The ‘Latino Vote’ During Neoliberal Crisis and Decline

Opinion for The Latino Newsletter

“54 percent of Latino men voted for Trump” is the statistic that has captured the attention and frustration of Democrats and liberals still reeling in disbelief that Donald Trump was re-elected in the 2024 presidential race. Even more shocking was seeing early exit poll figures showing Latino men second only to white men (60%) in their support for Trump, seemingly nudging out white women (53%) for the first time.

These NBC exit poll numbers have been offered as “proof” that Latino men did not strongly support Harris because of their deep-seated sexism and racism. “No, it wasn’t ‘the Economy, stupid,’” railed journalist Juan Williams against Latino male voters, arguing they just didn’t want a female president because, after all, it’s part of their long-held culture of machismo.

As a Latino sociologist who studies racism and social inequality and who grew up in a Mexican immigrant family and community in Los Angeles, I know first-hand how racist, sexist, and homophobic Mexican men (and women) can be. It’s an issue we tend to overlook within our own community, even among Latino scholars. Just two years ago, a racist audio leak involved three Latino L.A. city council members and a labor leader. So, these 2024 exit numbers seemed to further confirm the rightward trend among Latinos in the U.S.

However, as several Latino scholars and journalists quickly pointed out, voting patterns among Latinos in the U.S. also differ significantly based on ethnic and national backgrounds, immigrant histories, and the past and present relationship of the U.S. to their country of origin. From fleeing communism, remaining under U.S. territorial control, or serving as an endless supply of cheap disposable labor, these histories and experiences have generally correlated with Republican or Democratic support. And this heterogeneity among different communities of Latin American descent in the U.S. is something that aggregated and blanketed “Latino” or “Hispanic” survey data or polls do not capture.

According to recent disaggregated exit polls, these past divergent patterns remained consistent in the 2024 election. A majority of Cuban Americans (54%), for instance, voted for the Republican candidate, while a larger majority of Mexican Americans (63%) and Puerto Ricans (65%) voted for the Democratic contender. These disaggregated figures also show that a majority of Latino male voters (56%) and a larger number of Latina female voters (66%) went for Harris, who won the overall Latino vote by a solid 62-37% margin. (Editor’s note: More about that poll is here.)

These figures paint a very different picture compared to the NBC exit poll numbers regarding the Latino vote. Numbers that were shared in haste by Democrats and liberals eager to condemn and punish Latino voters, rather than confront the failure of the Harris campaign to bring more voters to the polls. While most Latinos who voted chose Harris, their participation in the 2024 election also dropped significantly from the 2020 presidential race.

As I tried to make sense of these conflicting figures and debates regarding the Latino vote, I took a moment to reconsider another recent presidential election with a female candidate in North America. One where Latino men also played a significant electoral role: Mexico.

Mexico Swings Left

The 2024 election of Claudia Sheinbaum, the left-wing candidate and now the first female president in Mexico’s history, is historic. Not only for Mexico, but for the entire continent. Sheinbaum won in a landslide. And her historic election brought a record number of Mexican voters to the polls, capturing a supermajority of votes from both Mexican women and men, and 60% of the overall electorate.

According to pre-election polls, 51% of Mexican men said they intended to vote for the progressive Sheinbaum of the Morena party, while 39% of Mexican men said they would vote for Xóchitl Gálvez, the conservative female candidate who represented a coalition front between the major and traditional Mexican parties, with the goal of defeating Sheinbaum.

Between support for Sheinbaum and Gálvez, 90% of Mexican men said they planned to vote for a female candidate, with only 10% saying they would vote for the male candidate, Jorge Álvarez-Máynez. Sheinbaum’s support was also largest among working-class voters (59%) versus middle-class voters (46%) who said they would vote for her in the 2024 Mexican presidential race.

In sharp contrast, the only two female candidates who have come close to winning in a U.S. presidential race have both lost to the same candidate: Donald Trump.

So, what made the Mexican case different?

It turns out it was talking about the (neoliberal) economy, stupid!

The rise of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the leader of the left-wing Morena Party, is a significant part of the story. As a new political party in Mexico since 2014, AMLO used his platform as party leader to combat political and judicial corruption, address economic inequality, and tell a story about the role and failure of neoliberalism in Mexican society, politics, and culture.

“I say this realistically and without ideological prejudice: neoliberal economic policy has been a disaster, a calamity for the public life of the country,” AMLO proclaimed during his 2018 inaugural presidential speech. 

“The hallmark of neoliberalism is corruption… privatization has been synonymous with corruption in Mexico. Unfortunately, this evil has almost always existed in our country, but what happened during the neoliberal period is unprecedented…” he went on. “Political power and economic power have fed and nourished each other, and the theft of the people's property and the nation's wealth has been established as a modus operandi… We really want to regenerate public life in Mexico.”

During his six-year presidency from 2018-2024, AMLO actively used the Mexican state to improve the lives of millions of working-class Mexicans.

“The State will take care of reducing social inequalities; social justice will no longer be pushed off the government's agenda,” AMLO declared, vowing that “Those who are born poor will not be condemned to die poor. All human beings have the right to live and be happy.”

Through the power of the state, AMLO lifted millions out of poverty, managed to significantly increase wages, and expanded retirement and social benefits while increasing and collecting taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

His political strategy turned out to be incredibly popular. AMLO left office earlier this year with an 80% approval rating in Mexico. His protégé, Sheinbaum, a Jewish Mexican woman and former mayor of Mexico City, who also recently made her support of Palestinians and her criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza public, promised to continue and to expand on this legacy, thanking Obrador in her victory speech as "a unique person who has transformed our country for the better."

Back in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Biden's approval rating has continued to tank as he leaves office. Harris didn’t outperform Biden, either. Although Trump received 75 million votes in the 2024 election as he did in 2020 (71% from white voters alone), it needs to be stressed that nearly 90 million people did not turn out to the polls in 2024. As others have noted, in a three-way race between Harris, Trump, and the couch, it seems the couch won the 2024 election.

Latino voters in the U.S., like most other groups, made it clear that the economy was their core concern leading up to the election. The cost of living/inflation (52%), jobs and the economy (36%), housing costs and affordability (27%), and health care costs (25%) were the top four concerns among Latino voters in this race, according to UnidosUS polling.

The Harris campaign maintained that the economy was strong and centered on a “politics of joy” rather than the everyday reality of working-class voters. But a “politics of joy” was beyond absurd, given that Harris promised to support “the most lethal military in the world” a year into Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, with the full support of the Biden and Harris administration, which cost Harris support from Muslim and progressive voters. 

By ignoring the day-to-day realities of working Americans living paycheck to paycheck, this strategy also failed to translate into voter enthusiasm and an electoral win for Democrats. And as neoliberal Democrats (and even some progressives) moved further to the right, on issues like immigration and courting Republican war criminals like Dick Cheney, tens of millions of voters stayed home.

The failure of the Harris campaign to mobilize working-class voters of all backgrounds prompted Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders to conclude “that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

Sanders, it is worth recalling, won major support from Latino working-class voters during the 2020 primaries, beating Biden in a landslide in states like Nevada, California, and Texas.  

Now, as Democrats and liberals lick their wounds after this massive election loss, they have resorted to bashing Latino voters like a political piñata, in order to downplay their own political shortcomings as an unpopular neoliberal party beholden to corporate interests and an imperialist war machine.

What’s Next

The Democratic Party establishment and Trump’s Republican Party represent two competing sides of the same neoliberal order in crisis and decline. Trumpism aims to ease this decline with hypernationalism, xenophobia, white nativism, and mass deportations to distract from the crisis of neoliberal capitalism.

Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment has no real alternative for a future beyond staying the course on neoliberalism, while increasingly relying on the “elite capture” of identity politics to avoid advancing a real progressive agenda and left-wing alternative that would mobilize working-class voters of all backgrounds in this country. Instead, they insisted or pretended that “Bidenomics” was a real solution to neoliberalism.

Clearly, it was not.

This realization has only confirmed that there is only one real electoral strategy left on the table if Democrats want to remain relevant as an alternative to Trumpism and the rise of fascism. The socialist ticket.

The Sanders campaign offered a glimmer of hope, the way AMLO and Sheinbaum are currently doing in Mexico. Even the centrist New York Times columnist David Brooks seems to think so. Back in 2020, Brooks adamantly opposed Sanders as an electoral alternative in the U.S., insisting he represented “the end of liberalism.” Now it appears Brooks has gone full “Bernie Bro,” admitting that perhaps the self-described Democratic Socialist “was right.”

But as we saw in 2016 and 2020, it was the Democratic establishment, not voters, who sidelined Sanders’ political rise, so as not to deliver on real substantive, material, and economic outcomes to improve the lives of working-class people. Given Bernie’s age and decline in popular support, it’s unlikely he will enter a presidential race again. Yet, no other progressive figure within the Democratic Party appears to be able to catalyze and replicate the same momentum right now. 

Instead, the failure of neoliberal Democrats has left us all, once again, with a vengeful Trump eager to retake power and “Make America” in his own image and that of his fellow billionaire and millionaire fascists.  

As Trump gears up to fulfill his promise to launch the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history, many liberals seem unbothered by this looming nightmare. Some even gleefully await this assault on Latino migrants as revenge for their supposed electoral betrayal. After all, liberals have also been primed to be numbed by the deportation of immigrants, as Obama still holds the record as deporter-in-chief. At least for now.

The more liberals and Democrats continue peddling their racist and elitist narratives that vilify Latino and working-class voters of all backgrounds, while failing to offer a political and economic alternative to neoliberal crisis and decline, the more these voters will continue to flock towards what they believe Trumpism has to offer.

And this reality is one that Democrats and liberals can only blame on themselves.

About the Author

Raúl Pérez is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of La Verne and author of The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanford University Press).

What We’re Reading

Mexico Responds to Proposed Trump Tariffs: Speaking of Mexico, Sheinbaum said this on Tuesday after the news that Trump wants to issue a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods: “President Trump, it isn’t with threats or tariffs that we resolve the migratory phenomenon or the abuse of drugs in the United States. What’s needed to confront these great challenges is cooperation and understanding.”

Immigrant Resentment: ProPublica filed a Tuesday story with immigrant voices who shared resentment towards Biden immigration policies as a reason why many Latinos voted for Trump.

Black Latinos and Trump: Over at The Grio, Natasha Alford featured the voices of several Black Latinos to discuss Trump’s 2024 electoral performance.

The Latino Newsletter welcomes opinion pieces in English and/or Spanish from community voices. You can email our publisher, Julio Ricardo Varela. The views expressed by outside opinion contributors do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of this outlet.