By taking more of the Hispanic vote than any Republican since the U.S. government created the ethnic category in 1977, President-elect Donald Trump has dismantled a coalition that the Left had expected to ride to power throughout the 21st century. That alone bodes well for conservative governance.
Voters who self-identified as Hispanic broke for Trump at an astonishing 46% rate, which means the actual percentage is likely higher if these early estimates hold. Hispanic men in particular voted for him at a 55-45 rate. These votes might have cost Vice President Kamala Harris the election.
Politically, this was a tsunami. Trump romped through the Rio Grande Valley, a hallowed corner of southeastern Texas tucked into the Mexican border, where he won all four counties, something no Republican had done in the past two centuries. All the counties are well over 90% Mexican-American, and Trump won one of them, Kenedy County, by 73%.
But the politics, which is downstream from the culture, is only one aspect of it. Far Left elements of the Democratic Party had convinced the rest of the party that the reason power was assured was that a “majority-minority” country would go along with plans to deconstruct American society as long as its “minority” members were induced to believe that a racist and oppressive country hated them.
That has now clearly run aground. Even the bitterest critics of what just took place with Hispanics admit that many Hispanics have now assimilated politically, identify their interests with those of the rest of their fellow Americans, and welcome being addressed as other Americans are.
“Many Latinos seem to find a sense of belonging in Trump’s otherism because he talks to them the same way he talks to white supporters,” scoffed 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega at CBS, as if this was a bad thing.
Over at MSNBC, the often-sour Maria Hinojosa deadpanned, “Latinos want to be white.”
Matt Yglesias was, as usual, much more thoughtful (hard not to be) when he posted on X on Nov. 8 that “Democrats’ Hispanic losses are driven by people with conservative views becoming [more] informed about the structure of American partisan conflict.”
Like the tale of the six blind men and the elephant, all of them have part of the truth (including the caustic Hinojosa, but only in the sense that Hispanics simply seek the assimilation she so despises).
Many Hispanics have always ticked the box for whites on the U.S. Census — and in fact, the U.S. Census for years counted them as white. “Hispanics” can be as white as Cameron Diaz and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), or of African descent, such as the MLB’s Juan Soto, or even Asian like Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru.
This classification began to change after the Office of Management and Budget in 1977 issued Statistical Policy Directive 15, which created the races and ethnicities we have today, including Hispanics, then a new term. These categories were slapped on the U.S. Census for the first time in the decennial census of 1980.
These changes were demanded by leftist activists who were not interested in collecting better data, but in creating a new group whose members they could then fill with grievances about the United States with a view to changing the country.
The perception that all Hispanics were “people of color” was the intent, because that would obstruct assimilation and would be the gateway to shoehorning this new group into the “oppressed vs. oppressor” narrative so favored by the ascendant cultural Marxists.
In my 2020 book, The Plot to Change America, I describe how in 1976, Public Law 94-311 paved the way for the OMB directive. It was “the first and only law in U.S. history that defines a specific ethnic group,” I quote the ethnographer Ruben Rumbaut as saying.
Public Law 94-311 maintained that (remember, “Hispanics” had not yet entered the lexicon) “a large number of Americans of Spanish origin or descent suffer from racial, social, economic, and political discrimination and are denied the basic opportunities they deserve as American citizens and which should enable them to begin to lift themselves out of the poverty they now endure.”
Therefore, what Hispanics had in common was neither ethnicity, race, nor language but being victims of discrimination. Victimhood was the bonding agent.
In an earlier book, A Race for the Future in 2014, I argued for conservatives to speak to Hispanics as they would to other Americans and fight the multiculturalism and balkanization of America that are such important arrows in the Left’s quiver. Vega may not like it, but Trump did do that to great success.
What we are seeing is that these voters are now matching their values with their votes. Three days after the election, political scientist Yamil Velez said, “There has been a significant demographic change, with Latinos in America increasingly native-born. These Latinos might behave much like their non-Hispanic white counterparts, such that they’re better sorted into the parties based on their ideology.”
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What needs to happen going forward is obvious. The U.S. Census Bureau under President Joe Biden has unearthed an Obama-era idea to make Hispanics into a category like a race — no longer just a simple ethnicity that allows Hispanics to choose a race — and create yet another category for people of Middle Eastern and North African background.
The Trump administration can put a stop to this foolishness. Indeed, it must. Follow the dismantling of the Democratic coalition by freeing Hispanics from the Left’s balkanizing boxes.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.