**Welcome to Inside Washington's post-Election Day edition!**
I'm a registered Democrat — I even interned in the Obama administration. Pell Grants allowed me to go to community college and a public university. I'm disabled, and Obamacare ensured that I could not be denied healthcare coverage for a pre-existing condition.
But I've never felt entirely at home in the Democratic Party. Maybe because after I graduated from a prestigious university and moved to Washington, I realized that a lot of Democrats inside the political machine lived in a bubble disconnected from the needs of real people. But another reason: my parents were Republicans for much of my youth.
My dad is a classic right-winger from Texas. One year, I got him a calendar of Ronald Reagan for his birthday — that's how much of a classic right-winger I mean. My mom, a Californian who grew up in the height of the Reagan era, admired Republicans like George H W Bush for signing the Americans With Disabilities Act and when we lived in San Antonio, she loved that then-governor George W Bush invested in special education.
These days, however, Mom — a born-again Christian if there ever was one — votes for Democrats almost all of the time, and that's mainly because of the Iraq War.
Notice what I did not mention in these reasons for our political persuasion, despite being Latino: immigration. That's because at least on my mom's side, our family moved here 100 years ago. This was before there was such a thing as legal and illegal immigration; according to my late grandmother, her parents paid just a penny to cross the US-Mexico border. It's not to say we didn't care about the issue. But it was more that it was in the rearview mirror for us.
That was why, of all the big shocks during Election Night, the hard shift of Latino voters to Donald Trump did not surprise me in the least. The speed at which it came to pass may have surprised me, but the fact it happened did not. Ever since Trump did better with Latino voters in 2020 — after he called Mexicans drug dealers, rapists and criminals in 2016 — I've been cognizant of this shift. And I've spent a lot of time trying to work out what's behind it, particularly when it comes to Latino men.
Read more here.
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