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Attendees cheer as Donald Trump speaks on stage during a campaign rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on October 29, 2024. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images Sifting through the wreckage of the 2024 campaign, one thing that can’t be said about the Democrats is that they put too little effort into winning over Latino voters. If you looked closely, it was clear that the national party, the Biden-Harris campaign, and Democratic-allied groups were determined to avoid a repeat of 2020, when Joe Biden’s campaign was widely accused of neglecting Latino voters, starting its outreach too late, and making tone-deaf appeals — all mistakes that allowed Donald Trump to make historic gains with these communities despite Biden ultimately prevailing in the election. This time around, the Biden (and then Harris) campaign were determined to do everything right. They hired and elevated top Latino consultants, strategists, and elected officials. They opened field offices and hired staff in heavily Latino parts of swing states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania as early as the spring. They reached out to voters on WhatsApp, a private messaging app used as a form of social media by many Latino and immigrant communities; sent surrogates to Spanish-language radio stations; and microtargeted advertising to Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Mexican American voters. Spanish and bilingual ads ran continuously on TV, radio, and online starting in March. And those ads moved beyond an explicit focus on identity, instead talking up policy and accomplishments like Medicare’s cap on insulin prices, the expansion of health care coverage, and job creation during the post-Covid economic recovery. The hope was that this earlier, smarter, more tailored campaign would help reverse a few trends that were obvious for most of 2023 and 2024: that Latino voters were deeply unhappy with the status quo, were not enthusiastic about Biden’s reelection, and were questioning their loyalty to the Democratic Party.  It’s clear now that this strategy was not enough. Though it will take months to get more granular data, county-level results and exit polls do indicate a rightward shift by Latino voters across the country that contributed to Trump’s victory. To be clear, it appears Democrats still won a majority of Latino voters — but the harsh reality for Democrats is that Trump once again managed to improve his standing. That doesn’t mean that Democrats should throw out the playbook for campaigning with Latino voters. Calls for a hard pivot to the right on cultural issues, or outright resignation about a permanent racial realignment — as some of the conventional wisdom floating around since the election suggests — are premature. Republicans simply cannot be sure these gains will stick around without Trump on the ballot. But there are oddly two contradictory takeaways given what we know so far: Democrats can assure themselves that they ran a pretty good campaign to win back Latino voter support. On a deeper level, however, they missed a more fundamental disconnect between the party and the voters, particularly the working class, that a textbook campaign simply couldn’t fix.  Two takeaways from the election There are two distinct points to take away from November 5.  First, campaigning does still matter. The national trend of Trump posting better margins of support in non-battleground states than in swing states applied to Latino voters as well.  Where Democrats campaigned heavily for Latino votes, Kamala Harris saw a smaller drop in support than in places where her campaign did not focus its efforts — meaning that the Harris campaign’s Latino ground game, spending, and organizing shouldn’t be discounted. The second point cuts the other way: There is a much deeper problem with Democrats’ appeal to Latino voters, one that will take time to repair. Nationally, Democrats like Biden and Harris were just not trusted as working-class champions by many Latino voters, who are still overwhelmingly working class and not college educated.  The memories of economic hardship during the pandemic (for which Trump largely escaped blame) and the inflationary period that followed never went away, and weren’t properly addressed by either Biden or Harris during the campaign. Combined with an overriding anti-incumbent mood that permeated electorates globally this year, Democrats were almost certain to do worse with Latino voters. There were some exceptions. Republican Senate candidates, for example, did not do as well as Trump did among Latino voters, and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who won the Arizona Senate race in a state Harris lost, particularly overperformed, winning by two percentage points a state that Trump won by five. But the larger point holds: Democrats lost ground with Latino voters, and analysts point to their inability to appeal to the working class as a culprit. “It starts with the credibility of the message,” Chuck Rocha, a Mexican American strategist who advised Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign and helped with both Biden general election campaigns, told me. “People like to say that Bernie Sanders was this, or that — the thing that made Bernie Sanders great was that he had always said the same thing, so he was credible. People see bullshit now in politicians. They want someone that’s credible whether they like him or hate him.” Rebuilding that credibility will be essential if Democrats are to reverse their fortunes not just with Latino voters, but with a wide swathe of the electorate.  Democrats never really figured out how to regain Latinos’ trust on the economy In retrospect, the storyline of the Latino electorate was fairly consistent. Poll after preelection poll told the same story: These voters were most concerned about the economy, and they were as likely as white voters to say they either missed the policies and economic conditions of the Trump era, or trusted Trump more than either Biden or Harris to deliver relief. At the heart of this feeling was a disconnect between what voters meant by “the economy” and what many national Democrats, including Biden and Harris, were talking about on the trail. Latino voters, troubled by inflation earlier in the Biden presidency, largely meant “prices should be lower,” while Biden and Harris mostly talked about job creation, slowing inflation, and gradually rising wages. That was true as early as November 2023, when polling from the Democratic research firm Blueprint found that Latino voters cared most about lower prices and least about “creating more jobs” — which was especially problematic because, as Blueprint also found, Latino voters more than any other racial group thought that more employment was Biden’s priority.  Add to this dynamic the fact that it was Latino and Black Americans who experienced uniquely traumatizing financial rollercoasters during the post-Covid period — seeing their wealth and financial prospects rise during the pandemic because of government aid only for rising costs of living to wipe out many of those gains before wages began to grow again — and you can see where the Biden administration’s credibility gap emerged. The Biden economic message was focused on trying to sell a positive economic success story — and there were indeed data and legislation they could point to tell that story. But according to Camille Rivera, a senior advisor for Voto Latino and founder of the Puerto Rican civic organization La Brega y Fuerza, the campaign’s foregrounding of topline indicators — the GDP, the improving consumer price index, the low unemployment rate, and investments in infrastructure and manufacturing, among others — could not sway voters who still saw vivid reminders of peak inflation in the cost of food and household essentials. “We were talking about the economy in macro forms, but people were not feeling it. They were just not feeling it. My father would be like, ‘Hey, did you see this? I just bought these potato chips. There’s like 50 percent air in these potato chips, and the price is higher,’” Rivera said. “We kept saying, ‘But the economy is great. Look at the stock market!’ That to me was many of our flaws.” The “identity force-field” showed cracks Over time, this disconnect may have taken a toll on the overall “party of the work class” brand of the national Democratic Party. And there’s perhaps no better sign of this than in polling specifically focused on one dynamic that tends to bind Latinos to the Democratic Party: the question of which party best “cares for people like you.” It’s that feeling that has tended to root most Latino voters in the Democratic camp, even if these voters don’t necessarily agree with every social position, economic or immigration policy, or cultural value that the party takes on — a kind of “identity force-field,” as Equis, a Democratic research firm focused on Latino voters, calls it.  In the aftermath of the 2022 midterms, Equis found evidence that those feelings were still fairly strong. In those midterms, there were conflicted or swing voters who turned out, and who, because of that warm association with the Democratic Party, pulled the lever for Democratic candidates. There were also Latino voters who ended up voting for Republicans —  but who still harbored warm feelings toward Democrats anyway. Generally, Equis polling found, Democrats were still the party viewed as “better for Hispanics” and which cared “about people like you.” But as Carlos Odio, an Equis co-founder, warned at the time of that report, there was a good chance swing Latino voters could drift in 2024 if “there is a major shift in the issue environment, imbalanced campaigning, or a weakening of identity bonds.” And that seems to be what happened. The signs of weakening identity bonds were there. The Biden campaign fizzled out. And the economy, as well as a rise in the salience of immigration, put national Democrats on the defensive with both Latino voters and the general electorate. By October 2024, after Biden drove down positive perceptions of the party among Latinos prior to his late-July exit, Harris had managed to recover the party’s footing. Her campaign strategy didn’t change tremendously, but polling showed Latino voters returning to the Democratic candidate, albeit not at the same rates that they had voted for Biden in 2020. By the close of the campaign, Harris was viewed as being “better for Hispanics” and “people like you.”  But the Democratic advantage had shrunk from two years before. The force field was weak. And by then, it was too late for the Harris campaign. Democrats now face a challenge: to reassess how they talk about the economy, about class, and about material conditions in a way that can connect with the electorate. There’s a tendency among some in the party — strategists, commentators, and elected officials — to either want to throw out the way they’ve run outreach to Latino voters or to deny that they have a problem at all (and blame “disinformation” or offer counterintuitive data to bolster that thinking). Democratic campaign operations in 2024 were not useless, but if the party is to have a shot in 2028, the work to rebuild credibility with working-class Latinos starts now.

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Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) speaks on stage on the third day of the Republican National Convention on July 17, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Let’s be clear: Not everything Donald Trump has proposed to do in his upcoming administration is a threat American democracy. Some of his Cabinet appointments, like Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state or former Rep. Lee Zeldin for EPA administrator, are basically what you’d expect from Republicans. You might disagree with their policies, but you can’t seriously argue that they represent threats to the rule of law or democratic norms. Others, like former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services, are troublingly unqualified and even outright dangerous — but not an immediate five-alarm fire for American democracy specifically. Yet at the same time, there is already clear and undeniable cause for alarm. Around the world, there are certain steps a leader takes if they want to destroy a country’s democracy, like putting loyalists in charge of law enforcement and politicizing the armed forces. Many of Trump’s early decisions fit this pattern to a T. The biggest red flag is the choice of arch-loyalist Matt Gaetz as attorney general. The Justice Department is arguably the single most powerful domestic policy agency, running everything from the FBI to federal criminal prosecutors to civil rights litigation. Gaetz has few, if any, qualifications to manage all of this — except for his vendetta against the department, as it once investigated him on suspicion of sex crimes. (Gaetz denies the allegations and the DOJ dropped its investigation into them in 2023.) His pitch for the job, one Trump insider told the Bulwark, was to “go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.” Trump’s plans for the military are similarly ominous. Two teams of reports, in the Wall Street Journal and Reuters respectively, have uncovered plans for a political purge of the brass — potentially including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump’s proposed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is a Fox News commentator and MAGA diehard who called for precisely such a purge in a recent book. And then there’s Trump’s scheme to get his Cabinet picks in office. If the Republican Senate actually does block any of these picks, Trump has demanded the power to install them through recess appointments while the chamber is out of session. If enough senators balk, Trump reportedly has put together a complicated backup plan that boils down to the House giving him the power to go around the Senate entirely — effectively eviscerating its constitutional advice-and-consent role on appointments. Of course, we don’t know how much of these really bad ideas will come to pass. Trump is famous for saying things and failing to follow through. But given the enormity of the tail risk — the corrosion of American democracy — it’s critical to take what’s happening right now seriously.  And that means being clear-eyed about the Trump agenda: both what’s not so scary about it, and what is. The “authoritarian checklist” that can guide us through Trump 2.0 The United States is not the only democracy to elect an authoritarian of late. Voters in a series of other countries — including Hungary, Turkey, Israel, India, Poland, Venezuela, Brazil, and the Philippines — have elevated similarly dangerous leaders in recent elections. None of these countries are exactly like the United States, but all have some things in common that can give us guidance as to what to expect.  One of the most important similarities is that none of these country’s leaders openly campaigned on abolishing democracy. The concept remained far too popular among both citizens and elites to act like Hitler and abolish elections outright. Instead, they made incremental changes that would slowly-but-surely increase their own power while neutering opponents both in and out of the government. No one step marks the end of democracy, but each cumulatively makes it a little bit weaker. If this process reaches its endpoint, elections become functionally meaningless — theoretically free contests that in actuality are nearly impossible for the incumbent party to lose. Executing this strategy requires a few key moves. First, would-be authoritarians need the loyalists in key government positions. No one can hollow out an entire government on their own; it’s simply too towering a task to micro-manage. So they delegate, empowering individuals with unwavering loyalty and dedication to remaking key government institutions along authoritarian lines. In India, for example, the second-most powerful position in government — home minister — is occupied by a man named Amit Shah, a close friend and comrade of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s since 1982. Second, they need those appointees to eviscerate legal and political guardrails on their power. Independent prosecutors, government accountability offices, courts, legislative prerogatives — all of this needs to be either co-opted or eliminated. The failed 2023 judicial overhaul in Israel, which would have effectively stripped its courts of any ability to check Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s power, is an unusually stark example of such a move. After these first two steps have succeeded in consolidating power over the state, the authoritarian then wields it to weaken dissenters outside of government — with the ultimate aim of tilting the playing field on which elections take place. This doesn’t just mean obvious things, like formally restricting free speech rights, but more subtle tools — like wielding tax agencies and spurious legal investigations against critics and potential private sector rivals. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is the pioneer here, using something as seemingly benign as government ad spending to bring the Hungarian media under his control. Through all of this, they need to be able to count on the loyalty of the security services as a last resort. In between elections, would-be authoritarians fear nothing more than popular uprisings and military coups. Stacking the intelligence community and armed forces with loyalists is the best way to ensure that coups fail (as happened in Turkey in 2016) or to violently repress street protests if necessary (as happened after Venezuela’s stolen election earlier this year). These four points — appoint loyalists, eviscerate guardrails, attack dissent, suborn armed forces — are the key benchmarks one should use for evaluating Trump’s policies.  Does what he’s proposing truly further one of those objectives? If so, by how much? How likely is it to happen? And how does the threat level rank relative to other things that he’s doing? Grading Trump’s early decisions by the checklist Trying to assess Trump’s policies on these metrics is not some kind of academic game.  Those of us who care about democracy, in the press and elsewhere, need to maintain our credibility with potentially persuadable third parties — like swing voters or moderate Republican senators. Being seen as liberal hacks who call any Republican appointee a threat to democracy is a problem; so too is developing a track record of crying wolf by labeling everything Trump does anti-democratic. In this spirit, it’s clear what emerges as the most dangerous move of Trump’s early transition: the Gaetz pick. It is hard to imagine someone more cravenly loyal to Trump than Gaetz. It is hard to imagine anyone who has a more serious vendetta against non-partisan administration of laws, since Gaetz was once the target of a federal investigation. And it is hard to imagine a more important position than attorney general — one that gives immense power both to eviscerate guardrails and to punish private sector dissenters with spurious criminal investigations (among other tools). The Defense Department plans aren’t too far behind. Purging the Joint Chiefs based on political loyalty — excuse me, alleged “wokeness” — removes one of the chief barriers to Trump’s alleged desire to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy soldiers against protestors at home. Hegseth isn’t quite as egregious a Cabinet choice as Gaetz, but it’s hard to imagine someone who has proposed such purges and regularly praises Trump on TV standing in the way of his boss’s plans. We can go on down the list.  The plan for circumventing the Senate’s advice-and-consent power would be extremely threatening to guardrails if it happened, but it’s unclear how likely it is to happen. Gabbard as director of national intelligence raises some troubling questions about politicizing intelligence, but she’s not as much of a Trump toady as a Gaetz or even a Hegseth. Kennedy is almost certainly a disaster for public health, but not an obvious threat to democracy narrowly speaking. The office of presidential personnel is small potatoes compared to a cabinet post, but Trump’s decision to put his book publisher in charge of it will facilitate his plans for seeding the entire government with loyalists. By contrast, there’s no reason to think appointments like Rubio or Zeldin even register on this scale. These are the kind of appointments you’d expect from any Republican, and while their policies may be terrible, they’re not an attack on our system of government. In terms of protecting our democracy, the question for them isn’t whether they themselves are a sign of authoritarian rot, but whether they would have the courage to resist it while in power (color me skeptical). Ranking these matters for more than just credibility purposes. Democracy’s defenders have limited resources and energy, especially when both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court are controlled by Republicans. They need to prioritize which Trump appointments and policies to fight, a task made far more difficult by the deluge of daily outrages that we all remember from Trump’s first term. That requires being clear-eyed about what really is threatening and what isn’t. And at present, an objective evaluation of Trump’s early proposals should give Americans a hell of a lot to worry about.

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