Mike Madrid spent 30 years as a Republican consultant specializing in Latino voting trends and behavior before co-founding the Lincoln Project in December 2019 to oppose Donald Trump and going on to advise Democratic candidates. His ability to move between different worlds began in his youth, in the Ventura County city of Moorpark — the only California city at the time that saw a declining Latino population. The grandson of immigrants from Mexico, Madrid grew up learning to navigate and be comfortable within both the lower-middle-class Mexican community he came from and that of his wealthier white neighbors.
In his new book, The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, equal parts memoir and political treatise, he describes how both parties have failed to connect with Latinos and why, as he writes, “the battle for the future of our country will hinge” on which party is finally able to speak and listen to this growing electoral force. He offers advice to Vice President Kamala Harris, who he says needs to keep a laser focus on the cost-of-living crisis, and housing affordability in particular, if she wants to win over Latino voters.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: In the introduction to The Latino Century, you write that “Latinos are the solution” for most of what ails the American body politic. Can you say a bit more about what you mean?
Mike Madrid: We are at this peculiar moment in time, as America transitions from being a white-majority nation to a nonwhite majority country. Younger people, especially those under 30, are far, far more diverse. Those over 65 are overwhelmingly white.
Those age cohorts have something else in common: those under 30, who are plurality-Latino, have some of the most optimistic [views of] and highest levels of trust and confidence in social institutions. It is precisely the erosion and collapse of that trust that is causing so much of the social tension, political chaos and the rise of extremism.
Most people over 65 have the most negative views of the country of any generation ever polled. Older white folks are in this existential battle to destroy the country, while what is emerging is a newer, younger, poorer, browner America that has much more belief and confidence in our system and hope for what the country is.
Why would this be?
Optimism is often a function of being young. Life hasn’t beaten you up enough yet. It is also a function of being an immigrant. The premise of my book is that explosive growth is happening in the third generation and beyond, but still a relatively large segment of our population is recently migrated, naturalized citizens.
And immigrants are much more optimistic. They’ve uprooted themselves to get here with essentially a blind belief that this new place will be better than where they came from. Those are two very strong indicators of optimism. This is not new. What is new is that this group is overwhelmingly Latino.
“Quantifiably, we know from polling and public opinion research that immigration is not a main issue for us. And yet that’s overwhelmingly the political-racial narrative for Latinos.”
The story I usually hear is that Latinos are moving from being Democrats to being Republicans, which I envision as an individual voter changing their political orientation. But you write about a different phenomenon, of the emergence of a completely new electorate.
A lot of people are writing about this racial realignment as they’re seeing nonwhite voters become more Republican, and they automatically say that these nonwhite voters are shifting to the right. And that’s not true. What’s happening is that there is an emergence of a new bloc that defies our traditional understanding of minority voters. The rapid growth among this younger generation is with third and now fourth generation voters. They do not have anywhere near as strong a racial or ethnic perspective or anchor as their grandparents or parents. In fact, overwhelmingly, they don’t view themselves as any different from mainstream culture — the Pew Research Center has done a lot of work in this field.
What you have is a Democratic Party that built its entire strategy from the Obama era based on this “demographics is destiny” model. It looks for ethnic cues to drive a nonwhite voter to their ranks, and immigration became the natural place to go. Now this was always misguided, but it was a very concerted strategy that began after the 2012 cycle. From there, they have witnessed a decreasing share of Latino support.
You’re saying that the focus on immigration as an overarching issue that will get Latinos to the polls has not borne fruit.
Correct. There’s a lot of debate as to whether it ever really did, by the way, because as Latinos we’ve got the lowest voter turnout rates of any of the four largest racial ethnic groups in the country, even though we’re the fastest growing. Quantifiably, we know from polling and public opinion research that immigration is not a main issue for us. And yet that’s overwhelmingly the political-racial narrative for Latinos.
That has worked to the Democrats’ detriment, because we know this is not a top-five issue, but the Democrats have prioritized it as the third generation Latino voter grows exponentially. The Latino voter of the next 30 years is gonna be wholly different from the Latino of the last 30 years. That’s the premise of the book. So where immigration was misguided before, it’s really misguided now.
I’ve heard it argued that some Latinos have lost faith in the Democratic Party because of their failure to pass immigration reform.
Immigration is an important issue, and I’d argue that it is more important for Latinos than other groups because we’re closer to the immigrant experience. But it’s never been a motivating issue. It’s not going to get people off the couch and to their polling place. And in fact, the over-reliance on the issue has reinforced the unrelatability of the Democratic Party. That Latino voters are motivated by the failure of Democrats to get comprehensive immigration reform done is a very peculiar inside-baseball perspective. That doesn’t show up anywhere in polling except for maybe the most partisan 10% of Latino voters.
“You vote for who you think is in your tribe, who is going to fight for you. And working-class people have viewed their tribe more and more as Republican.”
Is there something particular about Trump that attracts greater Latino support?
Let me answer your question this way. Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas, Doug Ducey when he was the Republican governor of Arizona … every Republican in a swing district in the country all have something in common: They either met or overperformed Donald Trump in levels of support among Hispanics. Republicans all over the country are doing better than Trump. Trump is literally limiting what would be further growth.
So Latinos may vote for him, but they don’t like the chaos and they don’t like the racism, yet they also want to work in the industries where they are working and see those industries as their economic ladder. You vote for who you think is in your tribe, who is going to fight for you. And working-class people have viewed their tribe more and more as Republican.
So if you’re advising Kamala Harris, what should she do? What does polling show about the issues that Latinos care most about?
You have to create an aspirational, multiethnic, working-class agenda.
For three decades, the polling has shown us that for Latinos the main issues are the economy and jobs. More recently, what most of the research is showing is that there is an affordability problem. And demographically we are at the lower end of the economic ladder, and so things like tripling of interest rates really hurts us.
As workers, one in five Hispanic men are employed in the residential construction space or related field. That’s a massive number. So when interest rates triple that economy gets walloped. That’s 20% of Latino households taking a huge hit. Compound that with inflation, and working-class people are suffering. The working class has been moving away from the Democratic Party for a decade. At the same time that the Democrats started leaning into immigration, they were losing working-class voters and doubling down on an ethnic frame to hold onto the working-class base when their working-class base didn’t view their world through that frame.
If I’m Kamala Harris, you’ve got to come with a Marshall Plan for housing. It’s not only that housing construction is so central to Latino livelihoods. It’s because we’re 30 years old and younger, and these are home-buying years, these are family-starting years. You can’t do that when housing affordability is so out of control, your dollar isn’t going very far, and you’re paying huge rents because we’re not bringing enough supply online. There are so many problems related to housing and homeownership and construction that the only way you get Latinos back into a place of building generational wealth is through housing. It’s everything.
