What drives Latino men to Republican Party?
Erik Ortiz, a 41-year-old hip-hop music producer in Florida, grew up poor in the South Bronx and spent much of his time as a young adult trying to establish himself financially. Now he considers himself rich. And he believes shaking off the politics of his youth had something to do with it.
“Everybody was a liberal Democrat — in my neighborhood, in the Bronx, in the local government,” said Ortiz, whose family is Black and from Puerto Rico. “The welfare state was bad for our people; the state became the father in the Black and brown household, and that was a bad, bad mistake.”
Ortiz became a Republican, drawn to messages of individual responsibility and lower taxes. To him, generations of poor people have stayed loyal to a Democratic Party that has failed to transform their lives.
“Why would I want to be stuck in that mentality?” he said.
While Democrats won the vast majority of Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential race, the results also showed Republicans making inroads with this demographic, the largest nonwhite voting group — and particularly among Latino men. According to exit polls, 36 percent of Latino men voted for Donald Trump in 2020, up from 32 percent in 2016. These voters also helped Republicans win several House seats in racially diverse districts that Democrats thought were winnable, particularly in Texas and Florida. Both parties see winning more Hispanic votes as critical in future elections.
Yet a question still lingers from the most recent one, especially for Democrats who have long believed they had a major edge: What is driving the political views of Latino men?
For decades, Democratic candidates worked with the assumption that if Latinos voted in higher numbers, the party was more likely to win. But interviews with dozens of Hispanic men from across the country who voted Republican last year showed deep frustration with such presumptions and rejected the idea that Latino men would instinctively support liberal candidates. These men challenged the notion that they were part of a minority ethnic group or demographic reliant on Democrats; many of them grew up in areas where Hispanics are the majority and are represented in government. And they said many Democrats did not understand how much Latino men identified with being a provider; earning enough money to support their families is central to the way they view both themselves and the political world.
Many mention their anti-abortion views, support for gun rights and strict immigration policies. They have watched their friends and relatives go to western Texas to work the oil fields and worry that new environmental regulations will wipe out the industry there. Still, most say their favorable view of Republicans stems from economic concerns, a desire for low taxes and few regulations. They say they want to support the party they believe will allow them to work and become wealthy.
Winning over Latino men is in some ways a decades-old challenge for Democrats. Still, some strategists on the left are increasingly alarmed that the party is not doing enough to reach men whose top priorities are based on economics, rather than racial justice or equality. And they warn that Hispanic men are likely to provide crucial swing votes in future races for control of Congress in the midterm elections as well as who governs from the White House.
“Democrats have lots of real reasons they should be worried,” said Joshua Ulibarri, a Democratic strategist who has researched Hispanic men for years. “We haven’t figured out a way to speak to them, to say that we have something for them, that we understand them. They look at us and say, ‘We believe we work harder, we want the opportunity to build something of our own, and why should we punish people who do well?’ ”
Jose Aguilar grew up in Mcallen, Texas, in the 1960s, raised by parents who had limited means for buying food and clothing. They were hard workers and instilled in him that “if you apply yourself, you will get what you deserve.” His family welcomed relatives from Mexico who stayed for a short time and then returned across the border; some managed to immigrate legally and become citizens, and he believes that is how anyone else should do so.
Still, Aguilar did benefit from an affirmative action-style program that recruited Hispanic students from South Texas to enter an engineering program.
“They were trying to fill quotas to hire Hispanic people in their company,” he said. “The first I ever got on was on a paid ticket to interview for a job, so I did. I saw that as a good opportunity for me to take advantage of; this was my chance, to take that opportunity and run.”
Aguilar, who now lives near Houston, said he saw Trump as a model of prosperity in the United States.
“I’m an American; I can take advantage of whatever opportunities just as Anglo people did,” he added. “There’s really no secret to success. It’s really that if you apply yourself, then things will work out.”
As a child in New Mexico, Valentin Cortez, 46, was raised by two parents who voted as Democrats but were personally conservative. Cortez was around “a lot of cowboys and a lot of farmers” who were also Hispanic, but he never felt as if he was part of a minority and said he never personally experienced any racism.
Like so many other men interviewed, he views politics as hopelessly divisive now: “You can’t have an opinion without being attacked.”
Like other men interviewed, Cortez, a registered independent, said he voted for Trump in large part because he believed he had done better financially under his administration and worried that a government run by Joe Biden would raise taxes and support policies that would favor the elite.
Some of the frustrations voiced by Hispanic Republican men are stoked by misinformation, including conspiracy theories claiming that the “deep state” took over during the Trump administration and a belief that Black Lives Matter protests caused widespread violence.
In interviews, many cite their support for law enforcement and the military as reasons they favor the Republican Party.
For Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who helped run Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign last year, the warning signs about losing Latino men were there for months. In focus groups conducted in North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, Hispanic men spoke of deep disillusionment with politics broadly, saying that most political officials offer nothing more than empty promises, spurring apathy among many would-be voters.
“We’re not speaking to the rage and the inequality that they feel,” he said. “They just wanted their lives to get better. They just wanted somebody to explain to them how their lives would get better under a President Biden.”
To Rocha, the skepticism of Democrats is a sign of political maturity in some ways.
“We’re coming of age, we’re getting older, and now it’s no longer just survival; now you need prosperity,” he said. “But when you start to feel like you just can’t get ahead, you’re going to have the same kind of rage we’ve long seen with white working-class voters.”