Longtime Republican political consultant Mike Madrid says the 2024 election could redefine what it means to be a “minority voter” in America. In 2020, Latino American voters surpassed African Americans as the largest minority voting bloc in the country, and those numbers will continue to grow.
At the same time, Madrid explains, those Latino voters are shifting more and more to the political right.
“The fastest growing share of the Latino vote is a third and fourth generation of Latino voters. These are either English-dominant or English-exclusive speakers,” Madrid said. “They are rapidly moving away from a racial minority voter to an economic pocketbook voter, and these are people who are overwhelmingly employed in blue-collar, working-class jobs.”
Madrid, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, is the author of “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy.” During an interview on The Salt Lake Tribune’s “This Week in Utah Politics” podcast, he said it would be wrong to classify this shift to the political right among Latinos as a “racial realignment.”
“It’s more of the emergence of a new vote,” he said. “Almost 40% of Latino voters are under the age of 30. That’s an extraordinarily large number of young people. They are not die-hard Democrats or Republicans.”
That political independence is a massive electoral opportunity for both Republicans and Democrats, but, Madrid says, the parties don’t understand how to appeal to young Latino voters — and the party that figures out how to win the votes of a multi-ethnic working class in America will be the dominant party for the next generation.
“Both parties are speaking to the Latino community as though it’s an aggrieved racial minority, but that’s not where Latinos are at. We’re not seeing the same racial tension to the same degree as we have in the past. It’s confounding a lot of politicians in both parties,” Madrid said.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just under a quarter of Utah’s population identifies as racial or ethnic minorities. Latinos are the fastest-growing minority population in Utah, making up 16% of the total population.
Madrid says Utah is notable for another reason: Both Democratic leaders in the Utah Legislature, Sen. Luz Escamilla and Rep. Angela Romero, are Latino women.
“It’s much more common for Hispanic women to be in leadership than in our culture,” Madrid said. “In many ways, Latinas have achieved what white women have not been able to achieve, which is parity in representation because it’s just so common for us to have women in leadership roles. That’s going to profoundly change not just the Latino community but our sense of American identity and the issues we focus on and the approach in which we engage with public policy issues.”
Listen and subscribe to the podcast for free.
