S4 Ep6: ‘Orange Man Bad’ is Not Enough (with Ruy Teixeira)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Secret Podcast. Asked, I’m Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark. And this week, we are checking in with yet another group of voters that could decide the twenty twenty four election. His span voters. After Trump spent his term pushing for a border wall and separating children from families, to say nothing of his common during the twenty sixteen campaign, it seemed inconceivable that Trump would do better with Hispanics in twenty twenty than he did in twenty sixteen.

But against all odds, he did do better. If you only count the majority party candidates, Trump got thirty six percent of the Hispanic vote in twenty twenty, up from twenty nine percent in twenty sixteen according to catalyst data. A lot of that was due to the fact that thirty percent more Hispanics voted in twenty twenty than twenty sixteen. Something that is certainly reflected in our focus groups. Behind all these shifts are real voters, and today you’re gonna hear from some of them.

You’re also going to hear from some Biden voters who are considering abandoning the Democrats in twenty twenty four. My guest today is my friend Rui Tashara, senior fellow at the American enterprise Institute, co founder and politics editor of the Liberal Patriot, and co author with John Judith of the forthcoming book, where have all the Democrats gone? The soul of the party in the age of extremes. Ruby, thanks for being here.

Hey. Thanks for having me, Sarah.

Okay. So your book’s coming out November seventh. It’s about the Democratic party’s decline in support among working class voters. You lay out a blueprint for the Democrat to be more of a working class friendly party than they are now. So what lessons does history leave for Democrats right here in this moment?

Well, right at this moment, I think, since our subject of today’s discussion is Hispanic, I think that looking at the trends among Hispanic voters and the opinions, the views, the inclinations of Hispanic voters provides An important lesson, as you pointed out, the Democrats lost, you know, roughly sixteen margin points among Spanish, between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, despite all the stuff you mentioned about Trump, that’s telling you a lot, and it was bigger, substantially bigger among working class, Hispanic. Than it was, some on college educated Hispanic. And, of course, Hispanic are overwhelmingly working class. And if you look at how they’re trending now in recent polling, I mean, we’ve see those margins. Again, we don’t know what’s gonna happen in the election, but judging from the polling, those margins for the Democrats are coming down even further.

We’ve seen polls where the Democrats certainly up like five, ten, fifteen points, among Hispanics, And we see that they give Biden an absolutely terrible rating on inflation on immigration on the economy. You name it. These are not happy campers, and they don’t see the Democratic party and the administration of Joe Biden is necessarily having done stuff that’s in their interests. And then, you know, there’s a wide panoply of cultural issues that we talk about a lot in the book that that are really not congenial to a lot of Hispanic voters, especially working class voters. You know, they actually don’t believe America is a structurally racist white supremacist society.

They reject that proposition. They are not enthusiastic about, some of the activity of the Democrats around transgender issues. They don’t think that biological voice participate in girls teams. They’re actually not that interested in the green transition. Therefore, wind and solar energy has everybody else’s, but they actually think that there should be a mix going forward of fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear, and so on.

So That’s just the tip of the iceberg, really, of how a lot of the views of working class Hispanic voters really do depart in important ways. From what’s at least perceived as the center of gravity of the Democratic party and some of the things the Biden administration has done and said. So long story short, If the Democrats are thinking they can surge back among hispanics based on Biden having been president for four years, It’s a little hard to see that in the data. And in fact, it appears there’s considerable potential for further erosion because Democrats image is just not anymore of being as it were the tribunal, the working class of all races. And ethnicities.

It’s become quite different. It’s become much more identified with the views of white college educated, liberalish people, and the coastal enclaves, and it adopts a sort of style of a rhetoric and presentation that is foreign to a lot of these voters. And they’re just not sure to put a bluntly Democrats have their back. And I think we saw a lot of them in those focus groups, Sarah, that we’re gonna, hear from today.

The focus groups were extremely fascinating. I learned a lot from them. And I I think maybe just to say it’s an overall observation. I was just really struck by how much these voters sounded like your average two time Trump voters. If I hadn’t known that we were screening for an all Hispanic group, they were pretty indistinguishable.

But, you know, one of the key points in your book is that after Barack Obama won reelection in twenty twelve, There was this kind of conventional wisdom that demographics had shifted in a country to such a degree that Democrats were headed for sort of a durable majority. But that hasn’t happened, in spite of everything about Donald Trump, the Republican Party Sheriff Hispanic has just continued to grow on his watch, And so when we talked to these Hispanic voters who didn’t vote for Trump in twenty sixteen, but did in twenty twenty, And on this podcast, we often call them reverse flippers. And some of them, like, didn’t even vote in twenty sixteen. Some, you know, went third party. Some voted for Hillary.

But they talked about how they warmed up to Trump, how they learned to love Trump, and the Republican Party in general. Let’s listen.

I couldn’t vote in twenty sixteen. I would have voted Trump. Actually, everybody that I told didn’t believe me, like, oh, he’s not gonna win. And I said, he’s gonna win because you’re underestimate actually the values that real America has. You know, there are real Americans that love hearing America that love seeing flag.

I mean, and I used to when I came on vacation, I got all the American flight was such a good thing. And and anybody that’s been in the citizenship Sarah Longwell, should agree with me that every American should go. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.

I’ve never thought Trump was gonna win. I really thought bush or whoever. Even the, governor from Ohio that was running, I liked him a lot too. I liked everybody, but Donald Trump. I never really thought Donald Trump could be any good.

And so I didn’t vote for him, and I definitely was a voting democrat. And so I just voted for that guy because I wanted to vote. I’ve been voting since, you know, I was able to. Now I voted for him in twenty twenty because he kicked ass. And I thought he was the best president and did great for this country.

If I would have had the ability to vote, I might have voted for Hillary. I liked her. Thank god. I didn’t have the ability to vote at that moment. So then in twenty twenty, I did vote for Trump for several reasons, not that I’d like the guy.

I don’t. I mean, I’m moving straight up front. I don’t. But I dislike even more the Democrat philosophy. So thanks for no thanks.

So I did vote against not only Biden. I voted against Democrat.

On the twenty sixteen, I voted for Hillary. Yeah. Because when Trump went out and said, all those bad things about Mexicans, I lived a long time in Mexico. I love Mexico. I love Mexican people.

Obviously, everyone love Mexican food. So I was shocked, you know. But in twenty twenty, I ordered for Trump because He’s a businessman. He knew what he was doing, and he did it very well. I mean, where he was president, he did it great.

I mean, I was astonished. I was astonished. I I didn’t think that I would be a pro from, but I was. And right now, I’m seeing all the stuff that I happening right now, not only economic, but they have, like, a agenda prepared, to make all the things spent here and all the corruption that you find in the government and the congress. Oh, man.

It makes you feel like bombing them. You know?

Okay. So I should note, every single person in this reverse flipper group, they plan on voting for Trump again in twenty twenty four. They are ready for Trump again. So to what do you attribute, Ruby? Trump’s major inroads with hispanics, because I hear in these comments a real pro trump vibe, right, a real, like, trump specifically.

I I like him And I didn’t like it before, but now I do. What do you attribute that to?

Sometimes when you wanna know what people mean, you’ll you’ll listen to what they say. Right? So What they said is, hey, the Trump is a straight shooter. He made things work. The economy was really good.

He stood up to other countries. You know, he was patriotic. I didn’t like him to begin with, but now I like him because he’s doing what needs to be done, and he’s not just a standard issue politician, And by god, we need more of that kind of thing. It’s really interesting to think, Sarah, like, okay, we’re listening to this. You know, it’s hard not to sort of get it a little bit when you listen to these voters, but I think for most Democrats, this is a foreign country.

They don’t get it. To them, it’s just so obvious Trump is awful. And nobody in their right mind with the decent values would vote for him. But that’s not the way a lot of working class voters see it and including working class Hispanics. And then until then, unless, Democrats start to understand that it’s actually quite possible.

For working class voters to like Trump for some reasons that don’t have anything to do with them being a stone cold racist reactionary or you know, neanderthal troglodyte, and I think they’re gonna struggle with these voters because these voters not incorrectly, I think, believe that Democrats don’t understand them, look down in them and can’t understand where they’re coming from. And this is these are good examples. You know, if you listen to these voters, you can see why they got the point of view. They do. If you want them to vote for you and not for Trump, you gotta make a better case.

You can’t just say, Trump bad, orange man bad, orange man fascist, you must vote for Democrats because it’s not gonna work.

Okay. So We definitely had some signs from the groups that the reverse flippers identify more at the GOP, and they considered themselves to have more conservative values. And so they identify this cultural decline Mhmm. Which they seem to sort of associate with Democrats. Let’s listen.

And one of the biggest things I’ve seen is a crisis in morality, the Democrat side. Republicans are not perfect. You know, they got their errors where they fall short, but the Democrats side, like some of you were saying, the whole deal with transgenderism with tolerance but they won’t tolerate too. It’s not on their side. Things like that.

This is a crisis of morality, California. I work in the mortgage industries. I do loans throughout the US, and I just see, you know, a difference in where people are buying homes. And there’s a good reason for it. That’s why I moved to Texas.

I was in Florida before, and was really really the only two states I’ve been seeing that are still, you know, holding on to a lot of their Republican values, whereas Washington in Oregon, California. Just in crisis mode right now.

People don’t care about giving customer service. People just It’s not about just minding their own business. It’s about not being friendly, not giving, you know, any thought about anything about anything. You know, I’m just going to work, clock in, clock out, bye bye, and that’s it.

But, I mean, the social morals are bad. You see every city. I mean, I live in Fort Worth, and Fort Worth is beautiful. But you go to Dallas, which is available in Park City, and it’s terrible. It’s ugly.

It’s dirty. It’s smelly. It’s like going to New York. So you see it. I mean, they have politics that actually don’t work for the people.

So, Ray, a big complaint in your book is that Democrats have taken this mix of sort of moderate economics and elite liberal cultural norms, like that’s what they’ve kinda put together, but you would prefer more cultural moderation in liberal economics for the sake of winning elections. But there are also a lot of voters Democrats can’t afford to lose in twenty twenty four who do want the more fiscally conservative so the liberal mix and sort of how do you balance that within the coalition?

Well, that’s a good question. I actually think the the numbers of people these days who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal is not that large. There’s actually much more higher correlation now between social liberalism and economic liberalism, that most of, for example, the white college educated liberals who are now the you know, increasingly a base of the Democratic party, a burgeoning group who, in many ways, sets the tone for the party. These are people of pretty liberal in economics too. It’s just they’re super liberal and social issues.

And, you know, as the number of studies have established, a lot of these voters in some ways give priority or salience to their social liberalism, and they’re willing to punish Democrats by voting for other more liberal democrats and primary on. You don’t adhere to these things, and they’re certainly willing to go after them on social media. And what have you? So my view is that Yeah. I mean, if the Democrats moved to the center on cultural issues discarded some of these who trade super liberal social approaches, and more sounded like they had a Norway voter approach to this.

They might annoy a lot of these college educated liberals, but I actually don’t believe that these college educated liberals are gonna go vote for Donald Trump. There may be some attrition in terms of not voting or voting for a third party candidate, but I think it would, my view, at least, to be more than made up by doing much better. Among working class voters, because that is where the bulk of the voters are. That’s where the Democrats have been losing voters. That’s how Trump is gonna win.

If he does win, it just seems to me the road is clear to taking a different approach to the balance of issues in the Democratic party and how those issues are presented. I mean, cultural moderation is extremely popular. Those white college graduates are are moderates. Right? I mean, there’s a good continuum that’s liberal, and they vote like at Soviet levels for the Democrats, but that’s not where the action is, and that’s not where the voters who are likely to move are, and is certainly true among non white voters.

Right? Non wide voters, especially working class voters, are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative. And I think they would welcome the Democratic party moving away from some of its positions on crime and immigration, on race, and gender on schools, and what have you? But they just want normal conduct in America. They want ideology out of the schools.

They want crime stop. They want the border control. They want things to be in order. I mean, in a way, look back on how Biden ran in twenty twenty. It was like, I’m gonna restore normality to America.

I’m gonna get the economy moving, and we’re gonna be normal. You know, everything’s gonna get back to normal. The problem for the Democrats to an untrivial extent at this point is that people look at the country know, under the Democratic administration, and it doesn’t seem normal. There was too much inflation. There’s too much crime.

There’s too much disordered in the cities. The border is clearly out of control. The culture wars around race and gender are raging, and nobody seems to want it compromised, including the Democrats. And people are sick of it. And I think this redounds to the benefit, not in the Democrats, but of the other side who can run against the incumbent administration.

In a way that puts him in a great deal of danger despite, you know, the fact that a lot of people really hate trump. And in fact, that the Republicans ran like Nikki Haley, she might clean up. But if they’re gonna run Trump, you know, he’s maybe not their best candidate, but, boy, he can take advantage of a lot of this fiscal intent.

People who listen to me a lot know that I I take your premise to a degree. Mhmm. Like, I think that Democrats need to do much more to moderate in order to attract sort of the big broad pro democracy coalition that can stave off this dangerous version of the Republican Party And people sometimes will be like, of course, you think that. You’re Republican. So, like, you want the Democrats to be more moderate.

And I’ll just say, like, in this particular moment, what I want is for Democrats to deliver sustained electoral defeat to Republicans so that it has an incentive to change from its current course.

Mhmm.

And so I think a lot about this about this question of how do you attract more voters and not lose voters? When I was listening to these voters, I was struck by, like, I said, how they sound like regular publics because they were mad about the economy. They for sure were. And they talked about sort of their cultural values, which were somewhat more conservative. These voters sort of seemed to have the same type of, like, right wing grievance that’s not always steeped entirely in reality.

Like, the culture wars that you just referenced, like, Ron DeSantis is driving a lot of the culture wars. Like, Republicans are stoking the culture wars in such a way. Like, Joe Biden has never said that he thinks biological males should play women’s sports, and he has never said defund the police, He has been good on Israel. And so, like, I guess it was clear to me listening to this group that they ingest a lot of right wing media. They gave by no credit.

They said the economy is absolutely awful. And, obviously, I hear this from all manner of voters that, you know, inflation is tough, but, like, Joe Biden is sort of culturally moderate and doesn’t seem to be winning over these voters. And so I guess I’m wondering How much of it is truly an alienation from the mainstream Democrats and how much it is that like these are actually right wing voters who have moved into a right wing media ecosystem, and that’s just the world they’re living in now.

Well, I mean, I’m always very cautious about trying to, attribute people’s views to simply, you know, they’re manipulated by whatever media that they absorb. I mean, one could make the same argument about liberal views on those social issues or issues in general. I mean, people tend to ingest media that they feel is sympathetic to their point of view, and those media are typically not completely unbiased. So if your view of the culture wars is fundamentally that the conservatives are prosecuting it and the Liberals have all the correct positions, you can just listen to coverage all day long that will reinforce that, because liberal media will take the craziest news of people on the right and amplify them and basically make it sound like a liberal position on x is obviously the correct, tolerant, and humane one. But that might not be true either.

I mean, to my mind, Sarah, I mean, one has to be careful about falling into what we call the Fox News fallacy, where a Fox News is raising an issue about what’s going on in the schools or what going on with crime in the city, so what’s going on with immigration at the border, this is a merititious deceptive meme that’s being injected into the body politic by conservative media, and it just has no real purchase on reality. People aren’t really upset about stuff that’s going on in the real world. They’re being made to be upset by the conservative media. And we reject that proposition. I think there’s a real problems that are going on that real people see and real people are worried about.

I mean, just take the issue of transgenderism, which, of course, is a real hot button issue. The problem isn’t that Biden comes out and says, I think that biological boys who say their girls are the same as girls, it’s just that the slant and practice of administration of the Democrats who make up his party are like pretty much a hundred percent on board with the so called gender affirming care approach. Right? I mean, this is just true down the line. You’ll go with his his assistant, surgeon general, who said that the whole gender medicine thing is all settled science.

Nobody should object to this. Democrats and states all over the country have basically and it really literally laid down the law on this. And who is associated with the view that, essentially, gender is self declared. And that anybody who says a man who says they’re a woman. They’re exactly the same.

They’ve treated the same. There should be no, biologically sex segregated spaces. Gender affirming medical care should be available pretty much almost on demand to children. I mean, people are really concerned about these issues. And we can argue about what the correct moderate approach might be to these issues, but it’s not just being made up by Fox News.

People are upset about this, and Democrats are inevitably and rightly associated with one wing of that debate. It doesn’t matter that Biden doesn’t give an address every week about how he believes in gender affirming care. His party is inevitably associated with. The same thing is true of issues around crime, around bail reform, around, you know, the sort of harm reduction approach in cities, which results in people openly taking drugs in the middle of city streets. You have mentally ill people on the street, It doesn’t matter that Biden says he’s for controlling the border when New York is getting six hundred additional migrants a day, and they’re freaking out because they can’t take care of these people.

Mean, we saw that in some of those Hispanic focus groups, people who live in and around New York complaining Yeah. No. About the migrant situation being out of control. So I I just think Sarah, we have to be very tearful about ascribing these views to simply being manipulated by the conservative media. Okay.

So I’m gonna get to the Fox News’ fallacy, specifically. We could pick this part back up But to get back to your point, which I think I agree with broadly, although I think sometimes I would disagree with, like, the level of emphasis.

Fair enough.

But let’s talk about the term Latinx Mhmm. Because this is one that’s like a personal annoying one for me, and that’s a term that’s definitely a symptom of the elite cultural norms that you’re discussing here. And one of which the voters in our groups were kind of perplexed by. So let’s listen to how they thought about Latinx and how they think too much tokenization is creeping in around these identity politics.

I don’t know what it means.

Me either.

Same. Same.

It’s all that on a thing that I was filling out. I was like, what is in Latinx?

I mean, democrat party holder had is divide and conquer. Divide and conquer. By whoever, women, with men, with friends, with gays, with black, with Latinos. I mean, they try to apply to Latinos with the Latin X stuff. And if you’re like, you’re not Latin X, but Latinos.

I mean, don’t put me any other name or any other box. This is not gonna work with us.

Don’t you say Hispanic? It doesn’t have an overnight.

Yeah. It’s

stupid. It’s stupid. Not stupid.

I just feel that they’re targeting just like they targeted blacks, you know, because even in schools, I mean, you you kinda happen to Spanish now for the younger people because there’s a lot Hispanic in the United States now. We’re almost approaching, I’d say, forty, sixty percent population. I just feel that they’re targeting and they use Hispanic as a ploy in the Democratic Party.

When we were doing this group, we asked them how they felt about being a sort of sought after demographic in politics, And we we actually heard concerns about too much homogenization. One Democratic voter said they were from South America, others were from Mexico, but they said they see us all as brown, meaning that a wide range of cultures from different countries are lumped together into being Hispanic. And the progressive theory of the case does seem to be that you can win these voters over basically by playing to identity politics. So how can groups that wanna, when these kinds of voters back, speak broadly to Hispanics without falling into this trap, or can they not?

Well, what would be wrong with, taking a universalistic, color blind approach to social policy? What would be wrong with what the Democratic party has traditionally stood for? Which is anti discrimination, tolerance, and uplift for working in middle class people of all races. What would be wrong with that? Why is there a necessity?

To promote in any way, endorse identity politics. This makes no sense to me. We can see from the way Hispanic react to this. This is not how they think of themselves. I mean, I’ve written in various places.

I think the Democrats made a huge mistake lumping in Hispanic with so called people of color, And assuming that, like, all people of color, they feel oppressed by being non whites and white supremacist society, and they’re victims of structural racism, And, really, that’s what they care about. They care about the fact that they’re oppressed as non whites. That’s not what they care about. Hispanics are a hardworking upwardly mobile patriotic constituency who cares mostly about their kids, their community, having a decent job getting health care. I mean, this is what they care about.

Don’t get up in the morning and think, oh my god. I live in this dystopian hellhole called the United States where I’m the victim of structural racism. That’s not remotely close to how they think about the world. And I think, you know, it’s time to go back to the future. Democrats have had their greatest success when they were viewed as and were the party of the people.

Of the common man enrollment in America without fracturing people into identity groups. You know, at times, it’s been hard to do this. Right? Ball has been dropped in many ways. America has both a good and a bad aspects to its history, but that is no excuse for giving up on universalistic norms of uplift of anti discrimination.

We’re all Americans. Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, you know, promulgated this term a long time ago called Omni Americans. We’re all Americans, we’re we’re a mix of all kinds of different culture and other influences, and that’s great. But we’re all part of one country. You know, we’re all in this together as it were.

And we should basically emphasize what we have in common, not that we don’t. Again, historically, that was a Democratic Party brand. And the brand that’s associated with the greatest success. And I think it’s been a tragedy that Democrats have discarded this potent weapon and this potential unifying force.

So in the book, your book, one problem you lay out for Democrats losing working class voters is that they’re resistant to policies that will reduce illegal immigration and are supportive of bringing a lot of what you call unskilled workers into the country. Our reverse flipper group had some strong feelings on immigration policy and who should be coming into the country and when. Let’s listen.

I had a friend that he lives in Japan. I remember that he told me something that I really made my mind, like, start thinking in a different way. And he told me, like, in Japan, if you wanna go to Japan and stay there, you have to do it the in the right way. I mean, you have to go there, ask for permit, learn the language, and everything because that’s the respectful way to do it.

I’m originally from Venezuela too, and I’ve seen socialism taken over. I saw it taken over, Venezuela. I saw it happen in Columbia. I saw it happen in Chile and Brazil. America was the last freedom standing in the world.

It was the the country everybody wanted to go. I’m pissed. Even when the quantity of Venezuelaists that are coming through the border and the quality of the Venezuelanists that are coming on the border. Even me being in Venezuela, I’m I’m not afraid. But saying it is wrong.

The quality of people is terrible because it’s the people raised by this Communist Party.

I don’t know if you’ve seen a lot of immigration. People Come there yet? The immigrants, but we are seeing a lot of panhandlers now who cannot speak English. Now I think on an American based citizen, part. They’re throwing things at them.

I don’t think that’s right. I think we need trump back. I think he had us going the right way, even though he was kind of blunt. And I never thought I would vote for him, but I did.

So like I said at the top, Trump’s immigration talk in twenty sixteen was thought to be poisoning the well, for the GOP with Hispanic voters, What is the conventional wisdom missing about some Hispanic views on immigration? Because I gotta tell you, These Hispanic groups, this was the thing that blew me the way the most. They were anti immigration. They sound a lot like other Republican voters where they talk about coming the right way. But they have a lot of negative feelings about too many people coming into the country.

Right. Yeah. I mean, well, this is related to the Democrats mistake. About, well, let’s just all think of those people of color, this undifferentiated block in all aspects. They assume they’re immigration voters.

Right? I mean, this was sort of part of the Montra after twenty twelve was that, you know, we did so well among Hispanics. They’re part of the burgeoning American majority. And they’re on our side because you know, we’re on the side of immigrants. Therefore, Democrat should stand for the maximally tolerant approach to immigration, and, we don’t wanna say anything that might imply we’re gonna harden people who are trying to come into the country or legal immigrants of any kind.

And we saw that in twenty sixteen and onward, where the Democrats start really talking about border security. They started referring to Obama as a reporter in chief. And the the theory of all this was that because hispanics are, you know, from an immigrant background, depends on the generation how far back, but, you know, They live in communities with a lot of immigrants. They were immigrants themselves at one point, perhaps I mean, because of that, they will vote on the basis of immigration. The immigration policy they want is a lax open, tolerant approach.

It’s just not the case. I mean, these are Hispanic citizens who are talking to who can vote. They’ve gone through the mill. They’ve been here for a while, and who knows how long, but their families may go back a while, but their view on America is America’s a land of opportunity. Where people should come here and take advantage of it, work hard, do it the right way.

And the idea that you should be able to stroll across the border, declare asylum, and then be bus somewhere else and, receive social services and the like and maybe even have access to a job. It’s just it doesn’t compute for them. That’s not the way they feel they live their life. That’s not what they feel America’s about. And so it’s just been a colossal mistake to think If Democrats wanna continue receiving the majorities, they do among Hispanics and build those majorities, they must continue to have a very lacks open immigration policy, and they don’t wanna say much about border security because, you know, as a famous yarn sign says, no human being is illegal, Right?

So, I mean, this is a kind of frankly baloney that has, you know, become quite popular and democratic activist circles, including a lot of the ad groups that purported to speak on, you know, in the name of hispanics. And I think when you drill down to what actual, you know, existing voters think who are hispanic, They do not have those points of view. They do not think the border should be relatively uncontrolled. They do think people should come in the right way. They aren’t for a lot more illegal immigration.

Now they may be for people being treated humanely at the border, you know, when they’re encountered, that’s fine. They may believe that there’s a need for something to be done for the illegal immigrants already in the country. There needs to be, say, some sort of path to citizenship or some sort of reform that would move us in that direction. That can all be true, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want border security and a crackdown on people who are basically gaming the system and coming into the country. And doing it the wrong way.

Like, this is just the the standard point of view that a lot of these voters have, and, I think Democrats have more to their peril.

Yeah. So it’s so standard that actually, I wanna give you a quick taste of another group we talked to for this show. So these are Hispanic voters who voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But who are undecided about twenty twenty four. And they brought up immigration policy a lot as one of the reasons why they were undecided.

Let’s listen.

To me, this is mainly the result of, like, COVID and all the inequalities that it brought up to the surface that were already there, but now they’re just more prevalent. I don’t think this is by him. Yeah. I don’t think he’s handled it correctly, but this would have happened with any other president. This is years in the making.

The fact that they haven’t had some type of immigration form in, like, decades. It’s just ridiculous. That at the same time, open borders just doesn’t work anymore. I mean, I am an immigrant myself, and so is my entire time. So for me to say this, it actually pains me, but to draw your mind at some point if this cannot continue to happen.

I think Mexico is just taking advantage of this policy that they just send me the derelict over and, you know, in the eighties when I, like I said,

I immigrated my cousin. And I had to put up five thousand dollars back then. It was a lot of money. But his stipulations was that he was gonna be a businessman. He was gonna be a asset to us.

The only reason I would ever entertaining the idea of voting for comp is because during the comp administration for border crossing, which may be around like, thirty people coming a month. Now the numbers were well within the thousands coming a month. And that’s not fair for those who are trying to immigrate to this country following the laws of applying.

So I I gotta say It is striking to listen to recent immigrants. Several of them talked about not being able to vote in twenty six weeks. They hadn’t gotten their citizenship yet. It is just wild to me to hear so many people talk about, like, well, we needed the border wall. And Mexicans are, you know, not sending their best.

And I understand sort of saying, boy, as somebody who went through the immigration process myself, Like, it’s pretty messed up. And let’s talk about it. But what they’re specifically saying is they do not, like, the Democrats policy of, like, letting more people in or, like, what they seem to be open borders, which Joe Biden does not have an open borders policy. But I I promise we’re gonna get into some of the the Fox news. So, but, like, I was blown away by these statements and who they were coming from.

Like, for somebody being like, I’m Venezuelan. Don’t let any more Venezuelans in. Like, what do you make of this?

Well, I think one way to think about it is to cast our minds back to debates about immigration policy in the past. Than, like, the seventies, eighties, nineties. I mean, most people today don’t realize it. Don’t remember, and would never have experienced it, but traditional Democratic party position on immigration was actually pretty tough. That immigration was perceived.

If it’s uncontrolled, this putting downward pressure on wages, as putting pressure on social services, and it was not at all in the interests of the working class. To have lax integration policy. That if people come into the country illegally and they Bulwark working, there should be an E verify system. The Jordan commission was all over Right? I mean, it’s not that long ago that the Democrats policy started departing from you know, the idea of borders have to be strictly controlled.

We have to really contain illegal immigration. If there’s a legal immigration, we should try to do something about it. In terms of the people in the country who have jobs who are here illegally. I mean, there was a whole, you know, effort to to regularize the immigration system and to bring it under control, but it kinda basically got blown up in the two thousands. And the Democratic Party itself changed it position where it was no longer so concerned with stopping illegal integration.

It was concerned with, you know, sort of what do we do with the people already here? We need a big reform on that. This was not the labor position and not the democratic position until relatively recently. And look, we don’t just go back to the Obama administration. They had a much tougher position on immigration than Democrats do today.

There’s just no question that the Biden policies and approach clearly was more flaxer than the Trump approach. It clearly sent a signal to people who wanted to come here and tons of people wanna come here. Basically, the the administration tried to present it as we’re gonna be more humanitarian, we’re gonna be nicer. But the way the signal was read across Latin American, Central American, a lot of other places was if you come, it will be easier to get in. And that turned out to be true.

So this is not to the liking of most Americans at this point, including a lot of Hispanics, including especially working class, Hispanic, so they don’t see it in their interest to have what seems to be a quasi, at least open border. And I think Democrats just need to accept that that people really do want border security. There is a very small constituency in this country for plazie open borders for basically the policy they currently have. And that’s why Biden is a twenty three percent rating on handling border security. But the real constituency for let them all come is basically white college educated liberal democrat That’s a constituency.

It isn’t Hispanic at this point. It’s the people who are most liberal in the Democratic party who have essentially adopted a dogma that border should essentially be as open as possible, and we should make it as easy as possible to integrate here and if they’re here, we have to take care of them and so on. Whereas, of course, no country in the world, you know, has uncontrolled borders. No country in the world thinks it’s okay for people to come, you know, if they want and just hang out and then get services and so on. So mean, again, back to being a spokesman for the ordinary American.

What the Democrats are doing in immigration isn’t that. And we see that in, again, in these focus groups of people who know, some of whom are obviously very sympathetic to the Democrats who just who just don’t buy it, and who are Hispanic, supposed to be the the burgeoning constituency for the Democratic party moving forward. So I think Democrats, I made this argument, and I’ll make it time and again, and I’ll make it time and again in the future. They need to really cut bait with a lot of the people who push a lot of these positions on these issues, like integration that are not popular not substantively workable that are a drag on their political prospects, including what we’re talking about here, about us with Hispanic voters. Easy to say harder to do.

I realize.

Look, we could do a whole hour or day or lots and lots of time on immigration. I I do feel strongly as somebody who is pro immigration for the United States America. I think that immigration has been it’s like the thing that we do here. It’s how we’ve built this country aside from early on when people were brought here against their will, I, like, I am proud of the fact that lots of people want to come here. I’ve always taken that as a positive.

Mhmm. And I think that we need a system that allows people to come here where it doesn’t take fifteen years to become an American citizen, and we know who’s in the country. And we do have borders. And it feels like this is one of those issues that Both sides have just become committed to not solving and, like, kicking the can down the road and nobody wants to actually do Bulwark. But I know you and I have been in a lot of rooms together where I, I make this case as well, that Democrats do not realize how vulnerable they are in immigration.

And I think it’s one of the things that people don’t realize that this was what made Trump that just accelerated him to the top. The wall was just sort of like a metaphor for taking immigration seriously and making it a central part of the campaign, and that is what people were attracted to. And, like, the thing about saying, like, immigration stuff broadly is that There is a nativist cohort. There is a cohort that that has, like, racial reasons for not liking it. But then there’s also sort of a broad, normie middle that is just like, well, obviously, we should have borders and, obviously, we should know who’s in the country.

And you can’t just let people pour across the border. And that is true of Hispanic voters, and I do think this is something Democrats are gonna have to grapple with. Don’t think they realize the electoral price that it is costing them to seem derelict on the border. Finally, on this Fox News fallacy, specifically in relation to the democratic Hispanics, these guys are not watching Fox News. Like, the reverse flippers who were voting for Trump.

I think these guys are watching a lot of Fox or listening to a fair amount of right wing media. I think a lot of, like, right wing talk radio is, like, going on in places like Miami and other places with, like, big, large, Hispanic populations. That said, like, the Hispanic dams aren’t that’s not, I think, what they’re immersed in, and they still had a lot of concerns. About the border. I think you’ve kind of already articulated your Fox News fallacy, but I do agree that I listened to Dem’s often just reach for Fox News as an explanation for everything.

And, like, only a few million people are watching Fox News. You really can’t blame everything on it. And it does, I think, discount the lived experience of a lot of people who are frustrated about things that, like, Democrats don’t really want them to be frustrated about.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, again, the most parsimonious explanation for my typically, people might view x and said, this is how they interpret their own experience, the things they’ve heard, you know, what’s going on in their community or the city that’s near them or their state, people are complex, and they have complex ways of processing information. Some rely on Fox News. Most people don’t.

But people’s opinions by and large on big issues like this are driven by the realities of the world around them and how they choose to interpret it. Now, loyal Democrats, partisan Democrats, prototypical white college educated liberal level, look at the same data as it were and have a very different conclusion. But these other voters, they may look at what’s going on at the border, and they say, basically, people have been pouring across the border. It’s just a fact. People have been pouring into all kinds of different areas of the country and are causing social disorder and Nobody knows what to do with them.

And people look at that and say, what the hell? This is a real problem. So they don’t need Fox News to tell them that, even though Fox News may cover. And, you know, one might add at this point that just like it’s the case that Fox News may not cover some things that make Republicans look really bad. But it will be covered on MSNBC.

And therefore, you know, if you want information about X, you might wanna look at MSNBC. The same thing is true of Fox News. Fox News will cover things that, you know, a lot of the sort of center left media will not. And therefore, you know, again, this is providing people with data. It’s not all bias.

It’s not all bias all the way down on either side. There’s always glimmers of truth, facts that are being reported, things that are being put into the complex machine that is the views of ordinary people on on big issues. I think it’s just really lazy for a lot of Democrats to of course, it makes them feel good. Right? I mean, why do people believe this crazy stuff?

Why don’t they like us Democrats? It’s Fox News. They’re just being lied to. It’s disinformation. They’re being manipulated.

Otherwise, they would see how great we are. So I think this is just stupid, really, and it shows a real misunderstanding of people. And how they make up their minds about things and a certain contempt almost.

Yeah. I mean, Fox News is full of garbage and poison. The extent to which just take the election. And to be clear, a bunch of this reverse flippers, the twenty twenty trump voters, they all thought the election was stolen. That’s a lie.

It’s a lie that Fox News perpetrates.

Yeah. No. That’s trash. I’m just saying everything on Fox News isn’t made up. Some things are.

Some things aren’t. Right? So it’s like any other news source. I mean, Fox News is particularly egregious on some aspects, but it’s just not the case that everything on Fox News is a completely made up, Meritricia’s story about some awful thing with Democrats never really did. Just like it’s true on MSNBC, that not everything on MSNBC, that sounds terrible for the Republicans is made up, though, occasionally, it might be.

Right? So I’m not here to defend Fox News as a great news source that we should all listen to religiously and believe everything is set. All I’m saying is that, you know, Fox News like a lot of conservative media, cover some things that the left media will not, and there is there’s truth content in there at times that is digested by the people who watch it and then it’s disseminated out. So I really I just refuse to take the position that nothing on Fox News is true and everything that’s on MSNBC is. I just don’t think that’s the way the world works.

And again, I think it short changes the complicated way in which people digest information and make up their minds about things.

I don’t think you have to create parity

Mhmm.

Between Fox News and MSBC to sort of acknowledge that the media that people are immersed in, their media silos make a big difference. And one of the things I wanna make sure people get out of this, because it’s something that I get out of listening to these focus groups,

Mhmm.

Is how much these Hispanic voters

Mhmm.

Sound to me now. They sounded like a regular Trump voting group. Uh-huh. And the extent to which they are imbibing right wing media, if not, Fox News. Like, Fox News is just one thing.

I think part of the issue with Fox News is that people reach for it all the time when actually there’s just a whole network of talkers out there. Many of them Hispanic. But like there’s Spanish right wing talk radio now. And that is clearly in here. And I I wanna get to this this last segment

because this is

the part that actively made me angry. And I wanna know what you think about it.

Okay.

So this group of reverse flippers, which to me, was just a really wild group. So we heard a couple people They were talking about how terrible things were in America. There was a lot of, like, it’s so bad here, and they were saying it was so bad. They were considering leaving the United States in a country that many of them chose to immigrate to. Let’s listen.

And I think for a joke, with other countries. And I don’t know what’s going on, but I have a bad feeling. I think we have been infiltrated through the southern border, not with just good people, but I think they have planted cells in this country, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but it’s scary. It’s scary times now. Now that a lot of people are leaving the country because of that.

I mean, Fred’s moved to Spain and loving it there, Italy. I got family in Columbia, so now even Colombia is starting to look better even though they have a bad government down there too. So

my wife and I already have our minds made up. I mean, it’s not gonna be right now, but we know that our retirement is not gonna be in this country. It’s gonna be either Spain or in Italy. Sadly, it’s not gonna be in Venezuela, which we would love, but it’s not. But it will be in Spain or Italy for sure.

Not here because the way things are going, no. Thanks.

Okay.

And it was the kind of the whole group, just super dark. View of the United States, and that is Trump’s view. So Trump has a super dark view. Of the United States. This is a bad place.

And I gotta tell you, my conservatism literally springs as a young person from the idea that America is a good place. And I didn’t like hearing Democrats talk about it. Like, we were always the bad guys because I thought America as an idea. The American idea was awesome. And I thought it was awesome that immigrants wanted to come here, and my mom came over here.

You know, I just and she had an immigrant zeal for the United. There was, like, Americana all over our house signing of the declaration of independence and stuff. And so it felt striking to me to listen to people who had immigrated to the United States, talk about it not being a great place anymore and, like, they wanted to leave. Is this common? Is this a thing that is out there now?

Well, sure. I mean, we know it is from to these voters. We know that as you say, I mean, Trump is a very dark view of America. There’s a very dark view of America, among a lot of Republicans, particularly the sort of hardcore, trump is to feel like we’re just one step away from, you know, the communist taking over the Democrats are never

gonna leave office. That’s silly.

Yeah. No. It’s silly, but there it is. People believe all kinds of crazy stuff.

Watch the

one who wouldn’t leave office.

Yeah. Okay. Fine. I mean, I’d I people have a right to their views as crazy as they may be. And maybe the Democrat should think twice about promulgating the view that where this is like the Weimar Republic nineteen thirty two, and we’re on the verge of a total fascist takeover by the Vagahites.

I mean, basically, they’re arguing in a very dark place too. Right? I mean, their view is like we’re one micro step away from fascism. Maybe a better approach to dealing with the anti democratic impulses of people in and around the Republican Party is by promulgating as you say a more positive view of America about how it’s a great place to be. Its best days are ahead of it.

System’s quite resilient. We beat back the challenges in twenty twenty. We’ll beat them back again. And in fact, you know, let’s actually return to a kind of America where everybody’s proud to be an American and everybody pulls together and who I’ve not divided the microdiced into a thousand different slices. I think that’s a more attractive view than saying on the one hand, you know, the trumpists are saying we’re one step away from a Democratic dystopia, and Democrats say we’re one step away from a fascist dystopia run by Trump and his kids or something.

So maybe just maybe. There’s an opening here for taking a more optimistic you know, view of America and its resilience and its potential and not basically just getting down in the mud with the Trumpist Republicans and saying, yeah. Yeah. You think we’re in this dark place. Well, you’re right.

We’re in a dark place. It’s just you’re the ones causing the dark place. You’re the ones that are taking us one step away from fascism. Look, I mean, Joe Biden went down to Georgia after the relatively anodyne voting reform law was passed, but didn’t turn out to have had a zero effect on voting in Georgia. So he went down there and said, this is Jim Crow two point o.

This is like Bulwark Connor on the on the bridge in Alabama. I mean, this is just silly stuff. Maybe it’s time for everybody to damp down the rhetoric, right, and sort of emphasize you know, what we have in common in the resilience of the system and not basically be so concerned with calling out the other side as being the agents of the having dystopia So end of rant, but I think that it would be closer to what most Americans wanna hear than what I hear coming from either party.

I remember those comments from Joe Biden. I was really disappointed in them at the time. I would say on the whole Joe Biden does present more of an optimistic view of America. I think he tries to.

Well, you brought up the Biden thing before, Sarah. And I think that there’s no question that Biden, you know, in his heart and probably his instincts. It’s a pretty call through the moderate guy in some ways, and he is sort of an optimistic old school Democrat But he can’t separate himself from his party. That’s the problem. Biden is not the party.

It’s more like the party is Biden, I think, at this point. And I think that unless Biden clearly and I made this argument, clearly took some steps to signal a decisive break with the Loonies in his own part and the cultural radicals and the people who do and say stupid things, it would just it’s not gonna make that much impression on the median voter that he’s, you know, the Democratic party is that much different. As I’ve said it in a few things. I mean, he’s a designated normie of the Democratic party.

Yeah. And he won. This is the thing. I just, like, sitting outside watching almost two hundred Republicans vote for Jim Jordan for speaker of the house. Right.

Donald Trump is up by like a gazillion points over everybody else. And the only other people in spitting distance or carbon copy imitations of Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. Mhmm. Normie, old guy, won the Democratic nomination. In.

And you can say he’s captured by the far left. But, like, I don’t know. I haven’t seen him try to pack the courts. I haven’t seen him try to

Well, I think he’s captured by the party as a whole. Not by the far left. I just think the left has a lot of sway over the party at this point that is not good. Yeah.

I mean, I share many of your critiques of sort of the far left. I just I think I feel like they’re overstated because I I do think that Joe Biden has, like, He was a real compromise consensus candidate. I think he embodies the thing that you say you want, which is a kind of cultural moderation and economic liberalism. He is much to the center of just about every other Democrat who ran for president and that’s who the Democratic party chose. So I just see the Democratic party broadly making better choices than I see the Republican Party making.

That being said,

one of

the reasons I wanted to have you on is that I think it is deeply important that Democrats understand how to win. I think it is deeply important that they understand that to attract back working class voters. Like, Joe Biden narrowly won in twenty twenty in large part because he was able to lose less badly with, some of these working class voters, and he’s struggling with them. He’s struggling with working class voters of color and hispanics And they’re gonna have to figure out what to do about that in the next year if we’re gonna keep Trump from holding office. So I appreciate your perspective, and I’m glad you shared it so candidly.

Think there’s gonna be a fair number of people here who don’t like it, but it’s backed up to some degree by what we just heard from these voters. And even I was caught off guard a little bit. I do a lot of Hispanic groups, but I hadn’t recently done one of these reverse flipper Hispanic groups. And when I was listening to it, I went, wow. That is something.

We can think it’s not good that this is what people are saying. We can try to identify the reason that they’re saying it doesn’t change the fact that it’s what they think. And so, like, the question is is even if we’re sure they’re wrong about these things, like, they’re democrats have got to find a way to appeal to these voters, and and how do they do that? Ruita Sherah, thank you for being here. Thank you for the great discussion.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

And thanks to of you for listening to the Focus Secret Podcast. We’ll be back next week with an episode you really don’t wanna miss. Bye bye.