A. I’ve been researching and looking at the data and doing campaigns all over the country with Latinos for over 30 years. I realized the time to put what I’ve learned in writing was right after the 2020 election — we saw a historic slide of Latinos away from [Democrat Joe] Biden.

The Democrats were either dismissing it or saying it wasn’t happening. And it occurred to me that they probably needed some help in understanding the Latino vote. I realized I needed to write a book and explain what was going on — before the 2024 election — otherwise we risk sliding into a really, really dark place.

Ironically, if Trump is reelected, he will do it with a historically high number of Latino voters, and that doesn’t sit right with me.

Q. De Los recently quoted you in a story about how 1 in 5 Latino voters were considering casting a ballot for a third-party candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Can you tell me more about why this trend in the electorate didn’t surprise you?

A. The whole thesis of the book is that neither party understands our community, and neither party has given due diligence to it. As a result, Latino voters are responding to that reality in myriad different ways. One of the main ones is [by] responding to candidates who are attacking their own parties and saying the parties themselves are not working.

It’s particularly ironic because Latinos by every metric have a higher trust and confidence in all of our social institutions. That fact is a really big reason why the book is optimistic, and I believe that in this current fragile state of our democracy, Latinos are replenishing the values that can keep this country going forward. I feel so passionately about that.

So when I see this populism, this antiestablishment sentiment in our community, it’s really contained to the political parties. Everything else, whether it’s higher education, church, government or the military, there’s very high levels of trust and support and confidence. The two areas where we are rejecting it with this very antiestablishment movement is with both political parties.

Q. You’re a data-driven guy. What does the data say about who Latinos are?

A. Well, it’s both who we are and who we are becoming. Two-thirds of us are U.S.-born. The fastest-growing segments of our community are third-generation and fourth-generation. Over 60% of us are Mexican American. We’re increasingly becoming part of the non-college-educated, blue-collar workforce.

There’s a very large divide between our women, who are going to college at higher rates, and our men — which is going to have massive impact in our institutions and our society. We have the largest gender gap out of the four largest racial or ethnic groups in the country.

...continued

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.