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Leguizamo’s sentiments, however, are representative of what many liberal Latinos believe: that they and the “Latino community” are synonymous, that the conservative policies they disagree with are “anti-Latino,” and even that, as Harry Reid put it in 2010, they “don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.” On “The Daily Show,” Leguizamo acknowledged that Latinos hold different political views, saying that “there are some of us that do support Trump.” But, in the next breath, he said, “In my family, we refer to them as the crazy uncle who doesn’t get invited to Thanksgiving.”
This is a line that liberal Latinos (like liberals of many backgrounds) repeat all the time, and it sums up their feelings toward conservative Latinos in general—that they are outsiders or, worse yet, sellouts or race traitors. But the twenty-eight per cent of Latinos who supported Trump in 2016, the thirty-eight per cent who supported him in 2020, and, if we’re to believe the recent polls, the forty-two per cent who might support him in 2024 represent millions of voters. If Leguizamo and other liberals have a genuine desire to understand how Latinos, writ large, view politics these days, they need to do more than rail against the falsehoods Trump spreads and his immigration policies. They need to listen to the reasons that Latinos give for supporting him.
Not surprisingly, Trump himself thinks he perfectly understands Latino voters. They want security, he told Acevedo, including border security and a crackdown on crime. Like other Presidents before him, both Republicans and Democrats, he has also argued that Latino business owners support him because he slashed financial regulations, lowered taxes, and helped them get loans and government contracts. To his Democratic opponents, who ask, in increasingly desperate tones, what a Trump victory would mean for the country, Trump, during a recent rally in the almost all-Latino city of Hialeah, Florida, offered an answer: “It means we’re gonna have strong borders, great education, you’re gonna be able to buy a house, we’re gonna have interest rates come down, we’re gonna have a great military, we’re gonna have safety and security.” Much of this is standard G.O.P. fare.
To put things in perspective, most Latinos support the immigration policies of Democrats over Republicans, but a recent postmortem on the 2022 midterms, by Equis Research, found that only about five per cent of the Latinos they surveyed identified immigration as their top concern. Moreover, Biden has earned some of his lowest marks from Latinos for his handling of immigration and border security, because he has continued some of Trump’s harshest policies, has been unable or unwilling to move comprehensive reform forward, and hasn’t done enough to secure the border—an issue on which, according to a recent Univision poll, a slightly larger percentage of Latinos trust Republicans than trust Democrats. Meanwhile, Latinos have always said that the economy is their top concern. This year, Latinos have expressed worries about inflation and the cost of living—especially food, rent, and health care—but they’re split on the question of who will do a better job of fixing it. Other issues have divided Latinos as well. A majority of Latinos support school choice, and about half of Latino evangelicals supported Trump in 2020.
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