The 28-Point Swing

Hispanics are jumping ship from Trump. This is the only way to keep them off the disaster vessel.

Talk about jumping off the cliff.

Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election due to a lot of factors, but the key among them in my view was the unprecedented level of Hispanic support he drew that year.

It was a stunning shift that nobody saw coming.

• In 2020, Trump lost Hispanic votes to Biden by 25 points.

• In 2024, he lost them to Harris by just 3 points.

• A massive 22-point swing toward Trump.

More than enough to tip the scale in what turned out to be a low turnout election. A lot of Biden voters—15% of them—sat at home watching TV instead of voting in 2024. That helped Trump enormously. Combine these two factors, and you got your result.

Fast forward to today: Trump is now sitting at -34 approval rating with Hispanics.

Doesn't mean shit if the Democrats do nothing about it and expect Trump to just deliver their victory back to them.

Both parties have struggled to hold onto the Hispanic vote, but the toxic masculinity brand Trump built for convincing undereducated American men? That goes a long way in shoring up his numbers with Hispanic men. And the fact that Democrats only wake up once every four years—not even every two—helps Trump even more.

It's not that Harris's campaign didn't understand this. The whole reason they prioritized the Midwest and Pennsylvania was their awareness that they absolutely suck at converting Hispanic votes in Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona.

Take a look at the campaign stops Harris made at the end of September last year. You can see the Sun Belt buried at the bottom of that list.

They avoided the Sun Belt, handed the Hispanics to Trump, and ended up losing more than necessary.

To a large extent, I struggle to pin the blame fully on the Harris campaign. They had very little time to react. They were up against a candidate who never stopped campaigning. And the Dems never really make any effort during non-election seasons to keep making inroads into the Hispanic coalition. They wake up a few months before the election and do some patchwork using playbooks written two decades ago, or they expect Trump to campaign for them.

They're not going to learn.

There's really no evidence at the party level that they see this as an existential threat to their future—or the country's.

Take the Christian nationalism threat to the Hispanic community. The GOP isn't just after immigrants—they're after everyone who isn't Christian and white. Right now, their target is immigrants. But they will shift gears soon enough. It's the responsibility of the Democrats, as the opposition party, to make people aware of this escalating threat. They couldn't even echo what Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said about it.

Trump’s ICE went after Hispanic families relentlessly, tearing apart communities with deportations, while at the same time fast-tracking visas for white South Africans. The message could not have been clearer: brown workers out, white workers in. And yet Democrats act as if Hispanic voters—many of them juggling two jobs just to stay afloat—will somehow connect all the dots on their own and then show up to vote the “right” way.

That is not strategy, that is negligence.

That is not all.

Take Trump's recent corporate investments—this is worse than communism. And there are Latino communities in Florida that cannot stand communism.

What have Dems done about this messaging opportunity?

Still nothing.

Let's not even talk about the big, beautiful tax cut bill the Republicans passed and its impact on Medicare. Let's stay away from discussing how tariffs devastate disposable income for middle-class families. Dems are still struggling to get their message to voters. Honestly, I don't even think the party is really trying.

We have one party willing to tear the country apart to get power. And we have another that won't take the basic necessary steps to win power. This is why voters are looking for change at the ground level—why people like me are rallying behind Gavin Newsom.

At least he understands the threat, says it the right way, and is willing to go toe-to-toe with the GOP media machine. And evidence of how Americans are responding is now coming to light.

That is why people need to take Gavin Newsom seriously. He is one of the few Democrats who understands that you cannot just wait around for Trump to implode. Trump is a nonstop campaigner, a man who floods the media space every single day with noise, energy, and grievance. The Democratic Party has shown no urgency in fixing its age-old policy failures or addressing the Hispanic drift that has already cost them dearly. They still act as if demographics are destiny, as if voters will just return on their own.

Newsom, by contrast, takes the fight directly to Trump. He mocks him, trolls his policies, exposes his contradictions, and turns the Republican media machine back on itself. That is not a sideshow—it is the only kind of counterpunch that lands in today’s political environment. Because if Democrats sit back and keep waiting for Trump to defeat himself, they are going to watch him march back into power.

Newsom may not be perfect, but he recognizes the threat for what it is and is willing to meet it head-on. That alone is reason enough for Democrats and independents to give him the support he needs.

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