American descent, Cuban descent, they sometimes had decidedly different opinions when it comes to candidates and causes.

>> David Leal: Yeah, there is a kind of like name game, so to speak, out there, in journalism, in academia.

So there are people who will argue that Hispanic and Latino mean different things. That Latino means all of Latin America or Latin American descent. That Hispanic somehow refers more to Spanish language country descent. I don't think that people really differentiate in this kind of way. I think these are kind of elite, quote unquote, kind of like discussions that have really very little to do with how everyday people identify themselves.

Surveys show that most people prefer their national origin identifier, Mexican American, Cuban American, Venezuelan American. And after that, a lot of people would just use a name like American. The idea that people are using words like Hispanic or Latino and thinking deeply about their difference. And of course, we have these new words too, like Latinx or Latine, and there's debate about how to pronounce them.

And this has been used as an example of how academia and progressive politics is out to lunch when it comes to Latino voters. Almost none of whom who haven't been to a PhD program use words like Latinx or Latine to describe themselves. It's very much a progressive kind of take.

And I think that if you were to ask Latinos and as surveyors have, you'll find that these names just don't really mean much, these differences.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, so numbers for you, David. According to NBC News exit polls, Donald Trump received 45% of Latino vote in this election. Other polls have it at 42%.

In 2020, exit polls had them between about 32 and 35%. In 2016, per the National Election Pool exit poll, Trump was at 28%. As you mentioned, this dovetails with Mitt Romney who was at 27%, John McCain, 31% in 2008. As we go further the wayback machine, David, 2004, the last time a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote.

George W Bush, your former governor of Texas, was in the low mid-40s, according to exit polls. The Roper Center, for example, had him 44%. So when we look at this, David, is we go from 44% in 2004 to maybe 45% in 2024. Nothing has changed in the last 20 years, or has it?

>> David Leal: Well, I would say that it's not entirely clear what Bush got in 2004. My sense, I did some post-election analyses, and there were other people who reanalyzed the exit poll data. He probably got about 40%, I'm thinking, if you look at sort of other surveys, if If you look at county level data, he's probably in the 40% range, which was still a record because we think the previous record was Reagan with about 35% in 1984.

But if you look at after, what came after Bush in 2004, you really had a serious decline in the Latino vote for Republican candidates. His support didn't carry over into the 2006 midterm election, it didn't carry over into subsequent presidential candidates. It seemed to be a blip that really didn't have a lot of impact.

It was a personal vote as opposed to a party partisanship, because after all, George W Bush, he had a lot of connections with the state of Texas. He had really positive relationships with Latino communities. He was talking about Big Ten conservatism and so there was a lot of support for him among Latino voters.

But it seemed to be a bit of a one off because it didn't translate in subsequent elections. What we're seeing here with Trump in 2016 and afterwards is it does seem to be much more of like a partisan movement. It's not a one off support for a candidate.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, but the last thing, David, you would associate with Donald Trump is the phrase compassionate conservatism.

>> David Leal: Well, I think that what do Latinos actually want? I think that there's a lot of talk about, assumptions about what Latino voters are actually looking for and I think that, compassion is probably a good thing.

And maybe for a lot of Latinos, conservatism is also a good thing. But I think we have to understand Latinos not in the sense of we're trying to find a Latino-specific explanation. I think that the way to understand Latinos is a population that's a similariting, that's moving to the mainstream.

And if you look at all the research over the last 20 years or so, you'll see that across all these indicators, Latinos in economic life, in social life, whether we're looking about jobs, whether we're looking at intermarriage, there's a whole variety of statistics here that show Latinos moving to the middle.

So why shouldn't we assume that they're also moving to the middle when it comes to politics? Why would we think that a population that's assimilating in lots of ways, and I know lots of people on the progressive side don't like the idea that Latinos are assimilating. And some people on the conservative side, I don't believe that it's been happening, but I think the Facts have been pretty clear.

I actually have a term for this, the Latino assimilation paradox, which is that the assimilation that conservatives have been in, many conservatives have been denying for years, is not only happening, but it's also advantaging their party over the Democrats. And the Democrats have not been in favor of assimilation.

They tend to like minority groups to keep their characteristics and maybe to keep voting Democratic, possibly over time, but it's really actually happening. And it is an example of what academics, to use trendy jargon, might call agency, which is people making up their own minds, given the circumstances around them, making up their own decisions.

And I think Latinos are moving to the GOP because they're moving to the middle and they're responding to a lot of the same political context that everybody else is.

>> Bill Whalen: But you put this, David, in the context of not just Latino voters, but also Asian American voters and African American voters, because we saw Trump make gains among black voters, but still his take on the black vote is very small, not as dramatic compared to Latino vote.

And then you have Asian voters, for example, Vietnamese voters, Texas and California, for example, they tend to come into the country, and at least in California, they tend to vote more conservatively, at least when they're right off the boat, there's not. In other words, we don't talk about assimilation with them as much as we do with Latino voters, it seems.

>> David Leal: Yeah, there have been, there's certainly a lot of rumors we might call them about Latinos and assimilation. I've had lots of people tell me, Latinos don't assimilate and things like that. And so for some reason, this kind of idea of, of Latinos as more left than they are, as even possibly socialists, as people who don't assimilate, I hear this being said one way or the other on both sides of the political spectrum, and neither of them seem to really understand what's going on.

I don't know as much about other populations, I feel less confident speaking about them. Certainly Asian American voters have changed a lot since the 1980s, when they were very much on the pro Republican side. But as you mentioned, it was also a population that was different than what it is right now.

There's been really substantial, substantial immigration from Asia over the last 20 years, and that's really changed. It's not the same voters comparing 1984 to 2024. It's a very different kind of population group. And so, yes, I think that with immigrants, with Asian Americans, with African Americans, we're seeing a general movement, although it's the Latino population that is the largest.

It's the Latino population that has been the focus because of its really strong population growth. And when you look at the projections out down the road, that's the population that's not only going to grow in the overall population, but also in the electorate, too. And so Democrats have been really counting on this group to, to stay Democratic, and it just doesn't seem to be happening.

The other gains that Trump has made is certainly helpful because parties aren't trying to win any group. Parties are trying to create a winning coalition. They're trying to just win more voters in Pennsylvania or Michigan than the other side. They're not necessarily trying to win a majority of any group.

And so when you put all of these kinds of trends together, this pretty clear movement of Latinos to the GOP, along with some of the general immigrant movement to conservative politics, along with some, you know, limited, but some African American movement, you know, a lot of Republicans have to be pretty happy about what they're seeing.

Even if I think if they were being honest, they wouldn't admit that they had really predicted this, that they didn't think that this was going to happen. But demographic change is turning out to be not such a bad thing for them. And so maybe this will change the tune of some aspects of the Republican Party, some aspects of conservative politics, when they realize that, diversification is, it might actually be good.

>> Bill Whalen: David, is the Latino vote similar to the white vote in this regarding Trump, in that we see an education divide within the vote?

>> David Leal: Yeah, you do see, you see gender divides, you see a lot of similar things that you see in the general population. So there is like a class divide that's beginning to happen.

You see religion as one of the most important determinants. And that goes all the way back to George W Bush's vote in the early 2000s, that Latino Protestants, usually, we're not talking about the Episcopalian church, we're talking about Pentecostal, evangelical, small congregations, often conservative. They vote very strongly Republican and this was a group that we saw in the data going all the way back 20-plus years.

But these other kinds of differences, concern about the economy, that's consistent, too. The Latino issue agenda, the kind of things that Latinos care about are actually very similar to what the overall population cares about. When you ask people about what's the most important problem in the country, they'll give you the same kind of issues.

The economy, inflation, jobs, education, it's a similar kind of agenda. So I think a lot of scholars, a lot of journalists have been trying to find differences, but I think the emerging story in all kinds of dimensions is really a similarity between Latino voters and white voters, right?

>> Bill Whalen: Well put. Is it safe to say, David, that educated, college-educated Latino voters would be more receptive to the fascist argument that Conal Harris put forward, whereas the non-college-educated Latino voters maybe turn off afascism and they're a little more driven toward economic issues because they would be hit harder?

Let's assume they're low, they don't make as much money as their college counterparts, so they're hit harder when it comes to inflation and cost of living.

>> David Leal: I think that's a reasonable hypothesis, I haven't seen specific data on that, but it makes perfect sense. I think that I don't know if the American public really sort of knows and American politicians really know how to deal with the inflation issues, since we haven't really had it in a long time.

You and I will remember the 70s, we'll remember stagflation and malaise and whip inflation now. And we'll remember the Simpsons had an episode where they said, Jimmy Carter, history's greatest monster, leaves forever. And so there's a little bit of cultural memory of the 70s and inflation, but not very much of it and.

And so I think we have these intersecting trends. We have a Latino population that is assimilating and moving to the mainstream in all kinds of ways. But then you also have inflation and cost of living, which I think accentuates some of this movement and helps to explain some of the change.

But I think this change has been clearly going on in any case for multiple election cycles. So inflation, I think is part of the story, but I really don't think that it explains the whole story. And college educated Latinos, I don't think we really know very much about some of these differences.

I think we're gonna probably, ideally, the Latino politics scholarship will be more interested in these kinds of questions. I feel like sometimes the scholarship has not really been asking the kind of questions that we need to ask. It doesn't have the information that we need to know, especially when it comes to Latinos and conservatism and the Republican vote.

>> Bill Whalen: It might also be a question, David, when future generations of Latino voters come along, because then you would have had the educational climb and more of a college presence within that block. But David, do you remember a ballot initiative in California called Proposition 8?

>> David Leal: Which one was that?

>> Bill Whalen: We have a lot of them in California, so.

>> David Leal: I know, I know.

>> Bill Whalen: Apologies for broadsided like that. Proposition 8 was a ballot measure, David, was defense of marriage in California. This was after Gavin Newsom had handed out marriage licenses, and it became a court issue as to whether or not same-sex marriage would be legally recognized in California.

So, conservative group got together and put a measure on the ballot that simply said marriage in California is strictly between a man and a woman. And thus began a fierce ballot argument in California. A big fight. The left came out in strong force to defeat it, and they lost.

It passed. And it passed in part, David, because the opponents of Prop 8 made a miscalculation. They didn't realize that the black community in California had issues with same-sex marriage. In other words, they didn't understand kind of the cultural striations of the black existence in California. I mention this, David, because I look at the campaign.

Kamala Harris obviously ran very strong on the democracy fascism argument. Also, abortion was front and center in the campaign, and that's my question to you. How does abortion play among Latino voters? Because on the one hand, you might have progressive minded voters who believe in a woman's right.

On the other hand, you have Catholicism and social conservatism.

>> David Leal: Yeah. When you look at the Latino attitudes toward what's the most important question, I think some people have thought that you must have Latino specific issues that matter the most. And those would be either like maybe immigration or bilingual education traditionally, or maybe abortion.

Because Latinos do have this cultural conservatism. Many, not all, but many, but it seems to be like a fairly low priority issue. If you look at the issue agenda, it's never been really. None of those issues have really been up at the top. Immigration has been, but only when it is for everybody else.

And so it's not as if Latinos are going to the polls and thinking about those kinds of issues. It's the traditional kind of topics that are being talked about in any given election cycle. So the Latino issue agenda doesn't really change. I think that there is like a kind of cultural conservatism.

I think the way to understand the Latino electorate is that it's much more like a New Deal electorate. It's not a progressive electorate, not in the sense of like coastal Democratic elites who sort of think about politics. Latinos aren't really in that kind of a political or ideological space.

I feel like some people have talked about Latinos as like a bread and butter constituency. I think New Deal constituency kind of captures it because it also captures how things change later on. So who was in the New Deal coalition? Lots of the ethnic Catholic voters, Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Irish Americans.

You had this group of people who were voting on economic issues, voting on practicality. Herbert Hoover had the unfortunate situation of being president when the Great Depression hit. It's probably not a good idea to do that. I'm sure he regrets it, but it's a parallel because over time, sure, you had this economic event, a lot of people voted Democratic, but over time.

Of course, they moved, they moved to the mainstream. And now, we don't even think about ethnic politics. We don't even talk about the Italian-American vote, and we hear hardly even talk about the Catholic vote anymore. These things that used to be so incredibly central to American politics have all just dissipated.

And it's possible that Latino politics will also over time dissipate into a kind of mainstream politics. Just like the New Deal voters also disappeared. So I don't think that it was as far as the Harris strategy goes. I don't know if those are the kinds of issues that Democrats, Latinos, were really sort of prioritizing.

It seemed to be more about the economy. And it's not clear what they really had to say about that to assuage Latino concerns.

>> Bill Whalen: Right now, I was gonna ask you if the needle moves with Latino voters when you bring up issues like pronouns. Because the narrative of this election is one of the most effective Trump ads was the one that said, what she's for, they them, Trump is for you.

Do Latino voters care about that issue? Do they care about controversies over transgender bathrooms? Do they care about biological men playing women's sports and so forth? Or again, are they more bogged down in economic issues right now?

>> David Leal: I mean, my sense is that culture war issues are the media like them, politicians like them.

I don't know how much people really care about them. I saw a Pew survey of issues they asked about. I think it was 20 or 21 issues, and trans came last. It was either 20th or 21st. I don't know if culture wars change culture. You know, I don't know if people actually are interested in these kinds of things when you have a real cost of living situation for lots of people.

I do think that the Democrats didn't quite sort of fully understand the cost of living kind of issue, the inflation issue. You know, maybe when you're like a sort of coastal elite, maybe it does, if the price of goods goes up, maybe that's annoying. But it doesn't quite have the same sort of hit that it does when you're more in the working class, when you're on a budget, limited income.

I don't know if Democrats really had either sort of like a full awareness of how much this issue mattered, or if they thought there was just. Maybe they had focus groups that said there really just wasn't much they could do with it, because it was the economy stupid to take that Clinton campaign quote from 92.

And so they tried to focus on democracy, they tried to focus on other things, but that really wasn't enough to move the needle. In many ways, this campaign reminded me of 92, again, something that we'll remember. A lot of people thought the economy was weak, but at the same time, you had The Bush administration.

The H.W Bush saying, well, we're not in a technical recession, and if you look at this data point or that data point, things aren't so bad. It's kind of hard to tell people they're wrong in politics. I think the Biden administration tried to make the argument that, hey, unemployment is low and things are going pretty well in lots of places.

But when people feel like they're being squeezed, that isn't a very effective response. It wasn't effective for H.W Bush, and it wasn't effective for Biden or Harris.

>> Bill Whalen: And I worked on that campaign, David. Thank you for bringing up that trauma for me. I'm joking, actually. Working on presidential campaigns is a great experience.

People should, if they like politics, you try it once. But no, you raise an important point. What's the saying in politics when you're explaining you're losing. And if you are trying to tell a voter that things are okay because look at these GDP numbers, and they're going to the grocery store, and they're upset because there's an $8 box of Froot Loops in front of them, you're not gonna win that argument, are you?

>> David Leal: Froot Loops are great. I know it's a real issue, and I think this is part of there's a lot of talk about how the Democratic Party is out of touch and how it's run by coastal elites and things like that. And some of it's rhetoric, some of it I think is reality.

I think inflation. This may be one of those things where those critics have a point, when the Democratic Party is. If the Democrats and the Republicans are switching, if the Democrats are becoming maybe the liberal Republicans of half a century ago and the Republicans are becoming like the Southern Democrats of half a century ago.

If the parties are kind of switching up, well, a higher educated, higher income kind of group of people maybe just doesn't quite think about inflation very much. And I don't know if the pronoun issue specifically matters, but I think there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that Latinos have been hearing about Latin X, they've been hearing about Latin E.

Those kinds of terms, I think, have become a kind of object of mockery for many people. They've become a symbol of a Democratic Party that's getting a little bit out of touch. Maybe not as symbol, but a representation of a party that doesn't quite sort of see real Latinos as they are and wants Latinos to be this kind of more liberal, more progressive, more Democratic constituency than they have been and have been for a long time.

>> Bill Whalen: Hey, David, another topic area for you, the border and immigration. I saw a CBS News YouGov poll put out by our colleague Doug Rivers over the summer said 53% of registered Latino voters favored Trump's deportation plan.

>> David Leal: Yeah, it depends, of course, what we're asking people. So if you ask people.

>> Bill Whalen: How you ask it.

>> David Leal: Yeah, how you ask it and what you give them as options. So in general, the American public is in favor of, like you said, there are many people who are in favor of deportation, but there are also lots of people and actually much more people who are in favor of a path to legal status.

And when you give people a trade-off, what you typically get is that there are more people who favor like a path to legalization than there are people who favor like a deportation. I think that there are many Latinos who do take law and order seriously, law enforcement seriously.

Of course, the situation has changed a lot from 100 years ago, when there basically were no immigration laws. And if you could get here, you could stay for many people, not everybody around the world.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> David Leal: So when you're trying to talk about immigration now, I think that, and this is true of Americans generally, that Americans have a lot of sympathy because we're a warm-hearted people.

We have a lot of sympathy for individuals. And when Americans meet immigrants and hear about their stories, they're often very sympathetic toward that and hope that they can stay. But immigrants, immigration is a category people see as kind of broken, to use that term that we hear all the time.

And Latinos have never been as pro-immigrant as people think they are. So there's this idea that Latinos are in favor of so-called open borders or whatever. And if you go back to the very first national survey of Latinos, which was called the Latino National Political survey, conducted in 1989, 1990, the first real data nationally on Latinos.

I think 40% of that Latino sample said that there were too many immigrants in America, and that was equivalent to the comparative white sample. And lots of surveys over time have found this in Texas and other places that Latinos aren't necessarily as pro-immigrant or immigration as many people think they are.

And so I think that's been another significant confusion that the parties have had on Latinos is about what they think about these kinds of issues.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, but David, I've been in California for 30 years now. I came out here in 1994 to work for Pete Wilson when he was running for reelection.

And this was the year that California voted on Proposition 187 and it passed. But then, what began after it was a narrative. The narrative was twofold. One that Pete Wilson had done for Republicans and Latino voters what Hitler did for the mustache industry, A. But B, if you were tough on the border, you're gonna lose Latino votes.

>> David Leal: Right, and that was sort of a story. And I've written a little bit about this. I think it's sort of an overstated story. I think that there's a counter narrative that says, like, well, who were the Latinos who actually might have changed their vote because of this?

And it doesn't seem like it was the native born Latinos. It was immigrant Latinos. So maybe it's not a Latino story. Maybe it's an immigration story. And so maybe that's a broader story that isn't really about Latinos per se. There's also an argument that, you know, at the time, the, the Republicans in California probably didn't lose anybody, that they weren't gonna lose anyway.

That the trends were already going, California had been contrary to our current situation, a kind of at least a purple state. And sometimes, it may have seemed even like a bit of a red state, but the trends were moving anyway. And it just didn't seem likely that the Republicans were going to really hold on to that state.

And so maybe there are actually, there was a confluence of events going on here and people tried to pin the political tail on the electoral donkey and say it was all about Pete Wilson or all about 187 or these other kinds of ballot initiatives. But maybe that's not really what was going on.

So I tend to be skeptical of the 187 story and because it was just a little too simple. And as we know, Latinos have never been quite as, as, as pro immigration as we think they have been.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, but this ties into the shock factor with Trump in 2016 and the continuing surprise in 2024 where he wants to build a border wall and my goodness, he's saying Mexico is sending their worst people over and so forth.

In other words, he is doing what he can to upset Latino voters. But it turns out he doesn't necessarily upset Latino voters.

>> David Leal: Well, it's all about what are your issue priorities. And also you have to evaluate a lot of rhetoric in politics. Lots of people are saying lots of things.

I think there is evidence that when people hear Trump saying things, they don't always believe it or they say that like, you know. Well, you know, we, it's a, it's an indicator that he's going to change things, that he's different, that he's going to, like, you know, bring this new, like, you know, fresh air to politics.

They don't necessarily believe specifically everything because, you know, they don't necessarily believe that people don't necessarily believe that about any politician. And so it's not as if one issue, one border wall, any kind of statement is gonna necessarily change the Latino vote because they're looking at other things, too.

Sure, you might hear some rhetoric, but then you also go to the grocery store and, and as you say, Froot Loops have tripled in price or whatever it might be. And so there are other issues that come to the fore. And so I think, and again, we shouldn't sort of assume that Latinos are prioritizing these issues.

A lot of Latinos have been here for like, many, many, many, many, many generations. The immigration issue is like a distant memory. Sure, they know that maybe at some point they were, they were citizens of Mexico, their great, great, great, great-grandparents, or something along those lines. But immigration is a little bit of a hypothetical thing.

They don't have any immigrants in their family. They haven't been to Mexico in their whole life. You know, they just, it's just not like a real kind of issue compared to the many other kind of mainstream political issues that people. And they also recognize that, you know, like any other American might, that maybe there's a problem with our immigration policy and maybe we need to do something about it.

And what did Harris do? Wasn't she the border czar or something along these lines or given some kind of you have to do something about immigration? It's sort of unclear what came of that.

>> Bill Whalen: She was supposed to go explore the root causes of immigration is the answer.

She was never the czar of the Tsarina. She was gonna explore the root causes. And the root cause is okay, right? But I don't think we ever got a report on the root causes, and I think the root causes are pretty obvious. People are coming up here for a better life.

>> David Leal: Yeah, I mean right. The root cause is the American dream. Immigration is, in many ways, good news. We want people, and especially it's such an incredible journey. It's such a difficult, often violent journey to get to the United States. People are taking incredible risks to come to America, not because they want to turn it into a socialist paradise, but because they want the American dream, and they don't like where they're coming from.

And so these are people who are like they know about America. They hear about it through the media, through their friends, through their family. These are people who are coming here who want to. They wanna work, they wanna live safely. We need to find a way to welcome them.

We should really be welcoming all these people who are coming from failed socialist regimes across Latin America because they really know what's what. Democrats are using this kind of rhetoric of maybe less this time, but a couple of years ago, there are Democratic candidates saying they are Democratic socialists.

That's not gonna cut anything in Florida, where there are a lot of immigrants who know what socialism actually is.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let me throw a theory at you, Professor Leal, and you can either play with this or scoff and laugh at me if you choose. This is the first presidential election after the pandemic, our first post-pandemic election, and I look at the Latino vote in this regard.

Peggy Noonan has a wonderful phrase for describing the economy, and she describes it as laptop jobs. In other words, you and I have essentially laptop jobs. We can take our laptop and go travel anywhere around the country and pretty much do our job. I can do a Zoom call like this with you and do a podcast. You could teach your kids remotely if you wanted to at UT Austin.

>> David Leal: Actually, no, I can't do it if I want to. We're back in the classroom. But I hear what you're saying, though.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, exactly. In other words, we're portable. But if you look at the Latinos in America, especially what I might call aspirational Latinos, those who are trying to climb the ladder, they don't know.

Necessarily have laptop jobs, David. They have physical jobs. They have to be at some place and work. They don't work out of their homes. So the pandemic screwed up their economic existence. Secondly, if we look at what happened with schools in the pandemic, David, what did we have?

Lockdowns. Kids lost education. In essence, you had to have lousy homeschooling. And also, keep in mind, David, if you're that aspirational person, school also provides what is subsidized childcare for you as well. And one party was definitely in favor of longer lockdowns, especially in schools. The other one was.

So this is my theory. Maybe the Democrats in this election paid a bit of a price based on the last time around in 2020 with the pandemic, Latinos kind of thinking, gee, which party took better care of us?

>> David Leal: I think that's plausible. I don't think we know enough about the pandemic's political effect.

I'm not sure if people want to think about the pandemic very much.

>> Bill Whalen: It's just a theory, David, but as I experienced the pandemic in California and you went through it in Texas as well, our lives were disrupted, but ultimately not in major ways. We could still do our jobs, we still move about.

Things didn't really change, but boy, it really hit home if you had a physical job, if you had to go report to work somewhere. And again, if you counted on schools not just to take care of kids, but also, David, in the larger context of what? You know that education is your kid's ticket to a better life.

And when government officials screw with your education, maybe you get mad about it and maybe you get even by voting.

>> David Leal: Yeah, I mean, I think that's plausible that there's some kind of dynamic going on. I think anecdotally, the Democratic Party also didn't do a lot of door to door politics in 20.

I don't know what kind of effect that had on a, on a population that was, you know, growing and many people were entering the electorate as naturalized citizens or as people turning 18. We know the in person kind of recruitment and GOTV is much more effective than any kind of postcard or Robo call or TV commercial or Internet ad.

It's the personal dynamic. And so it's possible that there was some kind of, you know, disruptive partisan effect too, by a Democratic Party that, you know, stayed home more in 2020 and tried to rely on, on the Internet, whereas the GOP from what I've heard, you know, did more kind of, you know, door to door in 2020.

So it's possible that there are multiple kinds of effects going on, policy and political, because of the pandemic.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, never too soon to look at 2026. You're in the Democratic Party, David, and you're looking at what should be, in theory, a favorable midterm, at least in the House election.

But you're also looking at Trump making inroads and in various voting blocks, including Latinos. Now, obviously, we can't say what the economy is going to be like two years from now. If the economy is rugged, then tide goes in, tide goes out. Trump and his party pay the price for that.

But if you're looking beyond economic conditions, David, and other parts of Democratic messaging, what's your advice as to what the party out of power ought to be thinking right now?

>> David Leal: Well, I think they ought to be, you know, moving toward the middle. I think they ought to be, when they talking about Latinos, it ought to be, like, about common sense, kind of, you know, bread and butter issues.

Let's not have the assumption that they're ideological progressives. Let's understand what they're telling people. What are people actually telling pollsters that they care about? I don't know if we really saw enough of this in the media in this election cycle for Latinos or really anybody. It seemed like it was all about polls that turned out to be not very accurate.

Maybe we need to get back to asking people what they really sort of think in terms of policy. I think the economy is going to be big. We don't have to pretend that 2024 was only about inflation, only about the economy. I think that the Latino vote is going to continue in this process of sort of, you know, building up toward the GOP as it moves into the mainstream as they vote.

As Latinos vote more Republican, it gets more attention from the institutional Republican Party, that makes more investments. And then you start to see real competition in a lot of places where you really haven't had real, genuine party competition, maybe even in decades. And so I think this process of, you know, GOP investment, a lot of grassroots Latino interest in Trump, and, and the GOP these days is going to, like, continue to build regardless.

But if Trump policies are seen by the voters as leading to greater inflation or any kind of negative economic consequence, I think that that's going to clearly play out in the election. So, it's really about, we all know that Morris Fiorina at Hoover has his theory of unstable majorities, which is that no party can really consolidate its majority.

And if we go back for the last, like, you know, for decades now, the parties have really swung back and forth in elections that we thought were, you know, maybe realigning, like Bush in 2000 or Obama in 2008, some people saying that about Trump now in 2024 in the GOP.

But every party overestimates its mandate. They over interpret their mandate and basically there's a cat here. And so basically what they, what they do is they get into power and they all try to shove their policies down the throats of the American people. And the American people are actually very moderate.

Contrary to media rumor, the American people are bunched up in the middle on policy issue after policy issue after policy issue. They're not ideologues, they're not really fanatical partisans. But the party system around them, the electoral context around them is more a wingnut, we might call it more on the left.

Democrats, Republicans, maybe with populism, that's changing a little bit. But we certainly see a situation in which the American people are stuck between a media class, a pundit class, a politician class that are very much on the fringes and they're in the middle. There's a lot of evidence that Latinos, African Americans are actually fairly moderate on lots of issues.

They may vote Democratic, Latinos still today, but that doesn't make them on the left in terms of policy issues. A lot of them are really in the middle. And so if, if the Republicans over interpret their mandate, if they, if they do things that are seen as harming the economy or going too fast in terms of policy, I think that'll come back to haunt them just like it's come back to haunt the Democrats and the Republicans in, in past election cycles.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay. Realignment may not apply to your state, Texas. And I think our eagle eyed viewers will notice that as the wonderful tower behind you in the UT Austin campus. I mentioned Texas in this regard. Obviously you look at the map of America right now, Texas has right now 40 electoral votes.

You add that to Florida's 30, that gives Republicans 70. That's something of a counterbalance to the Democrats having California, New York, Illinois in 101 electoral votes. But David, this narrative that Texas is slowly, inevitably trending Democratic. Now this began, Mitt Romney got 15.8%. He actually beat Obama by 15.8% in Texas in 2012.

Trump wins Texas in 2016 by 9.1%. And then in 2020, David, it's down to 5.8%. So game on for Texas going blue, but the results are in for 2024. They may move a little bit before it's all over, but right now, David, the spread is 13.9%. So it's about 2 points shy of where Romney was back in 2012.

Let me throw a couple more numbers at you, David. Donald Trump got 55% of Texas Latino voters in the state, according to exit polls. He won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled 2020 performance in Latino majority region in 20. Now shift to Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz won his Senate race, David, in 2018 by 2.6%, a difference of 250,000, 215,000 votes. In 2024, Ted Cruz won by 8.6%, David. Another way to look at this, if you look at the numbers in 2018 versus 2024, Colin Allrad, running on the Democratic side in 2024, he grew the vote by 956,000 over the 2018, but the GOP total grew by 1.7 million votes.

>> David Leal: That's right. And you also see a lot more GOP primary voting participation also.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> David Leal: I haven't heard anybody use the phrase turn Texas blue, non ironically, in several years now. And so I don't think that that was like a real possibility because of the data that you mentioned.

There really did seem to be a trend, at least at the national election. There were some, you know, there were a couple of close statewide elections, although most of them really weren't. I think there was this idea, and it was all part of the, the Democratic Party's demographic dream that, you know, if you had like, you know, the big cities, maybe if.

You had an influx of more liberal voters. And I don't think there's any evidence for this in the exit polls that, you know, that the people who have come into Texas from other states, they seem to be pretty split, maybe a little more Republican than Democratic. So I don't think that that has worked for Democrats either.

>> Bill Whalen: That was going to be my next question, the California effect, because I know when Greg Abbott ran for governor, there was the phrase, don't California my Texas. But then the fear among Texas Republicans was, my God, all these Californians are rolling in. They're gonna make us California.

>> David Leal: Yeah, no, I don't think that's going to happen. I think that people leave states is complicated, like why they leave states. I don't think that it's all about, you know, I think people are trying to claim that a lot of this is partisan. I think people are moving for all kinds of reasons that do and don't have to do with politics.

But I don't think there's any evidence that, you know, Californians are all going to like, you move to Texas and somehow swing things, certainly, like in the state Capitol. It feels like there are a lot of Californians around here and it also feels like a lot of them are on the progressive side.

But at the same time, if you look at the whole state, I don't think that's what's really going on. And you've also got the Latinos in the RGV, the Rio Grande Valley, if you look at them in other places. The economy matters a lot, you've got a lot, there's cultural conservatism.

There are a lot of other factors that are going on. And I also think too, as I said, this kind of genuine competition that's happening now in a lot of Latino areas. In the past, a lot of Latinos lived in areas where, you know, neither party was really investing.

The Democrat took them for granted, the Republicans thought it was impossible. Why bother, spend your money somewhere else. But I don't think this is any plan by any party. But I think a lot of Latinos, because of the political environment, have become activated, they've become interested, they're really interested in Trump and also aspects of the populist GOP in some ways.

And so I think that it's kind of bubbling up from the grassroots. It's no likenquote unquote, the vast right wing conspiracy that liberals are always talking about, I think it's really coming from Latinos themselves in many ways. And that causes a real investment by the institutional GOP, as I mentioned, in activism, in campaigns like some of the congressional candidates in the Valley.

Certainly, the Republican won reelection, Democrats have seen reduced returns at the congressional level in this election cycle. So, you know, it's really, I don't think there's any real trend that's working for the Democrats right now in Texas politics. You know, the best thing that they can hope for is that maybe in the next midterm, if there are economic problems that the voters associate with Trump and the Republicans, that would be their best bet.

But as far as these other factors, whether it's, you know, the Latino trend, which I don't think is in any way solely about the economy, I think it reflects lots of other things about people moving in from other places. And also things seem to be going pretty well in Texas.

It's kind of hard to sort of look around and saying, this state is a disaster, it needs to have like a complete partisan clean out. There's nobody really saying that. And I think the Democrats even struggle to kind of make an argument. That's why they're relying on abortion politics.

That's why they're talking about democracy. It's because for a lot of people, those are a little hypothetical, they're not really what they're what they're voting on. And I think it's kind of hard to look around the state of Texas. You know, you can certainly like, you know, find some statistics about poverty and some other things and you can say, all right, maybe there's room for improvement here.

But I think as far as, like an electorate goes that looks around at how the state is functioning, you know, there are always going to be political disagreements and personalities, but the state on the whole seems to be doing pretty well. And compare it to California. What do voters wanna be?

Do they wanna be California, or do they want to be Texas? I think a lot of them are finding Texas. And the same thing in Florida, too, that was supposed to be, if we can go back in time, 20, 30 years, that was going to be. That was a predicted state that the Democrats would just inevitably take over because they weren't that far away anyway from it.

And the diversifying Latino population of Florida, the immigrant population, that was supposed to be a deciding factor. And it turns out that it was just for The Republicans.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, Republicans now outnumber Democrats in terms of voter registration in Florida.

>> David Leal: Yeah. And Republicans like DeSantis got what, like 58% of the Latino vote in the last election, just barely behind what he got statewide.

So the idea that, you know, Latinos were inevitably Democratic or that they're attracted to Democratic Party ideas or candidates is just not finding a lot of favor wherever you look these days. And again, it's not just about inflation. It's a lot about. I think, at the state level, it's about sort of state government governance, state prosperity.

A lot of things are going well in some of the red states. And I think the Democrats have trouble sort of seeing that and acknowledging it, and that creates a problem for them when it comes to their messaging.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, so two observations, David. I gave a talk in Dallas in late September and got in the Uber at DFW, and the driver asked obligatory, did you have a good flight?

Where are you flying from? I said, san Francisco. And he turns and goes, I used to live just south of there in San Mateo, which is not far from Stanford, actually. I said, really? How long you been here? And he said, about four years, I came out here during the pandemic, and I stayed.

I said, why? He goes, two reasons. Number one, no taxes, and number two, the state works. So there's an impression that kind of the state attack together. The second observation, David. I got to my hotel room, checked in, turned on the TV and up pops an ad from Ted Cruz, and it's hammering his opponent on boys playing girls sport.

Turned it off, went to my event, got up the next morning, turned on the tv. There's the hat again. Going after him again.

>> David Leal: So, yeah, as a college football fan, I saw lots of those ads. I saw lots of ads by Cruz, I saw lots of ads by Colin Allred, whose main theme seemed to be like, I'm a cool guy.

I played in the NFL. You know, it wasn't And he even had some border ads, too. You know, some little bit of, like, getting tough on the border the Democrats felt like they had to do in this election cycle. So yeah, how much that played into it.

>> Bill Whalen: If you're a political junkie, by the way, this is an ad for YouTube TV.

Because if you have YouTube TV and stream college football, as I spend way too much time doing on Saturdays, they end up picking the local feeds from the Texas game. From now that, Stanford's playing the Atlantic coast conference, the ACC games. So I would watch a Texas game and I'd get constant Texas political ads, and I'd watch an ACC game and I'd get North Carolina ads, and it was great.

>> David Leal: Yeah, No, I remember seeing some ads from other states too. And it's a nice variety. Not that they were all different necessarily, but, you know, it's a nice variety than hearing the I. But I do think that, like, I think political scientists tend to be a little skeptical that any of that really matters, which is a little bit counterintuitive.

But, you know, our sort of the theory, the political science theory about like, you know, the effect of the media and even advertising has been what's called the minimal effects theory, which is that basically the people who are really paying attention to that kind of thing have already made up their mind.

And the people who might potentially be moved by TV ads or campaigns, they really do their best to avoid it because they're not interested or they're anti political. And so the TV ad comes on and they look for a sandwich or they talk to the person next to them on the couch or they flip channels or whatever, I don't know.

I think in general, I think it's easy to sort of assume that, you know, money raised and TV commercials running or effective in practice. I'm a little skeptical of that. You know, there's nothing wrong with trying it if you have the cash. But, you know, I don't know how effective any of that is.

Maybe that's a subject for future research to have a more definitive kind of conclusion about.

>> Bill Whalen: It's funny to mention that, David, because post election, now we're looking at how Kamala Harris spent $1 billion. And this crossed my mind several times. I was watching a Georgia, Alabama game and her ads kept popping up.

I thought to myself, how many hardcore Kamala Harris voters or swing Kamala Harris voters are right now watching the Alabama, Georgia game? That's kind of Trump territory.

>> David Leal: Right. But, you know, but you could imagine, like in Alabama that wouldn't work so well. But maybe in Georgia, where the Democrats have had some success, possibly that would be worthwhile.

>> Bill Whalen: Fair point.

>> David Leal: Yeah, you don't need to win a lot of people, you know, the money in politics argument is, you know, look at how Trump did in 2016. He wasn't the biggest spender, you know, but yet he did pretty well and surprised a lot of people.

So, it's not all about money. You can spend a billion dollars, but you can also waste a lot of money too, because it's a little bit hard to. To know how to spend it in ways that are really, truly effective. And you can try polling and focus groups and things like that.

But fundamentally, a lot of people just aren't paying attention to who you want to influence.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, David, final question. I'll let you go. Were you at all surprised by the results?

>> David Leal: I'm not gonna pretend that I had a crystal ball and that I saw the election outcome.

So I was pretty sure that the Latino vote was going to keep increasing for Trump and for Republican candidates, because we had been seeing that in the Data starting in 2016. And there was no reason to think that that was going to suddenly go away. I think that in this election cycle the media wasted a lot of our time with these useless polls that didn't really turn out to be very helpful.

It seems like the betting markets were actually like a better guide to the election outcome than the traditional kind of public opinion surveys. So, I didn't really know. I never had a confident sense of what was going to happen. I felt like it was just a little bit too much up in the air.

The media kept reporting differences that were not actually what we call statistically significant. They kept mentioning changes in the polls that were not statistically significant. Or they would publicize polls like Harris up 4% in Iowa, that just didn't seem credible and seem like at the outlier side. The media were wasting a lot of our time, and it was a little difficult to know.

So I'm not gonna pretend that I knew. But I had a pretty good sense that Latinos were gonna continue to move Republican, for reasons that didn't necessarily have anything to do with the issues of the moment or the campaign of the moment.

>> Bill Whalen: Hey, Dan, we're gonna leave it there.

Keep up the great work. Come out to Hoover. Come visit.

>> David Leal: I will. I'm looking forward to it, thanks.

>> Bill Whalen: Not today, It's supposed to rain like crazy today. But come out when it's drier.

>> David Leal: See you there.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, take care of my friend. Good luck Horns.

Got a big game coming up in a couple weeks, A and M.

>> David Leal: We do. I know, it's wonderful. It's one of the benefits of this realignment is that we get to bring our traditional rival A and M back. But also Arkansas too, who we just played. So this is good stuff from the Texas point of view.

So hook horns.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, by the way, I remember when George H.W. bush was laid to rest. Remember he went from Austin to, from Houston up to a College Station in a train. And they take the casket off the train as he's coming off the train and they start to carry it.

They start playing the Aggie War Hymn. And I started thinking, poor Jeb Bush. He's standing there and he has got his hand on his heart. He's mourning his father, but he's a UT guy. So he has to hear that friggin song.

>> David Leal: Yeah, a lot of the Bushes have been to UT.

So yeah, it's a great rivalry. It's great color, great excitement, all that. So I'm really looking forward to it. So yeah, hook ' horns.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay David, thanks for taking the time today. Enjoyed the conversation.

>> David Leal: Thank you.

>> Bill Whalen: You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics.

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