‘Don’t think he’s talking about them’: Why Latinos look past Trump’s racist remarks

It’s late afternoon at the Pima County Fairgrounds outside Tucson, Arizona, and a crowd of Donald Trump supporters is spilling out into the desert sun after a rally held by his fast-talking understudy, vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance.

Among them is Jesus Poblete, a first-generation Mexican-American and cab driver from Tucson. He is wearing a “Latinos for Trump” T-shirt, and his family proudly hold up Trump signs. “We’ve been conservative for a while,” Poblete says. “This is my third time voting for Donald Trump.”

Jesus Poblete, left, and members of his family after a J. D. Vance rally outside Tucson, Arizona, on October 22.Credit: Michael Koziol

The 46-year-old shares the litany of grievances common to most Trump fans: the country is failing under the Democrats, the economy is stuffed and there is “shady stuff” going on with elections. He wants to get back to core American values: God, family, country.

But in Tucson, almost 100 kilometres from the border with Mexico, one of the biggest issues is illegal immigration. Poblete’s father came to the US in the 1970s to work and earn money and was among millions of illegal immigrants granted amnesty by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1986.

The situation today is vastly different, Poblete says. Migrants are flooding over the border not to contribute to the US but to take advantage of it or engage in crime, drugs and sex trafficking. He welcomes Trump and Vance’s pledge to kick them out.

“My parents, if they had gotten deported in that time, it would have been legit. At the end of the day, it wasn’t like they came in through fences in the mountains. They came in looking for work. If we know that someone can contribute to this country, by all means we should have them over here. That’s not the same as what’s happening now.”

It’s a common refrain across Arizona and other states. As a Trump-voting Latino, Poblete is in the minority, but he’s not unusual. Once a reliable support base for the Democrats, Latinos are voting Republican in higher numbers and represent a potent electoral force in every swing state.

Latino voters just eclipsed African Americans in the 2020 election to become the largest group of non-whites, according to Pew Research Centre data. That growth has continued, with some 36.2 million Latinos eligible to vote in 2024.

Latino leaders pray with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a roundtable event in Florida in October.Credit: AP

A September survey also by the Pew Research Centre found 57 per cent of registered Latino voters supported, or were leaning towards, the Democrats’ Kamala Harris, and 39 per cent were for Trump. Joe Biden is estimated to have carried about 61 to 63 per cent of Latinos in 2020.

Political consultant and Latino vote expert Mike Madrid says Latinos are transforming from a racial voting bloc to citizens motivated by economic and other policy issues, where education is a reliable indicator of likely voting intention. Those with a college degree are more likely to vote left, and the working class – which is increasingly non-white – is moving to the right.

Mara Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive officer of Voto Latino, speaks during the Democratic National Convention.Credit: Bloomberg

For the Democratic Party, that is eroding what was once a reliable base. “It’s a decade-long slide,” Madrid says. “Non-white voters are becoming more class-driven and less racially polarised. The shift you’re seeing is not specific to Latinos, but it’s more visible because Latinos are growing so fast.”

Madrid is one of the US’ foremost authorities on Latino voters and author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy. He is a prominent Republican thinker and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a moderate conservative movement to counter Trumpism.

With Latinos focused on their hip pocket, they are less likely to worry about Trump’s inflammatory and racist remarks about Mexican rapists or immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country”. Many agree with Trump’s policies. Polls have found increasing numbers of Latinos support building a wall along the country’s southern border or deporting all undocumented immigrants. Support for such measures is not a majority position for Latinos but tends to be about 40 per cent or a little higher.

When Trump says outrageous things, “these voters overwhelmingly don’t think he’s talking about them”, Madrid says. “Because they’re not illegal, they’re not undocumented, they’re not even immigrants. It’s so far back in the rearview mirror, it’s not an issue any more.”

“Puerto Ricans with Trump”: A sign outside Donald Trump’s rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday October 29.Credit: AP

An exception to that may be the crass, racist “joke” told at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, which received saturation coverage in US media and led the Trump campaign to issue a statement distancing itself from the remark. [Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe described the US territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”.]

Such has been the furore that Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, who is one of the biggest and most influential Latin celebrities in the world, has since endorsed Harris for president, and Puerto Rican pop stars Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin have spoken out.

The key state of Pennsylvania is the only one of the seven battlegrounds where Puerto Ricans are the plurality of Latinos (there are nearly 500,000, though not all are eligible voters). Local media reported Hinchcliffe’s comment had “spread like wildfire” in the community in the past 48 hours, and the Democrats seized on it – including new billboard ads in Allentown, which has a majority Hispanic population and where Trump held a rally on Tuesday night.

With the campaign in damage control, three Hispanic speakers appeared on stage in Allentown, including Puerto Rico’s shadow senator Zoraida Buxo, who told the crowd Trump would “make Puerto Rico shine again”.

Puerto Rico’s shadow US senator Zoraida Buxó appeared at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Allentown on Tuesday night.Credit: AP

Madrid’s Lincoln Project also produced a new digital ad targeting Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania. He believes the controversy could prove consequential in the key state and, thus, the election. “This is a matter of Puerto Rican pride,” he says. “I don’t think it will have a massive five-point impact, but just a one or two-point shift changes everything.”

Some Latinos are comfortable with Trump’s campaign; some aren’t. But many also feel alienated from and overlooked by the Democrats; they feel their support is taken for granted.

In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, 63 per cent of black voters and 46 per cent of Hispanic voters said the phrase “keeps its promises” described the Democrats better than the Republicans.

Gilbert Romero is a former regional organiser with Healthcare Rising Arizona, which advocates for healthcare justice in the state. He was part of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that coalesced around Vermont senator Bernie Sanders when Harris ran for the nomination in 2019.

“Every four years, they tell us: we’re going to invest in a Latino community. It’s like a broken record with the Democratic Party,” Romero says. “It’s going to require more than a diversity program to turn out the Latino vote. I think the Democratic Party’s strategy with Latino voters has always been, ‘Let’s earmark X amount of money for these voters’ when in reality, to engage meaningfully with Latino communities; you have to do much more than that.”

Poblete, the cab driver at the J. D. Vance rally in Tucson, felt similarly. “It’s nothing but promises so they can get elected, and that’s another problem. If you promise something, you have to at least try to keep it,” he said.

Brian Torres Suazo and Maria Polanco believe Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric will turn off Latino voters in their home state of Nevada.Credit: Farrah Tomazin

Others are firmly sticking with Harris. Mexican-American Maria Polanco, who works as a cashier hostess at the Rio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, calls Trump’s deportation policy “insane”. She is worried he will deliver on his first-term proposal to remove birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.

“They’re born here. Why should we take that right away from them?” she says. “They’re American citizens. We’re multicultural here; we’re people from everywhere, and that’s what makes the United States what it is now.”

Brian Torres Suazo, a 26-year-old food runner at the Westgate Resort in Nevada, believes Trump’s rhetoric won’t hold sway in the swing state.

“Las Vegas is one of the most diverse cities in the country,” he says. “I don’t think I know anybody that doesn’t have family from somewhere else in the world and many of the things he says about Latinos are pretty offensive to us.”

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