This is the "Latino Century," according to our next guest. In fact, it’s the title of his new book.
Mike Madrid is a longtime political consultant, cohost of the Latino Vote podcast and author of the new book "The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy."
Madrid says Latino voters are becoming the most important voting bloc in the country — and both parties are failing them.
He spoke with The Show more about it, beginning with the cover of the book, which features a portrait he painted of a Latino version of the famous "American Gothic."
Full conversation
MIKE MADRID: There's an interesting moment when you're writing a book where you get a request from the graphics department, you know, asking what you want the cover to look like, and for many years now I've been exploring kind of the blending of traditional American iconography with Latino imagery, in part because that's, you know, a manifestation of my work and what I research and write on, and the other is because that's just what's happening every day in the country.
So I had painted a few years ago this painting of the Grant Woods American Gothic painting with a Latino family and call it Mexican American Gothic, and I, I sent that to the graphics department and they said we love this, and I was like, well, that was just an idea as to what I was looking for and they're like, no we never had, Simon & Schuster's never had a political book where the author was also the cover artist. So this will be the first. So there we go.
LAUREN GILGER: So there you go. That's really cool. And, and it does kind of segue well into what we're talking about here because as you said, this is such a not just a part of your work, but a part of the political and the cultural conversation happening in the country right now. Begin for us, Mike, with a little bit about the massive growth that we have seen in the Latino population, in the diaspora basically in the last several decades.
MADRID: Sure, so in eight short years, America, for the first time in our history, will be a non-white majority country. Driven almost entirely by the growth in the Latino population, Latino electorate. This is no longer a function of immigration. This is almost all U.S.-born domestic growth. So there's no wall that can be built to stop the demographic change. It's, it's here, it's happening. I think it's a very positive attribute to our democracy and to our country. We are in very short order going to start seeing extraordinarily fast demographic transformation here in the country.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah, and as you say, like this is already here, these are people who are already in the country. What does that mean about the sort of Latino voter, right? Like your, your podcast is called The Latino Vote, right? It's changing so quickly and in ways that I don't think were predicted, right, at least by mainstream people in politics, but maybe you did.
MADRID: Yeah, I've been talking about this for some time. I actually started to predict this rightward shift that was happening back in 2012 for purely demographic reasons, and that's really the most important distinction to understand is more often than not when we say the Latino vote is not monolithic, we're usually talking about kind of countries of origin or, you know, political diasporas that people have come from.
But that's not capturing where the real change is happening. It's happening by generation, how far removed you are from the immigrant experience is definitive in determining your political beliefs. And what 80% now, 80% of all Hispanic, new Hispanic registrations are U.S. born, and they're English dominant, if not English exclusive, and it's moving. The main takeaway here is the transition with Latino voters is moving away from a racial and ethnically focused voter to now an economic and pocketbook issue voter, and that explains why Latinos are moving near parity between Republicans and Democrats.
GILGER: Right, which is a huge shift because the Latinos have for so long been thought of as a, you know, a solid Democratic voting bloc. You say those days are over.
MADRID: They're completely over. They're very much in the rearview mirror and disappearing, again, not necessarily because of what the parties are doing, although that is part of the story, but really more a function of demographics is Latinos again, U.S. born, overwhelmingly U.S. born, non-college educated is the fastest growing segment of the blue collar workforce. They are 30 years old or younger.
If you look at some of the weaknesses that President Biden has in polling, it tends to be with younger voters, and there's no surprise a huge overlap between Latinos and young voters. Latino voters, as I say, is the youth vote. They're disaffected by both parties, and I think that's also an important distinction, is Republicans are winning more and more Latino voters despite their best efforts, not because of them.
GILGER: Right, that's an interesting point because we've heard so much, at least in the last year or so, about Latino voters shifting to the right and this being a win for Republicans. You're basically making the argument that both parties are doing this wrong.
MADRID: That's exactly the premise of the book, and there's a lot of data to suggest that that's the case. Arizona is a good example. Former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey was dramatically overperforming with Hispanic Latino voters compared to where Donald Trump or Kari Lake was getting. So the direction of the Republican Party is actually not conducive to greater Latino growth, or I should say if some of those voices, those more extreme voices were not in the party, the Republicans would be getting an even larger share of the vote.
GILGER: Yeah, I want to talk about what the parties can do in a moment, but let me first ask you about immigration and all of this because another kind of counterintuitive thing that you talk about in your research in this book is that this is not the main issue for most Latino voters anymore. But is the Democratic Party scrambling to figure out how to deal with the border, how to address immigration affecting this?
MADRID: Yeah, there's no question. I mean, look, immigration has never been a priority issue for Latinos in the past 30 years of looking at this issue and polling and working in the community. It's an important issue, but it's not a top priority, and Democrats are struggling, especially as the Democrats move away from working class voters.
Latinos are the fastest growing segment of the working class, and I say that because the education divide is the largest demarcation of political behavior in the country. College-educated voters are rapidly moving to the Democratic Party. Non-college educated voters are moving equally as rapidly towards the Republican Party, and Latinos are kind of caught up in that coalition realignment.
GILGER: That's so interesting. So yes, it's more about class than it is about race or ethnicity here. So what should the parties be doing? What would you be advising them or are you advising them as you as you work in your politics here?
MADRID: Yeah, this is the first time in 35 years, I'm not working on a presidential campaign or a partisan effort, so those days are behind me. Let me say real quickly, housing is central to all of this. About one in five Hispanic men are employed in the residential construction space or affiliated industries. That is a jaw-dropping statistic. And at a time when interest rates in the past four years have tripled and the value of our currency has devalued by about 20%, these voters are getting socked really hard economically in the gut.
That's going to have to be addressed. There's going to have to be a Marshall Plan for housing to address not only the construction jobs and related jobs that come from that industry, but perhaps just as importantly, the affordability of housing where Latinos as a much younger demographic are taking those first steps into home ownership and aren't able to get into a home. That's a problem both on the workforce and the consumer end.
GILGER: Let me ask you lastly here because you have a big picture question that you're addressing in this book, this broad kind of scope of history question about what the rise of Latino voters will do in the country. Like, is it going to create and continue to create a hyperpartisanship that we're seeing already, or will we see some kind of new pluralism, right? What's your answer to that? What's your hope?
MADRID: Well, the first thing to understand is Latinos are the moderate voters in both parties, and they're forcing both parties away from the extremist elements, which have consumed both the right and the left. But the second, perhaps most important consideration is that Latinos are a much more optimistic community than any other of the race or ethnicities in the country. They have much higher levels of trust and confidence in our social institutions. That is the very basis for which a democracy and a society is working.
So we are entering this time where there's this very deep concern about the fragility of the American experiment, about whether or not democracy is strong enough to work in the future, and fortunately we have this answer literally inside of us, our own DNA as Americans is changing to be more culturally supportive of these institutions, a more positive outlook on the future and more confidence in America and the American way of life.
