Democrats are in shock at their collapse among Hispanic voters. They shouldn’t be

Blinded by progressive ideology, they thought they’d create a permanent majority. This election proved them wrong

Thanks in part to a massive swing of Hispanic voters to the Right, Donald Trump stunned America and the world and captured both the popular vote and the electoral college. He won a majority of Hispanic men and almost half of Hispanic women, after nearly a decade in which Democrats predicted that his call for cracking down on illegal immigration would alienate enough Mexican-Americans to doom the Republican party to irrelevance and create a permanent Democratic majority.  
The election results have left American progressives catatonic with shock. But Democrats had no excuse for being surprised at this outcome.  
The warning signs were there before the election. A Marist poll of September 24, on behalf of National Public Radio, asked respondents if they agreed with the statement that all illegal immigrants should be deported. Sixty per cent of whites agreed with the statement – and so did 57 per cent of Hispanics.
For years Democrats have claimed that voter ID laws, which require voters to show government-approved photo IDs to deter voting by illegal immigrants, are motivated by anti-Hispanic racism. And yet according to Pew Research Center, 75 per cent of black voters, 81 per cent of whites, 84 per cent of Asians, and 85 per cent of Hispanics approve of voter ID laws. You read that correctly: Hispanics are more likely than any other group to approve of voter ID laws designed to deter illegal immigration.
The opposition to illegal immigration of many Mexican-Americans, particularly those along the US-Mexican border, is also nothing new. Many Hispanic residents of American border communities, even some with relatives in Mexico, have long resented being forced to compete for jobs and public services with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants, both legal and illegal, and have often favoured federal crackdowns on this form of labour trafficking.
In 1950, the GI Forum, one of the first important Mexican-American political groups, in an open letter denounced then-Texas Senator Lyndon B Johnson for betraying the interests of his Mexican-American constituents: “Whereas Senator Johnson owes in large measure his position in the US Senate to the votes of thousands of citizens of Mexican descent in South Texas…and whereas Senator Johnson’s actions have been contributing to the principles of liberalism expounded by the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt…[h]is vote is in utter disregard of the friendship in which he has been held by thousands of citizens of Mexican descent.”
What vote in the US Senate by Johnson was the GI Forum publicly condemning? Succumbing to pressure from Texas farmers and ranchers, Johnson had voted to reduce federal funding for detention camps and deportation of illegal immigrants from Mexico. Yes, that’s right – these Hispanic leaders were calling for more deportations of illegal immigrant workers and more detention camps.
In the 1960s, Cesar Chavez, the Mexican-American leader of the United Farm Workers, called for the federal government to thwart illegal immigration, in order to prevent agribusiness from deterring unionisation and paying low wages by hiring illegal immigrants rather than citizen-workers. And in 1964, Hispanic leaders, labour unions, and liberal reformers succeeded in getting Congress to outlaw the Bracero programme, an exploitative scheme that supplied American businesses with legal Mexican guest-workers.  
Anyone familiar with this history should not have been shocked that a growing number of counties along the Texas-Mexican border with overwhelming Mexican-American majorities have flipped from the Democrats to Trump’s Republicans in the last two elections. Now as in the 1950s and 1960s, many Hispanic-American citizens and legal immigrants on the border and in the interior of the country view illegal immigrants as competitors, not compatriots.
How could Democratic politicians, strategists, and pundits have been unaware of these facts? The answer is that Democrats were blinded by progressive ideology.
According to twenty-first century American progressivism, the greatest divisions in society are not along class lines or religious lines, but along racial lines. All Americans are either “white” or “non-white”. Hispanic Americans – whether they or their ancestors came from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, or South America, and regardless of whether they are primarily of European, Native American, or African descent – are all “non-white” by definition, according to the American Left. A blond, blue-eyed American who does not speak a word of Spanish but whose German ancestors appeared mysteriously in Argentina after World War II is bizarrely deemed to be not only “Hispanic” but also “a person of colour”.
Many Hispanic Americans do not think of themselves in this way. In past Census counts, about half identified themselves as “white” and many are now choosing a new multiracial option that better reflects the complexity of their heritage.
Democrats have long hoped that Hispanics would vote almost unanimously for the Democratic party, like African-Americans. In this year’s election, African-Americans voted for Kamala Harris over Trump by 80-20; a decline from Democratic support in earlier elections, but still overwhelmingly pro-Democrat. 
But going back half a century, Democrats have usually won no more than two-thirds of the Mexican-American vote at best, sometimes less. Cuban-Americans have often supported Republicans, the more anti-communist of the two parties in the Cold War, thanks to their memories of Castro’s tyranny.
Democrats in every election cycle since Trump first ran and won in 2016 have won majorities of Hispanics, as well as black and Asian-Americans. But in each election since then, more voters from all three groups have shifted toward the Republicans, contributing to the party’s sweep of the presidential and congressional elections this year. Guess what was the only group whose support for Harris was greater than its support for Biden in the 2020 election. White college-educated Democrats.
No wonder Democrats are stunned and disoriented by the election results. For two decades, they have told themselves that, as the immigration-driven non-white share of the US population grows, the result will be an inevitable Democratic majority resting on college-educated whites and non-whites as a group. The Republican party was supposed to shrink and become whiter as the Democratic party expanded and became more diverse. Instead it is the Republican electorate that is growing more diverse and the Democratic party is becoming whiter.
Under Trump’s leadership, the Republicans have become, not the dying party of the dwindling white working class, but a truly multiracial working class party. Meanwhile, the rich and well-educated are abandoning the Republicans, making the Democrats the party of bankers, business elites, and professionals. History is not moving along the course that American progressives had marked out for it.
All too often, today’s Democrats have listened to academics and nonprofit activists who owe their positions to university appointments or nonprofit grants, instead of grassroots leaders of mass membership organisations, like the GI Forum and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in the old days.
A professor of Latino/a/x studies at a university, or an activist at a nonprofit like Unidos (formerly La Raza Unida), may have as little knowledge of the Hispanic working class as a white Ivy League academic does of the white working class. These “spokespeople” are not elected or chosen in other ways by fellow members of their racial/ethnic communities. Instead, they are designated by university officials, foundation executives, and magazine editors to speak for an entire race to an audience that is overwhelmingly white and elite. It is no surprise that non-white intellectuals of all kinds tell their donors what the donors want to hear, whether it corresponds to the beliefs of most Hispanic, black, and Asian-Americans or not.
The good news is that most Americans of all races increasingly vote as progressives or conservatives, or members of this or that economic class or industry, instead of voting a racial party line. The Democratic party can come back from its devastating defeat at the ballot box – but only if it addresses the concerns of citizens as citizens, instead of expecting them to vote as automatons assigned to rigid and permanent racial blocs.
Michael Lind is a contributor to Tablet, a fellow at New America, and the author of “Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America”