A former aide in the Obama administration painted a bleak outlook for Democrats, saying the party has no path back to the White House unless it regains its foothold with Hispanic voters.
From 2016 to 2024, the number of Hispanics eligible to vote jumped from 27 million to 36 million, according to Pew Research. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden won that demographic by large margins over President Donald Trump (66%-28% in 2016 and 61%-36% in 2020).
But last year, former Vice President Kamala Harris attracted just 51% of the Hispanic vote to 46% for Trump, according to exit polls by NBC News, CNN, and The Washington Post. Trump’s total surpassed the 44% that George W. Bush gained in 2004.
“There’s no way to look at this without recognizing the massive scale of our problems,” Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser for strategy and communications in the second Obama administration, said Friday on the “Pod Save America” podcast, which he co-hosts with former Obama White House aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor.
“You can kind of tell yourself that things might be kind of OK by looking at just the shift from ’20 to ’24,” Pfeiffer said, according to the Daily Mail. “But if you really want to assess where we are as a party, you have to look at the shift from 2016 to 2024.”
He noted the sizable shift among Hispanic voters toward Trump from 2016 to 2024, including a jump of 14 percentage points among Hispanic men.
“[Hispanics] are particularly politically powerful because of how the population is distributed in electoral-rich Sunbelt states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada,” he said. “They are becoming more of the electorate, and we are losing more of them at a very fast rate. If that trend continues, there is no path to Democrats winning elections.”
Trump’s biggest gains among Hispanic voters came in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to the Daily Mail. He became the first Republican presidential candidate since George H. W. Bush in 1988 to win Miami-Dade County, where two-thirds of residents are Hispanic.
“The message I take from this is, anyone who thinks that we can get away with just tinkering around the edges, just hoping that Donald Trump becomes unpopular or they nominate some yahoo in 2028 or we’re going to ride the wave of tariffs and inflation to a narrow House victory is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Pfeiffer said. “We have to be willing to ask very hard questions.”
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