Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the role of Latino voters.
Senator Ruben Gallego spoke with David Frum:
One of the things we knew instinctively, because growing up Latino and working class: Latino men do not intently watch Univision, Telemundo. They don’t intently follow politics. They largely are disconnected from the normal avenues of—well, I would say that normal people kind of consume news and political news.
And one of the things that I emphasized on my campaign early on is a nontraditional way to reach these men, because you’ve got to understand the way these guys are. I mean, when I was in construction, I would wake up at 6 a.m., go to the site. Hopefully, it’d be done by 3 p.m. but probably not. So maybe you’re back at home by 5 p.m. You’re dirty as hell. You’re smelly as hell. You’re jumping in the shower, and then maybe, you know, you’re in time—you’ve made it home in time for dinner, right? You’re sitting down to dinner, and then you have probably a couple hours before you zonk out to start the next day.
Do you want to spend that time watching the news? Do you want to spend that time talking politics? No. You want to spend time with your family or with your friends, because your day sucked, and it’s going to suck again tomorrow. And so you do this rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
So where are they getting all their information from? Well, a couple places. Number one, they’re getting it from their other coworkers at worksites—which by the way, people forget when it comes to Latino men, the people they’re most likely to work with besides other Latino men are white working-class men, right? And white working-class men are very much politically involved and have a lot of political information that they’re getting. And they’re sharing it with their Latino coworkers, right?
And number two, they’re living off their phones through different social media, whether it’s Instagram, Snapchat, or all this kind of stuff, Twitter. So one of the things that we emphasize is trying to figure out how to get a message, a vibe, about who I was to these Latino male voters early on, so that way they understood, like, Ruben Gallego is a Democrat. Ruben Gallego says he’s for the working class. But then we also had a very strong cultural attachment. Like, He understands me. He actually worked at factories, worked in construction, understands the dignity of work, the responsibility of a man to his family, to provide for his family, and how important that is to me as a man.
And that kind of stuff, we are afraid to approach to get these men to start considering us as Democrats. And then, because we never talk about it, we never give them the dignity of allowing them to be family leaders and not making them feel bad about being family leaders. And then we’re surprised when, year after year, we don’t continue to have this conversation with us, they keep on moving away from us. And it’s a dumb trade-off, because we continue to do that because we think that somehow we’re going to piss off female voters.
And I don’t think that’s the case. Female voters are worried about their sons or daughters and their husbands. They’re worried about the fact that they’re becoming less social. They’re worried about the fact that they’re not actually being productive in life. And they want to have good husbands—heck, they want to have good ex-husbands that are involved with their kids’ lives, and they’re making good pay and paying their child support, things of that nature.
But for some reason, the Democrats have continued this trade-off, and it’s going to continue going until we realize: Making sure [of] people’s economic needs will cross all racial barriers and, if you do it rightly, will also cross these gender gaps that we’re seeing.
