Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump was caused by many factors, and one of them was a surge of Latino support for the GOP ticket even as Democrats were confident that warnings about Trump’s mass deportation plan would prevent that from happening.
Now, one of the Democrats who won on November 5 despite the underperformance of the top of his party’s ticket is warning members of his party to actually listen to Latino voters if they want to win them back for future election cycles.
Ruben Gallego, the senator-elect from Arizona, said on CNN’s State of the Union that Democrats too readily dismissed real economic hardships for lower and middle income Americans in favor of statistics purporting the economy to be getting better overall.
He explained to host Jake Tapper that he’d seen the results of inflation in his neighborhood — people increasingly buying offbrand groceries rather than higher-quality items, and feeling the hurt in their checking accounts regardless. Gallego also pointed to credit card debt, which is at an all-time high across the United States, as evidence that many people are still suffering from residual financial stresses stemming from the Covid pandemic.
“Yes, costs were going down. [But] people were still paying down credit card debt that they used, basically, to survive,” he said.
“One of the things that we were very clear about in this campaign was say: Yes, let’s see what we can do. Like, let’s figure out what we can do to make your life a little easier,” Gallego said of his strategy.
Gallego’s victory in Arizona was a breath of relief for the Democrats on an otherwise dismal election night. His victory against Kari Lake blocked a bonafide conspiracy theorist from the Senate while mitigating his party’s losses in the upper chamber. Democrats are still set to be in the minority this term, but will do so without Republicans obtaining a filibuster-proof majority.
He would go on in the interview to blame Harris’s underperformance with Latino voters in particular in the party’s reliance on “people from the same backgrounds” — Ivy Leaguers — including when it came to hiring consultants to craft messaging aimed at addressing the Latino community.
“I think a lot of politicians didn’t want to hear what was actually happening out there,” Gallego said. He pointed out that his campaign pushed early on border security and economic issues.
Democrats remain in disarray after their stunning collapse on election night; the party failed to retake the House, lost the Senate, and witnessed the Harris campaign lose seven out of seven contested battleground states to president-elect Donald Trump. Polls had indicated the race was closer and even trending in the vice president’s direction, adding to the weight of the blow to party insiders.
In the days following, Biden and Harris operatives have traded blame for the defeat, with many aligned with Harris (and still others with no dog in the fight) accusing the president of staying in the race long after it had become obvious to many that he was bound to lose the election to Trump. Pod Save America host Jon Favreau, an Obama White House official, said on his show that Biden campaign internal polling indicated that Trump would win with 400 electoral votes had Biden remained in the race after his disastrous debate performance in June.
Biden loyalists, meanwhile, have bashed Harris’s team for the shocking sum the campaign spent during its 100+ days in actions, having raised $1bn and still limping past election night millions in debt.
