David Remnick: Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. With all the headlines about Kamala Harris's surging campaign and poll numbers that indicate a very real change is taking place, the 2024 race remains extremely close. Harris and Tim Walz can hardly expect to win a national election on vibes alone. Any Democrat or anyone really who remembers 2016 will tell you that it would be kind of crazy to write off Donald Trump just yet. Today, we're going to look at two critical aspects of the Republican's race to reclaim the White House.

Back in 2013, after Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama, a Republican autopsy of the campaign said that Latino voters were being turned off by the party's hardline stance on immigration. The report said if Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence. Well, that turned out to be wrong. Since 2015, Donald Trump has said any number of false, misleading, and racist things about people from Mexico and Central America.

He put in place policies like child separation at the border. Yet, his share of the Latino vote increased in 2020, and the trend continues. Comparing Trump and Biden back in July, Latino voters were split evenly. All of this was on Geraldo Cadava's mind when he covered the Republican National Convention for The New Yorker.

Geraldo Cadava: That sound you hear is maracas for Trump. People at this Hispanic leadership coalition event have been instructed to shake them on the convention floor tonight.

David Remnick: This is a subject very close to Cadava's heart. He's the author of a book called The Hispanic Republican. Gerry, there have been a lot of headlines about Donald Trump's support among Latino voters, that it's increasing. That's a phenomenon that Democrats, a lot of them, find utterly baffling. We'll get to that. Before we get into the whys and hows, what's the scale of this? What do we know about the numbers and how the vote has shifted over time?

Geraldo Cadava: What we know for sure is that Donald Trump increased his share of Latino support between 2016 and 2020 by about eight points. That's the consensus view. That was surprising to many because of everything that Donald Trump had said and done, especially in the arena of immigration, all of his anti-immigrant policies that were to be a real turnoff for Latinos. I think there's a real debate about how much Latinos are becoming conservative or whether that lower share of Democratic support had to do with Latino dissatisfaction with the candidates.

David Remnick: Now, you went to talk to Latinos at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. Now, these are not your average voters. They're very engaged political people, and some are truly ardent Trump supporters, like a guy named Bob Unanue, who's the CEO of Goya Foods.

Bob Unanue: I'm Bob Unanue, President and CEO of Goya Foods.

David Remnick: Why did you want to talk with him specifically?

Geraldo Cadava: I wanted to talk to him specifically because I wanted to ask him directly about his experience of giving that talk in the Rose Garden at the White House in the summer of 2020 because he said that we are blessed to have Donald Trump as our president.

Bob Unanue: First of all, I never knew Donald Trump until July 9th, 2020. When I was in the Rose Garden, I was appointed by him to be a commissioner on the White House Commission on Hispanic Prosperity. He was very concerned about prosperity for Americans and Hispanics, so he appointed a group of commissioners.

Geraldo Cadava: After he said that we were blessed to have Donald Trump as a president, there were just widespread calls to boycott Goya beans. I really thought that Democrats, by going down the rabbit hole of boycotting Goya, really took their eye off the ball. What the event at the White House was about was about Donald Trump announcing new initiatives, including investments in Hispanic-serving institutions. Those kinds of things are core elements of his appeal to Latinos. Meanwhile, Democrats just got carried away with this story about boycotting Goya Foods.

Bob Unanue: When I said we were blessed, [unintelligible 00:04:32] as a positive who were offended by that was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julián Castro, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the elites who are not, if you ask me, not truly Latino because they have a privileged life.

David Remnick: Whoa. He said-

Geraldo Cadava: I know. [chuckles]

David Remnick: -that Castro and Lin-Manuel Miranda and AOC are not really Latino. Why not?

Geraldo Cadava: I should first say that I'm not really comfortable with the language of who is and is not a real Latino because I think there are 65 million Latinos in the United States and all of them have different ways of relating to their Latino identity, whether it's about family traditions or language or music or anything like that. I think that it doesn't make sense, really, to talk about who is or is not a real Latino.

It's something you see the Republican Party doing right now. Not too long ago, Donald Trump also said that Kamala Harris was Indian before she was Black, and she might not be a real Black woman. I think the Republican Party is trying to scramble our concepts about ethnic and racial identity.

David Remnick: This question about what people mean in the words they use came up in another conversation that you had with a woman named Betty Cardenas. Now, tell us who she is before we listen to her.

Geraldo Cadava: Yes. I find Betty Cardenas fascinating. First of all, she's part of this power family in Latino Republican politics because her son is named Abraham Enriquez, and he's the founder of a group called Bienvenido US. She has also served as national chairwoman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. Now she's also the president of the Bienvenido's action group.

David Remnick: Let's listen to your conversation with her.

Betty Cardenas: As you see Trump coming in, you see a message of more diverse, a little bit more inclusive. In the platform, you even see it. I think there's still a lot of work to do within the Hispanic community. You see Trump, I think he will do a-- I hope he does a phenomenal job for the America First agenda that President Trump has, which America First means it has so much inclusivity in a lot of stuff.

Geraldo Cadava: I had never seen these signs. I'd seen, "Build the Wall," things like that. I had never seen a sign that said, "Mass Deportation Now." How do you feel about those signs?

Betty Cardenas: Coming from immigrant parents, I think when you see mass deportation, you won't see me raising one of those mass-- because there's so much significance behind that. I know what Trump's policies said. I know the policymakers that are going to be behind, and I know what mass deportation he's talking about. He's talking about the criminals. "Deport those high-risk criminals." I think that's what's missing if they could specify, but also, it's a message of the campaign.

I know in my heart what it means. I know who's going to be sitting down doing the policy. It is simple. I see it and I know it. It wouldn't be more like, "Oh, mass deportation, everybody, even the students, the DACA students, everybody here." It wouldn't be possible. You and I know that it's not true.

David Remnick: Here she gets to a very crucial slogan of the Trump campaign, "Mass Deportation Now," which is a sign that you saw at the RNC quite a lot of. She says it just means deporting some criminals. How accurate is that where the Trump campaign is concerned?

Geraldo Cadava: Well, I don't think it's very accurate if you take him at his word in terms of what he said publicly. They're talking about deporting 15 million to 20 million people, which he believes is the true number of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

David Remnick: It has echoes of 1954. Right? What happened then?

Geraldo Cadava: That's right. It has echoes of 1954 when there was an operation called Operation Wetback that deported some 1.3 million Mexicans from the United States. Now Stephen Miller and Trump together are calling for mass deportations. That would be something like 10 times that, more than 10 million, 12 million deportations. I got this a lot from a lot of different people is that they think, first of all, that we are taking Trump's comments out of context, that what he really means is he's not talking about all Mexicans, he's only talking about high-risk, high-threat criminals.

If you think about it, that's not all that different than what Obama was advocating too when he talked about selective prosecution. He was going to go for the criminals. He wasn't going to prosecute the people who'd been here for a long time and were just trying to make better lives for themselves. When it gets down to it, I don't know that her vision of how this is going to work and Obama's are all that different, but she says that she has been in rooms with Donald Trump where he has talked to her about his views of immigration, and she knows that mass deportation is not in his heart, it's not what he means.

She even brought out her phone. She had captured screenshots of old tweets that Donald Trump had sent that were in support of the Dreamers. She thinks that Donald Trump would still like to find a pathway for undocumented citizens, including Dreamers. He would still like to fix things for them.

David Remnick: Well, it's striking that she mentions the word diversity and inclusiveness as aspects of the Republican Party. Those are usually Democratic Party buzzwords. I almost wondered if she were trolling you in a way, although she doesn't seem to have that kind of personality. She means something different?

Geraldo Cadava: Yes. I think that that's what all, not only Latinos, but I saw many Asian American Trump supporters, many Black Trump supporters, Native American Trump supporters there. They really want to believe that because the Republican Party aligns with their values, that it is a truly inclusive message. In fact, they will say that Democrats are the ones that like to divide and conquer all Americans by appealing to particular ethnic groups, by having messaging that divides up the electorate and sees us all as a compilation of various interest groups.

I think she thinks that her message, the Republican message is more all-encompassing and all-American.

David Remnick: Gerry, you also talked with Carlos Trujillo, who's a former ambassador to the OAS, the Organization of American States. What was his role in the campaign and at the convention?

Geraldo Cadava: He is now part of the campaign working as the Latino Americans for Trump organization, which replaced, in name at least, the Latinos for Trump group.

David Remnick: Let's hear some of your conversation with him.

Carlos Trujillo: A lot of it is driven by the policy. If you just look at the gains with President Trump and the Hispanic community, and I think one of the better examples, not the unique one, is Miami-Dade County. 2016, President Trump received about 34%, 35% of Dade County, 40s. 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis won Dade County, and I'm willing to predict in 2024, President Trump will win Dade County, one of the largest Hispanic counties in the entire country, obviously in the state of Florida.

I think it's a signal of what's happened with the Hispanic community that before, it was in the lower 20% participating in the Republican Party, to now, it's one of the fastest-growing blocks of Republican votes.

Geraldo Cadava: I've spent a considerable amount of time talking to leaders of the Latinos con Biden campaign, and they talk a lot about how they're doing everything they can because they've heard loud and clear this idea that the Democratic Party takes Latinos for granted. You can't just show up two or three months before an election and expect people to turn out for you. They've talked a lot about how they've been spending millions of dollars on bilingual ad buys. They have been opening community centers.

The people I've talked to have said, by contrast, the Trump campaign is doing absolutely nothing. I would like to hear you talk about that characterization but also tell me a little bit about if that's what they see as the invisibility of a campaign is actually part of the strategy.

Carlos Trujillo: Well, the campaign is a policy, and I think there's a clear distinction between the Trump policy from 2016 to 2020 to the Biden policy. For the Hispanic community, the big issues are always faith, family, and freedom; economic freedom, individual freedom, the incorporation of faith, which is very, very important, and the incorporation of family. They're issues that Democrats strongly struggle with. The collapsed border that they think helps them with Hispanics does not. It actually hurts them. Their policy just across the entire Western Hemisphere has been disastrous.

For a lot of Hispanics, especially first generations, second generations, those foreign policy issues almost become domestic in nature. It doesn't matter how many community centers they build or how many cutting-edge ads, policy is what people are going to vote for. If you look at the amount of people born in Latin America who are now United States citizens voting in this upcoming election, it's very, very significant. I think the majority of the gains that Republicans have made have really been with that population.

Geraldo Cadava: I'm sure you get this all the time, but from the moment he declared his candidacy, Donald Trump was supposed to be toxic to Latinos because of statements he makes about Mexican immigrants and immigration in general. In 2016, the focus was on Mexicans who are rapists, murderers, and thieves, and then by 2020, it was about kids in cages. Now it's about immigrants poisoning the blood of America.

Carlos Trujillo: Yes. If you look at illegal migration now, 2024, things that President Trump warned of in 2016 have become reality. American cities are less safe. There's a lot of crime being committed by illegal immigrants. This last wave of migration are the opportunists. It's not the traditional immigrant who was looking for economic opportunity. The majority of these people are great people. They love America. They're looking for economic opportunity

Really, you're sympathetic towards them, towards their fight of trying to improve their family, but at the same time, you have to take into account the country's safety and the security. At the end of the day, people don't vote for the collective, they vote for the individual. When your economic policies is benefiting you personally, inflation's low, taxes are low, regulations are low, you're making more money, you tend to be a lot happier. People vote for safety, they vote for security, and they vote for freedom.

David Remnick: Now, Gerry, Carlos Trujillo is using some talking points about immigrants and crime that are, in fact, misleading. He also says that Trump's Latino support is concentrated among more recent immigrants. Is that right, and why would that be?

Geraldo Cadava: That was one of the most surprising things that Carlos Trujillo told me because I think the common knowledge had been that Trump's greatest gains would have been among third or fourth-generation Latinos, who are more acculturated, speak less Spanish. This interesting fact about Trump increasing his support among first-generation Latinos was confirmed to me by this political scientist at Emory University named Bernard Fraga, who's been working on this. He found that, indeed, it is true that that was one of Trump's greatest areas of gain.

David Remnick: Gerry, something very important happened since the Republican National Convention, of course, and that is that the head of the Democratic ticket has changed from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris. What difference do you suppose that might make in this crucial vote?

Geraldo Cadava: I think the enthusiasm that we've seen among Latinos is not unlike the enthusiasm we've seen among all Democrats right now. I think Voto Latino, the biggest voter registration and turnout operation on the Democratic side, has reported record registration since Kamala Harris declared her candidacy, something that the president of the organization told me that they never even saw during the Obama or Clinton years. There's certainly a lot of enthusiasm, and it's especially noticeable among Latinas and young Latinos.

The main question, I think, going forward is whether they're actually going to turn out. Usually, about 50%, 55% of Latinos show up, so there's a real question. I think, for me, the thing I've been thinking about is it feels almost like the turning on of a light switch like it was an on-off thing. There was a lack of enthusiasm, and now there's a burst of enthusiasm. It's raised real questions about whether the problem is just fixed or whether, structurally, all of the problems that Democrats had been having engaging Latino voters still exist and will have to be worked through over the next few months.

David Remnick: For a long time, there's been this idea floating around that when white people in the United States become a minority, which will happen in around 20 years, according to most projections, when that happens, the Democratic Party will triumph simply through the force of demographics. Do you want to lay that idea to rest here?

Geraldo Cadava: I've wanted to lay that idea to rest for a long time, especially-- It's ridiculous and it's condescending. It's certainly condescending to think that it plays into that idea that Democrats take Latinos for granted because--

David Remnick: Which they have for years and years.

Geraldo Cadava: Which they have for years. They were a core part of the Democratic coalition. I've talked with so many Democratic strategists about this, and the best they can say is that they are afraid of the idea that Latinos will be seen as anything other than an important part of the coalition because if the Democratic Party takes from all of these recent changes that the Latino vote is up for grabs, then Latino advocates lose their ability to make a strong case for immigration policy or any of the issues that they have been fighting for for a long time. Because if Latinos themselves are more fractured as a population than the Democratic Party has been told they are, then they'll have no power. It's like power in numbers.

David Remnick: Gerry, thanks. So much.

Geraldo Cadava: Thank you, David.

David Remnick: Geraldo Cadava is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, and you can read him on the election, the migrant crisis, and much more at newyorker.com.

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