Latest news with #LatinoVoters
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Promise of ‘a little rebate' suddenly becomes Trump's latest gimmick to distract Americans from the Epstein fallout
In the months after the 2024 presidential election — and understanding what happened with Latino voters and why they shifted to Donald Trump — I called a Democratic operative in Webb County, right in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She told told me that when asking why one voter would back the once and future president, put simply, the voter told them in Spanish, 'I voted for Trump because he's going to give me money.' Famously, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump signed an economic rescue package that included a $1,200 check. Moreover, Trump sent letters telling people he was the person responsible for it. For many working-class families, the stimulus checks were a lifeline and Trump's approval rating slightly ticked up after sending out the checks, even as he would proceed to make careless mistakes that caused unnecessary deaths in the midst of the pandemic. That conversation came to mind when on Friday, Trump suddenly floated the idea of sending out 'a little rebate' to Americans. 'We're thinking about a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt, but we're thinking about a rebate,' he told a reporter before boarding Marine One on his way to a five-day trip to Scotland. 'We're thinking about a rebate because we have so much money coming in from tariffs, that a little rebate for people of a certain income level might be very nice.' Unsurprisingly, Trump's comments come when voters are souring on the president. On Friday, as he departed, he vehemently denied that he visited the late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein's island. During that same gaggle, he said that he could pardon Epstein's convicted accomplice and occasional girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. Fewer than 30 percent of independents approve of him, according to a new Gallup poll and he has an overall approval rating of 37 percent. His approval among men, a central part of his 2024 victory, now sits below 50 percent. And no matter how much he tries to deflect, blame the Democrats for 'the Jeffrey Epstein SCAM,' he has been unable to escape the stench of it. Trump has denied any knowledge of Epstein's wrongdoing and crimes, whihc came to light after he had a falling out with the financier and ended their friendship. This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson had to dismiss the chamber a day early for the summer recess to prevent enough MAGA Republicans from teaming up with the Democrats to sign a discharge petition to force a vote to release the Epstein files. Even some of Trump's most devoted supporters like Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Nancy Mace of South Carolina joined with Democrats in a subcommittee to subpoena the Department of Justice to hand over documents related to Epstein. In the Senate, Democrats smell blood in the water, as Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Ruben Gallego of Arizona attempted to force the release of files related to Epstein. Both men obviously see themselves as potential Oval Office occupants and see this as an opportunity to gain points with the base and the American public. Manosphere podcasters like Theo Von and Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh who played a key role with non-college educated sports-loving dudes breaking for Trump are turning on him. But this will likely not happen for a number of reasons. For one, the stimulus checks in 2020 came during a once-in-a-century pandemic that required people to stay home and therefore lose their jobs. The checks made sure people had enough to meet their basic needs while keeping demand steady enough. Pumping money into the economy now when unemployment is relatively low — and Trump frequently touts how 'hot' the country is right now — would do nothing but overheat the economy, drive up demand and cause inflation to spike, the very formula that killed killed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' White House runs and allowed Trump to return to Washington. This is to say nothing of his desite for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which could drive up inflation and his 'reciprocal tariffs.' None of that matters though, Trump is trying to rekindle the same tricks that helped him in the past. It's the same rationale for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's saying that Barack Obama staged a 'coup' and his rage against Joe Biden's autopen. Trump is in a position of his own creation and trying to dig himself out with the old tricks. But this time it might not work. Even now, some people might take his stimulus checks and then still not like him. After all, that happened in 2020.
The Independent
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Promise of ‘a little rebate' suddenly becomes Trump's latest gimmick to distract Americans from the Epstein fallout
In the months after the 2024 presidential election — and understanding what happened with Latino voters and why they shifted to Donald Trump — I called a Democratic operative in Webb County, right in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She told told me that when asking why one voter would back the once and future president, put simply, the voter told them in Spanish, 'I voted for Trump because he's going to give me money.' Famously, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump signed an economic rescue package that included a $1,200 check. Moreover, Trump sent letters telling people he was the person responsible for it. For many working-class families, the stimulus checks were a lifeline and Trump's approval rating slightly ticked up after sending out the checks, even as he would proceed to make careless mistakes that caused unnecessary deaths in the midst of the pandemic. That conversation came to mind when on Friday, Trump suddenly floated the idea of sending out 'a little rebate' to Americans. 'We're thinking about a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt, but we're thinking about a rebate,' he told a reporter before boarding Marine One on his way to a five-day trip to Scotland. 'We're thinking about a rebate because we have so much money coming in from tariffs, that a little rebate for people of a certain income level might be very nice.' Unsurprisingly, Trump's comments come when voters are souring on the president. On Friday, as he departed, he vehemently denied that he visited the late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein's island. During that same gaggle, he said that he could pardon Epstein's enabler and occasional girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. Fewer than 30 percent of independents approve of him, according to a new Gallup poll and he has an overall approval rating of 37 percent. His approval among men, a central part of his 2024 victory, now sits below 50 percent. And no matter how much he tries to deflect, blame the Democrats for ' the Jeffrey Epstein SCAM,' he has been unable to escape the stench of it. This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson had to dismiss the chamber a day early for the summer recess to prevent enough MAGA Republicans from teaming up with the Democrats to sign a discharge petition to force a vote to release the Epstein files. Even some of Trump's most devoted supporters like Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Nancy Mace of South Carolina joined with Democrats in a subcommittee to subpoena the Department of Justice to hand over documents related to Epstein. In the Senate, Democrats smell blood in the water, as Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Ruben Gallego of Arizona attempted to force the release of files related to Epstein. Both men obviously see themselves as potential Oval Office occupants and see this as an opportunity to gain points with the base and the American public. Manosphere podcasters like Theo Von and Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh who played a key role with non-college educated sports-loving dudes breaking for Trump are turning on Trump. But this will likely not happen for a number of reasons. For one, the stimulus checks in 2020 came during a once-in-a-century pandemic that required people to stay home and therefore lose their jobs. The checks made sure people had enough to meet their basic needs while keeping demand steady enough. Pumping money into the economy now when unemployment is relatively low — and Trump frequently touts how 'hot' the country is right now — would do nothing but overheat the economy, drive up demand and cause inflation to spike, the very formula that killed killed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' White House runs and allowed Trump to return to Washington. This is to say nothing of his desite for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which could drive up inflation and his 'reciprocal tariffs.' None of that matters though, Trump is trying to rekindle the same tricks that helped him in the past. It's the same rationale for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's saying that Barack Obama staged a 'coup' and his rage against Joe Biden's autopen. Trump is in a position of his own creation and trying to dig himself out with the old tricks. But this time it might not work. Even now, some people might take his stimulus checks and then still not like him. After all, that happened in 2020.
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Rep. Espaillat, influential among NYC Latino voters, endorses Zohran Mamdani for mayor
NEW YORK — Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a key influencer among Latino voters, threw his weight behind Zohran Mamdani's mayoral candidacy on Thursday. The endorsement comes after Espaillat supported ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his failed primary run. The congressmember also previously backed Mayor Eric Adams. Mamdani, who appears in early polling to be the frontrunner headed into November's general election, has collected institutional support from unions and other elected leaders since his 12-point win in June. Other key party leaders, such as Gov. Kathy Hochul, continue to express reluctance about Mamdani. 'The city is at a precipice, and people are forced to move out because they can't make ends meet,' Espaillat said at a Washington Heights press conference announcing the endorsement. 'And I think he represents that vision. I think more and more people are lining up with that vision.' Espaillat stressed the importance of unity among Democrats in supporting their nominee and said that he would campaign and make calls on Mamdani's behalf. 'I have never chosen to be outside of the Democratic lane, and we will continue to back those candidates, those nominees, that voters tell us that they support,' he said. Mamdani said Espaillat, the first Dominican American member of Congress, was a model for how to push back against President Trump. 'We have to fight the authoritarian administration in Washington, DC,' Mamdani said from the United Palace. 'We have to fight for the working people in this city who are being pushed out of the place that they call home. And I look at Congressmember Espaillat and I see a guide for how to do both of those things at the same time.'
Washington Post
02-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
The one thing about Mamdani's win that should worry Republicans
Armin Thomas and Leon Sit are partners at Split Ticket, an election data analysis firm. You shouldn't read too much into one mayoral election in New York City — let alone a Democratic primary — when it comes to gauging the broader political winds. But if there's one warning sign for Republicans, it's that national polling is starting to show discontent among two key groups that swung hard right for Donald Trump in 2024 and that helped power Zohran Mamdani's upset win: young people and Latinos. Trump romped to victory in 2024 by promising to improve the cost of living after a spike in inflation and to reset immigration policy after a rapid influx of migrants. But recent polling shows that young and Latino voters have moved sharply against the president in both of these areas and are judging his performance harshly overall. Based on five June polls measuring Trump's approval rating, the president's numbers among these groups have fallen far from his 2024 high-water mark. These negative ratings also stand out compared with movement among more 'traditionally' Republican groups: White voters and voters over 65. For each of these groups, there was less of a shift in voting behavior last election. Trump's June approval with voters over 65 is only net negative by 6.5 points, while he is above water with Whites by three points. The issues bothering these groups notably connect to ones that Mamdani — who began his campaign by interviewing Trump voters in November — ran on. He promised to both make the city more affordable and protect migrants from Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns. On the issue of the economy, young people have a more unfavorable than favorable view of Trump's performance by a 25-point margin. With Latinos, it's 26 points. By contrast, the disapproval margin for voters over 65 is 7.5 points, and it's less than one point for White voters. There's some overlap between these trends: Latino voters tend to skew younger in the electorate, as the demographic has grown quickly in size and electoral importance. A large number of voters cited economic pressure during the Biden presidency as their reason for switching parties — crediting the prior Trump presidency with a stronger economic climate. Approval ratings and voting behavior are not the same thing, of course, but these persistent negative ratings among the groups that swung the largest toward the president suggest that these voters are not feeling the economic relief they believed they would be getting. On the issue of immigration, this divergence also persists. Young voters are more likely to have an unfavorable view of Trump on immigration than a favorable one by a margin of 18 points, and Latinos by 24 points, as the administration pursues a wide range of policies that have affected undocumented immigrants as well as foreign students, certain green-card holders, and people who have been temporarily allowed to live and work in the United States. Democrats should nonetheless temper their expectations. Even with strong disapproval ratings among these groups, it is unlikely that they will swing back to being as Democratic as they were previously. Trump's approval is still higher with them than it was at a comparable point in his first term. It's not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, but it does suggest that the Republican brand, though tarnished since last year's election, remains stronger among these key groups than it did eight years ago. But Democrats also don't need to recover all their losses to have a strong performance in the midterms. Even a 1 percent better showing in House races overall would have secured them the speaker's gavel last year. The Republican Party will be making a mistake if it thinks it can take its newest voters for granted.
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Arellano: Trump was winning with Latinos. Now, his cruelty is derailing him
The Pew Research Center is one of the most trusted polling firms in the country, especially when it comes to Latinos. Last week, it published findings that should have been a victory lap for Donald Trump and his tortuous relationship with America's largest minority. According to Pew, Trump won 48% of Latino voters in the 2024 presidential election — the highest percentage ever recorded by a Republican presidential nominee and a 12 percentage point improvement from his 2020 showing. Latinos made up 10% of Trump's coalition, up from 7% four years ago. Latino men went with a Republican for the first time. Trump even improved his share of support among Latinas — long seen by Democratic leaders as a bulwark against their macho Trumpster relatives — by a 13-point margin, a swing even greater than that of Latino men. These stats prove what I've been warning about for years: that Latinos were souring on illegal immigration — even in blue California — and tiring of a Democratic Party too focused on policies that weren't improving their lives. This gave Trump a chance to win over Latino voters, despite his years-long bloviations against Mexico and Central American nations, because Latinos — who assimilate like any other immigrants, if not more so — were done with the Democratic status quo. They were willing to take a risk on an erratic strongman resembling those from their ancestral lands. Read more: Arellano: How an 'American Cholo' went from Hillary Clinton fan to Trump voter Pew's findings confirm one of Trump's most remarkable accomplishments — one so unlikely that professional Latinos long dismissed his election gains as exaggerations. Those voters could have been the winds blowing the xenophobic sails of his deportation fleet right now. All Trump had to do was stick to his campaign promises and target the millions of immigrants who came in illegally during the Biden years. Pick off newcomers in areas of the country where Latinos remain a sizable minority and don't have a tradition of organizing. Dare Democrats and immigrant rights activists to defend the child molesters, drug dealers and murderers Trump vowed to prioritize in his roundups. Conduct raids like a slow boil through 2026, to build on the record-breaking number of Latino GOP legislators in California and beyond. Trump has done none of that. He instead decided to smash his immigration hammer on Los Angeles, the Latino capital of the U.S. Instead of going after the worst of the worst, la migra has nabbed citizens and noncitizens alike. A Times analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law found that nearly 70% of those arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement from June 1 through June 10 had no criminal convictions. Instead of harassing newcomers with few ties to the U.S., agents are sweeping up migrants who have been here for decades. Instead of doing operations that drew little attention, as happened under Presidents Obama and Biden — and even during Trump's first term — masked men have thrown around their power like secret police in a third-rate dictatorship while their bosses crow about it on social media. Instead of treating people with some dignity and allowing them a chance to contest their deportations, the Trump administration has stuffed them into detention facilities like tinned fish and treated the Constitution like a suggestion instead of the law of the land. The cruelty has always been the point for Trump. But he risks making the same mistake that California Republicans made in the 1980s and 1990s: taking a political win they earned with Latinos and turning it into trash. Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the last amnesty for immigrants in the country illegally. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, who famously said that Latinos were Republicans who didn't know it yet. The Great Communicator knew that the best way to bring them into the GOP was to push meat-and-potato issues while not demonizing them. The 1986 amnesty could have been a moment for Republicans to win over Latinos during the so-called Decade of the Hispanic. Instead, California politicians began to push for xenophobic bans, including on store signs in other languages and driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants, arguing that these supposed invaders were destroying the Golden State. This movement culminated in the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, which sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was eventually declared unconstitutional. We all know how that worked out. My generation of Mexican Americans — well on our way to assimilation, feeling little in common with the undocumented immigrants from southern Mexico and Central America who arrived after our parents — instead became radicalized. We waved the Mexican flag with pride, finding no need to brandish the Stars and Stripes that we kept in our hearts. We helped Democrats establish a supermajority in California and tossed Republicans into the political equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits. Read more: Prop. 187 forced a generation to put fear aside and fight. It transformed California, and me When I covered anti-ICE protests in June outside a federal building in Santa Ana, it felt like the Proposition 187 years all over again. The Mexican tricolor flew again, this time joined by the flags of El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. The majority of protesters were teens and young adults with no ties to the immigrant rights groups I know — they will be the next generation of activists. I also met folks such as Giovanni Lopez. For a good hour, the 38-year-old Santa Ana resident, wearing a white poncho depicting the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, blew a loud plastic horn as if he were Joshua trying to knock down the walls of Jericho. It was his first protest. 'I'm all for them deporting the criminals,' Lopez said during a short break. 'But that's not what they're doing.... They're getting regular people, and that's not right. You gotta stand up for regular raza.' Since then, I've seen my social media feeds transform into a barrio CNN, as people share videos of la migra grabbing people and onlookers unafraid to tell them off. Other reels feature customers buying out street vendors for the day so they can remain safely at home. The transformation has even hit home: My dad and brother went to a 'No Kings' rally in Anaheim a few weeks ago — without telling each other, or me, beforehand. When rancho libertarians like them are angry enough to publicly fight back, you know the president is blowing it with Latinos. Back to Pew. Another report released last month found that nearly half of Latinos are worried that someone they know might get deported. The fear is real, even among Latino Republicans, with just 31% approving of Trump's plan to deport all undocumented immigrants, compared with 61% of white Republicans. California Assemblymember Suzette Martinez Valladares and state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh are among those GOP skeptics. They signed a letter to Trump from California Republican legislators asking that his migra squads focus on actual bad hombres and "when possible, avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace." When proud conservatives like Ochoa Bogh and Valladares, who is co-chair of the California Hispanic Legislative Caucus, are disturbed by Trump's deportation deluge, you know the president's blowing it with Latinos. Yet Trump is still at it. This week, the Department of Justice announced it was suing the L.A. City Council and Mayor Karen Bass, arguing that their "sanctuary" city policy was thwarting "the will of the American people regarding deportations." By picking on the City of Angels, Trump is letting us set an example for everyone else — because no one gets down for immigrant rights like L.A., or creates Latino political power like we do. When mass raids pop up elsewhere, communities will be ready. Many Latinos voted for Trump because they felt that Democrats forgot them. Now that Trump is paying attention to us, more and more of us are realizing that his intentions were never good — and carrying our passports because you just never know. You blew it, Donald — but what else is new? Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
