From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject This Small Rust-Belt City Holds the Secret to Democrats’ Latino Woes
Date March 1, 2025 1:05 AM
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THIS SMALL RUST-BELT CITY HOLDS THE SECRET TO DEMOCRATS’ LATINO
WOES  
[[link removed]]


 

Greg Sargent
February 14, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Latino voters shifted dramatically toward Trump in the last
election. Reading, Pennsylvania offers a clue to how Democrats can
claw them back. Both campaigns saw Reading as strategically critical
and it happens to be nearly 70 percent Latino. _

Campaign signs for both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris adorn a
Dominican-owned bodega in Reading during the 2024 election campaign.,
Erin Clark/The Boston Globe // The New Republic

 

During the final, frenzied week of the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump and
Kamala Harris both
[[link removed]] made
campaign stops in a place whose significance in the election had
largely been overlooked by observers: Reading, a city of around 95,000
people nestled between the Schuylkill River and Mount Penn in central
Pennsylvania.

Reading does not boast many of the noncollege-educated white voters
who were widely seen as pivotal to Trump’s chances. Nor is it one of
the educated, affluent suburbs or large metropolitan areas where
Harris had hoped to run up the immense margins needed to lift her to
victory. Yet both campaigns saw Reading as strategically
critical—because this little city, which is known to most people as
the nineteenth-century birthplace of the Reading Railroad, ultimately
memorialized in the game Monopoly, happens to be nearly 70 percent
Latino.

Trump had already shocked some Democrats in Reading by contesting it
with surprising aggressiveness. He held two rallies in the small city
and dispatched running mate JD Vance to campaign there twice, a
remarkable commitment of time and resources to a reliably Democratic
stronghold filled with nonwhite voters. What surprised Democrats was
the audacity of Trump’s bet on making inroads among Reading’s
Hispanics—a bet that made the city a critical test case of whether
Trump’s ability to move that demographic his way was more than just
a fluke of 2020 and might have more durability than many Democrats
expect.

Democrats were even more surprised—and not in a good way—when the
results came in.

Reading (which is pronounced “RED-ing”) had a net shift of 16
points in Trump’s direction relative to his 2020 showing against Joe
Biden, according to precinct data from the election board in Berks
County, where Reading is located. Harris did win Reading handily (by
65–35 percent), but Trump’s success in moving the electorate
incrementally his way relative to 2020 (when Biden bested him by
72–27) helped him win the crucial Rust Belt swing state of
Pennsylvania after losing it last time around.

Reading does not boast many of the noncollege-educated white voters
who were widely seen as pivotal to Trump’s chances. Nor is it one of
the educated, affluent suburbs or large metropolitan areas where
Harris had hoped to run up the immense margins needed to lift her to
victory. Yet both campaigns saw Reading as strategically
critical—because this little city, which is known to most people as
the nineteenth-century birthplace
[[link removed]] of
the Reading Railroad, ultimately memorialized in the game Monopoly,
happens to be nearly 70 percent Latino.

Trump had already shocked some Democrats in Reading by contesting it
with surprising aggressiveness. He held two rallies in the small city
and dispatched
[[link removed]] running
mate JD Vance to campaign there twice, a remarkable commitment of time
and resources to a reliably Democratic stronghold filled with nonwhite
voters. What surprised Democrats was the audacity of Trump’s bet on
making inroads among Reading’s Hispanics—a bet that made the city
a critical test case of whether Trump’s ability to move that
demographic his way was more than just a fluke of 2020 and might have
more durability than many Democrats expect.

Democrats were even more surprised—and not in a good way—when the
results came in.

Reading (which is pronounced “RED-ing”) had a net shift of 16
points in Trump’s direction relative to his 2020 showing against Joe
Biden, according to precinct data
[[link removed]] from the
election board in Berks County, where Reading is located. Harris did
win Reading handily (by 65–35 percent), but Trump’s success in
moving the electorate incrementally his way relative to 2020 (when
Biden bested him by 72–27) helped him win the crucial Rust Belt
swing state of Pennsylvania after losing it last time around.

To the dismay of local Democrats, the Reading results ended up
illuminating the success of Trump’s larger winning formula, which
entailed assembling an unexpectedly diverse coalition by merely
shaving Democrats’ historic margins among core voter groups (without
winning them outright). That includes working-class nonwhites, a
demographic heavily represented in the region around Reading, which
is dominated
[[link removed]] by
tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in industries like automotive
batteries and food production.

“Harris won this city overwhelmingly,” Reading Mayor Eddie Morán,
a Democrat who is the first Latino elected to that office in this
city, told me. “But we didn’t get the percent that we needed.”
As he noted, Trump operatives never expected to win the Latino vote
here. Instead, they aimed to “neutralize it a little bit.”

“And that’s exactly what happened,” Morán said.

What unfolded in Reading, then, is an object lesson in what Democrats
must urgently avoid going forward, if they are to prevent their
coalition from fraying further and preserve their hopes of a comeback
in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

 

Trump’s national inroads among Latinos are a terribly sobering story
for Democrats. According to calculations
[[link removed]] by _The
New York Times_’ Nate Cohn, the shift happened over the course of
the last three presidential elections. After Barack Obama won Latinos
by 39 points in 2012, Democrats underperformed among them in 2016. In
2020, Trump made further inroads, culminating in 2024, when Harris won
the Latino vote by only 10 points. Over 12 years, that’s a
staggering net shift of 29 points toward Trump among Latino voters.

 

 

Even more disconcerting, this shift unfolded even as Trump initially
campaigned in 2016 by labeling Mexicans rapists and killers, and then,
as president, implemented a draconian set of policies against
immigrants from Central and South America, which included inflicting
outright terror by way of family separations and the forcing of
asylum-seekers to wait for hearings in Mexico, resulting in a variety
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humanitarian horrors. Trump campaigned in 2024 on highly
publicized vows
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mass removals carried out with giant detention camps and the military,
as well as explicit declarations
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immigrants fleeing horrible civil conditions in Central and South
America are “poisoning the blood” of our country—all amounting
to the most openly white nationalist, anti-immigrant presidential
candidacy in the modern era.

Though more data is needed to figure out what really happened here,
it’s already clear that none of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric or
actions weighed sufficiently on the Latino voters who shifted toward
him—because inflation mattered a lot more. Preelection polling by
the _Times_ showed
[[link removed]] that,
for Latinos, the economy was far and away the most important issue,
with immigration a distant third. A staggering 81 percent of Latino
voters saw economic conditions as “poor” or “only fair.”
Meanwhile, a whopping 63 percent simply did not believe that Trump’s
menacing rhetoric about immigrants was aimed _at them._

Indeed, in some cases, immigration might have played in Trump’s
favor among Latino voters. In South Texas, for instance, many
majority-Hispanic counties shifted hard
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Trump, including a number of them along the border. This suggests
that, for some Latinos, border security is as important (if not more
so) as how welcoming our country is toward legal immigrants, and that
they blamed Harris and Biden for being overly lax on the issue while
crediting Trump as “strong” on it. These claims are absurdly
unfair, but they seemed to resonate, and now we need to do the work of
figuring out what it all means.

 

To grasp how these dynamics played out in microcosm in a swing-state
city, I spent a recent afternoon driving around Reading with Mayor
Morán, who was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Brooklyn. A squat
man with an affable demeanor that disguises a hard-edged pragmatic
streak, Morán was eager to demonstrate to me just how forcefully
Trump and Republicans had competed for Latinos in many neighborhoods.
So we drove to King Food, a small supermarket in the
lower-middle-class residential neighborhood of Glenside.

You may remember King Food. It briefly got national attention last
September, when Vance did a campaign stop there. Vance held up a
carton of eggs, and declared
[[link removed]] that
“a dozen eggs will cost you around $4, thanks to Kamala Harris’s
inflationary policies.” After internet sleuths figured out that the
eggs were actually $2.99 per dozen, Vance was roundly mocked
[[link removed]] online
over the incident. Some declared that it revealed what a cringe
campaigner he is, and others lampooned similarly awkward moments, such
as his declaration that his two sons eat 14 eggs per day.

But Morán had a very different takeaway from the incident. What
nobody noticed amid all the hilarity is that King Food sits right
across the street from a lower-income housing project that’s funded
by city government: Glenside Homes, which is “85 percent Latino,”
Morán said. As we drove past the development’s modest two-story row
houses, Morán noted that Vance’s appearance was complemented by
relentless campaigning among these residents by local Trump campaign
operatives.

“They knocked on nearly every door here,” Morán told me.

Again and again, Morán said, he heard from residents of the
development, who told him that people campaigning for Trump had
engaged with them at their doors, asking: “Do you want to live
better? Do you want a better economy?” For Morán, the egg-carton
incident was anything but funny: What it really captured was how
vigorously Trump’s campaign worked Latino neighborhoods that might
typically be hostile political territory but lately were filled with
people struggling with the cost of living.

Further underscoring the point, Morán recounted that Democrats did a
double take when the Trump campaign opened an office right in the
heart of downtown Reading, many months before Election Day. As we
drove through the downtown, a mix of offices and small shops and
restaurants, many Latino-owned, Morán said the Trump campaign’s
bold tactics were “a huge surprise to everybody.”

Driving around Reading with Morán underscored another big takeaway:
The Latino electorate is extremely diverse, even though it’s often
treated in our political discourse as a monolith. Not only are many
heritages represented in this small city alone—Dominicans, Puerto
Ricans, Mexicans, Colombians—but the variety of life experiences is
also striking and should be factored into understanding the challenges
Democrats face.

For instance, Morán said, because Latinos have been arriving in
Reading for decades, many residents are first- and second-generation
Hispanics, some of whom work in professions like health care, the
region’s second-largest industry. At the same time, many more recent
arrivals are working-class, a lot of whom are drawn to the area to
work in factories—Deka battery manufacturing, for instance, or the
Giorgio Mushroom Co.—that are within a short drive of the city.
Meanwhile, low real estate costs have attracted many other recent
arrivals who have opened small businesses here, Morán told me. Among
some of these people who aspire to business success, Trump’s folk
appeal as a businessman-celebrity appears to resonate.

 

Case in point: the northeast
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of Reading, which boasts the highest concentration of Latinos in the
state of Pennsylvania outside Philadelphia, according to one estimate.
As we drove through the neighborhood, small Latino businesses were
visible everywhere: restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores,
and _lavandarías._ It was here, Morán recounted, that he realized
something was seriously amiss in the election, when signs saying
PUERTO RICANS FOR TRUMP and DOMINICANS FOR TRUMP began to appear.

 

 

Among these Dominicans, Morán regularly found that any concerns about
Trump’s immigration policies were outweighed by perceptions of his
economic prowess. Indeed, that led some Dominicans to develop a
particularly hopeful view of Trump. Some came to believe that when
Trump talked about not wanting “illegals” in the country, he was
really telegraphing that he might pursue some sort of amnesty for the
undocumented who don’t merit removal. Amnesty, Morán said, is
something they fondly associate with a Republican president, due to
Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform bill. Trumpism, of course,
is in many ways a direct repudiation of Reaganism’s
American-exceptionalist, city-on-a-hill rhetoric about the virtues of
immigration, but apparently that didn’t sink in. “A lot of
Dominicans believe that could happen,” Morán told me, speaking of
hopes for a Trump amnesty. “I heard that one too many times.”

Johanny Cepeda-Freytiz, the Democratic state representative whose
district includes a chunk of downtown Reading, saw similar dynamics at
play. Her personal story is typical of Hispanics in Reading: Her
mother is Dominican, and she grew up in New York City and worked as a
community organizer before moving to Reading to open a
restaurant—the Mi Casa Su Casa Cafe—on Penn Street, the city’s
main business strip. As I lunched on an empanada cooked by her mother
in the restaurant’s kitchen, Cepeda-Freytiz told me that, as the
campaign progressed, she found that many Latino small-business owners
like her “were identifying with Trump as a moneymaker.”

Like Morán, Cepeda-Freytiz discovered that, because of Trump’s
business celebrity, many saw him as a potential creator of
opportunities. Cepeda-Freytiz saw the DOMINICANS FOR TRUMP signs and
others like them, and concluded that Trump was connecting culturally
in particular with Latino breadwinner men. Again and again,
Cepeda-Freytiz said, she saw Latinos reacting to higher supermarket
prices, only to tell her: “When Trump comes, the economy will be
better.”

Trump’s planned deportations, of course, threaten
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make food prices even higher. Yet Cepeda-Freytiz was dismayed to
encounter some Latinos who themselves came to this country as
undocumented immigrants but, now that they’re established here, see
Trump as a vehicle for opportunity rather than as a threat to Latinos
whose presence remains precarious. “I’m like: Wow, you forgot how
you got here. You forgot where you came from,” Cepeda-Freytiz told
me. “That really turned my stomach.”

It’s important to stress, as Cepeda-Freytiz and Morán both do, that
many Latinos had good reason to be unhappy with the economic status
quo (indeed, with the immigration status quo as well, though hoping
Trump will improve the immigration system seems like a terribly
misplaced bet). And they both noted that Harris still overwhelmingly
won Latinos in Reading. But Trump’s inroads mattered on the margins.

To illustrate the point, Cepeda-Freytiz shared with me an analysis
that local Democrats privately circulated after the election. It
showed that, in raw vote totals, Harris’s support dropped by as much
as 6 to 10 percentage points relative to Biden’s 2020 totals in some
of the most Latino-heavy neighborhoods in Reading. “The difference
went towards Trump,” Cepeda-Freytiz said, pronouncing the numbers
“disturbing.”
 
A “Latino Americans for Trump” office opened in Reading in June
2024.  (Credit: Joe Lamberti/Associated Press  //  The New
Republic)
Add up these transformations, and they help explain some bigger
dynamics driving the election outcome—as well as the task ahead for
Democrats. Trump won
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by 1.7 points, and exit polls showed
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made up only 6 percent of the vote in the state, Trump substantially
improved among them over his 2020 performance. Again, the story here
is all about margins. In 2024, Trump lost by 17 points among
Pennsylvania Latinos, but that’s substantially down from four years
ago, when he lost them to Biden _by a 42-point margin._ In those
four years, Trump’s support among this demographic rose from 27 to
41 points, a striking shift.

Places like Reading are why this happened. Reading sits in what local
operatives call “the 222 Corridor,” named for Route 222, the
highway that connects Reading with other Pennsylvania cities like
Allentown and Lancaster, both of which also boast sizable Latino
populations. The two campaigns heavily contested
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whole stretch of territory, and in part due to Latino immigration to
these areas, Pennsylvania now has some 620,000 Latinos living in the
state, making Trump’s successful inroads among them look even more
catastrophic for Democrats.

 

So what should Democrats learn from all this?

Mike Madrid, a GOP pollster and critic of Trump who has studied the
Latino vote for decades, has pored over postelection data and reached
a precise conclusion: “Affordability,” he said, has replaced
“jobs” as the key economic issue that is motivating Latino voters,
and this shift in priorities favored Trump. To be sure, there is
something perverse and paradoxical about the change: To a greater
degree than any president in decades, Biden consciously strove to
create a full-employment economy, and as the economics writer Zachary
Carter explained
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Slate, full employment might be Biden’s real legacy. But inflation,
caused in large part by pandemic disruptions, outweighed those
achievements, and even outweighed considerations of both candidates’
actual economic policy agendas.

Indeed, Madrid believes that “affordability” is becoming the
touchstone for understanding some of the bigger dynamics driving what
happened with the Latino vote in 2024. “The common glue with Latinos
is not ethnicity, it’s not country of origin, it’s not
language,” Madrid told me. “It all comes down to affordability.”
He added: “Everybody has a job in this economy. What they don’t
have is a job that allows you to afford living here.” Illustrating
the point, Madrid conducted
[[link removed]] a
postelection poll of California Latinos, and found that a whopping 65
percent of them said that “the prices we pay for everything” are
“extremely important,” whereas jobs lagged behind. 

The Latinos who moved to Trump aren’t necessarily in favor of GOP
economics._ _They picked the alternative to the party that was in
power while prices rose.

Madrid believes this affordability-versus-jobs distinction is key to
understanding the ongoing battle for what he calls “the new working
class.” Among the political observers who have obsessed over
Trump’s gains with nonwhite working-class voters, some argue that
this represents a realignment. But Madrid thinks that these voters’
preoccupation with affordability actually tells a story about a Latino
electorate that’s very unsettled and in flux. The Latinos who moved
to Trump, Madrid said, aren’t necessarily in favor of _GOP
economics, _but rather picked the alternative to the party that was
in power while prices rose. “It’s not that they’re becoming
Republican,” Madrid said. “It’s about disaffection with the
Democratic Party.”

That’s also the conclusion of Camille Rivera, a political operative
who worked closely with numerous Latino groups that bankrolled
pro-Democratic ads in Pennsylvania. Rivera recounted that, in
conversations with Latino voters in the state, she observed that they
seemed to interpret Trump’s criticism of inflation on the
Biden-Harris administration’s watch as a sign that he’d actually
do something about costs, which they remembered being lower during
Trump’s presidency. “Trump cares about our issues,” they told
her.

These voters, said Rivera, were difficult to move with discussion of
Trump’s actual record as president, in which the economy went into
deep freeze in his last year due to the pandemic that he made much
worse
[[link removed]] than
it needed to be. Though Biden signed a huge Covid-19 relief package
with no Republican support
[[link removed]] in
2021, arguably helping the U.S. recovery outdo that of the rest of the
developed world, these voters mostly recalled
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stimulus money that they received under Trump, which Democrats broadly
supported. “Well, we got checks when Covid was happening,” Rivera
said voters told her, in explaining why they didn’t blame 2020 on
Trump.

As galling as all this is, it also suggests that we should be cautious
about worrying too much that a major, permanent Latino realignment is
underway. A postelection analysis by Equis Research concluded
[[link removed]] that some
of the Senate GOP candidates actually underperformed Trump in some
areas across the country with high concentrations of Hispanics. That
includes swing states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, and even Berks
County, the location of Reading. Those GOP underperformances suggest
both that the results don’t necessarily represent a large-scale
conversion of Latino voters into Republicans and that Trump had a
unique appeal rooted partly in his signature fusion of economic and
cultural celebrity.

This is an account dovetailing with the dynamics that unfolded in
Reading: the identification of Trump as a celebrity moneymaker whose
cultural cachet comes across to some voters as a kind of magical
capacity to mitigate the struggles of small-business people; the
constant focus on everyday costs of living; the belief that a change
at the top, regardless of the parties’ economic policy positions,
could begin to set things right.

All of this hints at a number of ways forward for Democrats.

For starters, it’s imperative not to treat the Latino electorate
like a monolith or a uniform ethnic bloc. As both Morán and Madrid
stressed to me, Hispanic voters are diverse in their class backgrounds
and economic experiences. The second-generation Latino professional
working in health care in Reading should be approached with very
different messages than, say, the recently arrived immigrant who is
harvesting mushrooms at the Giorgio factory just outside the city. The
former might be more reachable with traditional ads addressing
middle-class concerns about public order, while the latter might want
such public-order reassurances but also to hear about the Democratic
Party’s concrete plans to provide an immediate boost to the working
class.

Similarly, the diversity of the Latino electorate can also inform how
Democrats talk to Hispanic voters about immigration going forward.
That second-generation Latino voter and the recently arrived immigrant
factory worker might both have an interest in immigration issues, but
from different perspectives. The latter might want to hear more
specifics about work permits and pathways to citizenship, while more
established Latinos might want to hear more about an agenda that fuses
border security with a humane overall approach to handling immigration
flows. _Washington Monthly_’s Bill Scher suggests
[[link removed]] one
idea along these lines: toughening up requirements that employers
refrain from hiring undocumented labor, combined with broadening
numerous pathways to legal status. More such fusions should be
discussed, messages that effectively integrate promises of public
order with management of immigration in ways that genuinely benefit
the national interest, all wrapped into one coherent vision.

Representative Greg Casar, who represents a central Texas district and
was recently elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus,
recounted an anecdote that helps illuminate the challenge here.
Earlier this year, Casar told me, he talked to a Hispanic worker in
the construction trades, a registered independent, who voted for
Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 but was planning to vote
for Trump in 2024, because he’d concluded that Democrats were
“focused on other stuff” and not his material concerns. When the
topic turned to immigration, the worker allowed that he had relatives
who lacked legal status, but he was unmoved by the fact that
Republicans (including Trump) had long blocked efforts to rectify
this, concluding that all that mattered is that neither party had
fixed the problem.

“His response was: That’s all politics stuff, everybody is just
blaming everybody else,” Casar said, and his bottom line was that
“he hasn’t seen stuff get done.” So Democrats need to
communicate much more effectively that they have a theory of how to
actually accomplish immigration reform, either with executive actions
under the next Democratic president or with the next Democratic
Congress. As Casar put it, Latino working-class voters will be more
open to believing the party can accomplish immigration reform if
they’re persuaded up front that it is focused on their immediate
material concerns, making them less vulnerable to GOP propaganda about
the dangers of _the other._

“The Democratic Party has always been at its most successful when
working-class people know we are standing up for them,” Casar said,
because it defuses Republican efforts to paint Democrats as
“standing up for someone other than the everyday person.”

That lesson itself leads to several other conclusions: Democrats need
to figure out how to reach Latinos with a more economically populist
agenda, but also a more _sustained_ message, which reaches them in
off years as well as during election season. As Morán and Rivera told
me, their conversations with Latinos in Reading revealed, again and
again, that Harris’s late entry into the race left these voters
largely unfamiliar with her biography, values, priorities, and
intentions. The Harris campaign did pump ads
[[link removed]] about
her economic plans into Latino communities, many of them emphasizing
costs, but it was too late. “We have to continue to engage and
better inform our community, and it has to be ongoing,”
Cepeda-Freytiz told me.

Which means Democrats need to think now about how to produce a
constant drumbeat of messaging in Latino communities about what
specifically they will do to benefit working people, especially if and
when Trump’s tariffs and his plans to dramatically slash government
while giving huge tax breaks to his plutocratic allies all start to
bite. Democrats should relentlessly broadcast their concrete proposals
to alleviate economic suffering under Trump _as it happens,_ years
before the next election, seizing on people’s economic angst when
they are primed and receptive to alternative solutions. Cultural
politics will be critical here as well: Senator Ruben Gallego, who won
a hard-fought race in Arizona, made special appeals
[[link removed]] to
Latino men by stressing his biography as a Marine veteran who grew up
in tough circumstances and held many menial jobs throughout his life.
Obviously Gallego had a unique appeal for Latino men, but Democrats
will need to think hard about how to replicate these displays of
solidarity with working-class Latinos going forward, in a sustained
and systematic way.

Yet all this underscores another problem, and it’s a deeply sobering
one. It’s now clear that the Democratic Party’s undeniable
deficit
[[link removed]] in
the information wars, in which Republicans benefit from a massive
media propaganda network while dominating more apolitical cultural
information spaces, extends to Latino voters in a very big way. Casar
pointed to the right-wing infiltration
[[link removed]] of
Univision, the premier Latino television network, as a key turning
point in these info wars. He also noted he had seen a marked uptick in
right-wing propaganda via Spanish-language social media that distorts
the Democratic Party’s economic plans and, tellingly, in
misinformation that’s designed to turn more established Latinos
against recent arrivals, dividing Latinos against one another. “Many
of the voters most susceptible to right-wing disinformation are
Spanish-speaking-only voters who have all sorts of propaganda dumped
on them,” Casar told me. “A ton of it is in Spanish.”

How to solve the information gap with regard to Latinos is a
complicated problem that will take many months or even years to figure
out. For now, what’s critical is that Democrats treat this as an
urgent matter that requires a comprehensive set of solutions and a
real commitment of party resources. As Casar put it: “We have to
make sure that folks who do not have time to get plugged into politics
don’t just get covered in a right-wing-only message.”

What happened in Reading—and in many Latino-heavy communities like
it—was a major wake-up call for Democrats. But it is not unfixable.
As Madrid stressed, the Latino shift to Trump is real, but it may have
reflected a temporary sense among many of these voters that the party
previously in power was not speaking to them, rather than any newfound
embrace of Republican values. And that means the Democratic Party can
still repair the problem.

“The biggest challenge that Democrats face is a trust problem,”
Madrid told me. “Latinos believe Democrats have solutions to their
problems. But they haven’t seen any results. This is not like the
past two most significant realignments, with African Americans moving
toward Democrats or Dixiecrats moving to Republicans. Democrats still
have a big opportunity to reconstruct a coalition around the
fastest-growing group of voters in the country—_if_ they are able
to deliver.”

_[GREG SARGENT is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of
the podcast The Daily Blast
[[link removed]]. A
seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he
was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from
2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New
York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author
of the critically acclaimed book
[[link removed]] An
Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and
Thunderdome Politics.]_

* latinos
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