Trump Got a Record 46% of the Latino Vote as Democrats Reject Hispanic Working Families

Murphy also highlighted that for Democrats to win in the future, they must “build a bigger tent” that includes people with more socially conservative views.

“Allow into the tent people that do not agree with us on 100% of our core social, cultural issues, as well as other hot-button topics like guns or climate,” he specified. “I think we’d be better off fighting out discussions around some of those very difficult social and cultural issues inside our tent instead of pushing everybody who disagrees with us outside.”

Murphy’s post-election remarks represented a sharp change of tune from four days before the November 5 vote, when he advanced Harris’ narrative that Trump and his supporters presented a “threat to democracy.”

At the time, the senator even repeated on X the debunked claim that Trump said former Congresswoman “Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.”

As CatholicVote noted, Trump had in reality criticized Cheney’s hawkish stance on foreign policy, making “the point that if Cheney were to serve in a combat role herself, she might not be as eager to send American troops to battle.”

Murphy is not the first federal Democrat lawmaker with a thoroughly socially liberal voting record to insist that the party must moderate on cultural issues following Harris’ loss.

Fellow New Englander Rep. Seth Moulton, D-MA, made headlines last week after he told The New York Times that “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.”

Specifically when it came to the topic of women’s sports, Moulton said: “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

The congressman stood by the comments after an LGBTQ activist called for his resignation.

CatholicVote reported that Moulton’s “about-face came after years of asserting that keeping men out of women’s sports was a violation of ‘transgender rights.’”

Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, a prominent figure in the Democratic Party’s hard-left faction, recently implied that the party’s messaging was out of touch with American voters.

“Democrats very often in their messaging, they speak in terms and in concepts and not in the second person,” the leftist lawmaker told MSNBC hostess Joy Reid in a recent interview.

Ocasio-Cortez was specifically referring to a viral Trump campaign ad portraying Harris as too far to the left on “transgenderism.”

In the ad – which experts say played a role in securing Trump’s win – a young male narrator says: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Ocasio-Cortez told Reid: “Political races are not about one candidate versus another candidate. It is a race to convince a person about who cares about you more.”

The wrong issues

Various analysts from across the political spectrum underscored that the Democratic Party in 2024 completely misread the priorities of the American public, contributing to voters’ overwhelming perception that the party was out of touch with their concerns.

Pollster Frank Luntz told CNN this week that the Harris-Walz campaign was not “listening to the American people” about what issues were most important to swing voters.

Luntz agreed with hostess Brianna Keilar’s comment that Harris’ 2019 stance supporting taxpayer-funded “transgender” surgeries for prison inmates – which was highlighted in the same Trump ad that Ocasio-Cotez mentioned – played a role in sinking the candidate’s campaign.

The Trump ad’s rejection of Harris’ pro-“trans” comments “was something that was really finding an audience,” Keilar noted. “And yet [the Harris campaign] thought it wasn’t.”

Luntz replied: “Someone needs to go back to the polling to understand what they were thinking.”

He pointed out that Harris’ position in the polls “peaked at exactly when she turned on Trump.”

UnHerd D.C. Correspondent Emily Jashinsky made the same observation during a Monday appearance on journalist Megyn Kelly’s podcast.

“When you look at the RCP (Real Clear Politics) national average of polling, where you saw Kamala Harris start to dip was on October 23,” said Jashinsky, adding that Harris’ numbers “never recovered.”

She explained that this was the day after The Atlantic published a hit piece quoting John Kelly, who served as White House Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term but is now a vocal opponent of the president-elect.

Kelly had alleged to the left-leaning publication that Trump once said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Harris leaned heavily into these claims, making a heavily scrutinized three-minute speech from outside her mansion on October 23 in which she echoed Kelly’s words that Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist” and that he “invoked” Hitler.

“There was a world in which Kamala Harris could’ve been banging the table talking about immigration, talking about inflation, distancing herself from Joe Biden,” Jashinsky said, “and not running on January 6, not running on fascism.”

During the same podcast, Washington Free Beacon Editor-in-Chief Eliana Johnson told Kelly: “The Democratic Party spent the last four years telling voters that the issues that were most important to them, which were the economy and immigration,” were not problems.

“You just can’t win elections that way,” Johnson stressed. “By telling voters that the things that they perceive as problems aren’t problems.”

On Sunday’s episode of his show, CNN host Fareed Zakaria outlined that Harris’ Democratic Party “blew it by making three big mistakes” during the election cycle, all related to either ignoring or overemphasizing certain issues.

“The first big error was the Biden administration’s blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border,” Zakaria said. “Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist.”

The political left “missed a massive shift in American public opinion” in favor of increased border security “in just a few years.”

Multiple polls have shown in particular that significantly more Latinos – a group instrumental in Trump’s decisive win – favor stricter immigration policies than they did in past years.

Zakaria went on to argue that the Democrats’ “second error was an overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump.”

Democrats’ targeting of Trump in court, popularly referred to as “lawfare,” gave “the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump.”

It also confirmed to Trump voters “that overeducated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes.”

Zakaria pointed out that a stunning 58% of 2024 voters who indicated “democracy in the U.S. is threatened” backed Trump, per a CNN exit poll – in spite of Harris and her party’s aggressive messaging that it was the Republican candidate who presented a “threat to democracy.”

“Lawfare turned Trump from being a loser into a victim,” the Zakaria noted. “And as his indictments grew, his campaign contributions surged and his poll numbers solidified.”

The Democrats’ third mistake, Zakaria said, was their embrace of identity politics that “alienated many mainstream voters.”

“There’s an irony in claiming to be pro-Latino by insisting that people use the term ‘Latinx’, only to discover that Latinos themselves think the word is weird,” he said.

This approach made Democrats’ “miss, for example, that working-class Latinos were moving toward Trump, perhaps because they were socially conservative … or even agreed with his hardline stance on immigration.”

Like his CNN colleague Keilar, Zakaria also acknowledged that Trump’s viral “Kamala is for they/them” ad was effective.

Zakaria stressed that the political left’s “entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal: judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.”

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein also implied that Democrats lost many voters due to ignoring issues important to Americans during an appearance this week on “Pod Save America,” a popular left-wing podcast co-hosted by four former members of the Obama administration.

“The thing that surprised me least about the election was the sharp red shift in these big cities,” Klein said, specifically naming Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City.

“Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them they are furious,” he explained.

Klein said that the “rage” he hears from fellow New Yorkers over the city’s migrant crisis “does show that what was going on at the border was much worse I think than Democrats were letting themselves accept.”

“The sense of disorder rising,” he added. “Not just crime but homeless encampments, trash on the streets, people jumping turnstiles in subways, crazy people on the streets… you just talk to people and they’re mad about it.”

As CatholicVote previously reported, a post-election poll by Democratic-affiliated research initiative Blueprint asked voters to indicate what reasons played a role in their decision not to back Harris.

Out of 25 reasons listed in the poll, the three that ranked the highest were “Inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris Administration,” “Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris Administration,” and “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”

LifeNews Note: Anthony Iafrate writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.