I recently joined my dear friend AJ Rice on his new show, "Dangerous Laughter." It’s a cutting-edge example of new media that AJ describes as “political satire with a spine.” Somewhere between the laughs, the history lessons, and AJ's trademark ability to connect today's headlines to events most people slept through in high school, we landed on a topic that continues to haunt the American Left.
Why are so many Latino Americans walking away from the Democrat Party?
It's a question I explore in my new book, "The Rise of the Liberty-Loving Latino," but it's also a question Democrats seem uniquely incapable of answering honestly.
Their preferred explanation is that Latino voters have somehow changed. Mine is simpler: Latinos haven't changed; the Democrat Party has.
For years, Democrats convinced themselves that race was political destiny. They built an entire electoral strategy around the idea that certain groups belonged to them. Not because they earned their votes. Not because they consistently delivered results. Because they believed those voters had nowhere else to go. And truth be told, under the Uniparty GOP relics like John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, just to name a few, they didn’t.
Then 2024 happened.
Latino voters shifted toward President Trump in historic numbers. Latino men voted Republican at levels that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Counties along the southern border that Democrats once treated as permanent political property suddenly became competitive or flipped outright.
The reaction from the Left was revealing.
Instead of asking why millions of Hispanic Americans rejected their agenda, they immediately began questioning the voters themselves. Some suggested Latinos were misinformed. Others implied they were acting against their own interests. Still others blamed cultural shortcomings, sexism, or ignorance. You read that right! Leftists like Mika Brzezinski from MS NOW actually called Latino men misogynists because we didn’t vote for the most unqualified woman to ever run for the presidency, or any office, really.
In short, the people who spend every waking hour lecturing America about tolerance became remarkably intolerant the moment Latino voters stopped doing the Democrats’ bidding.
During my appearance on "Dangerous Laughter," we discussed how often Democrats reduce people to demographic categories. They don't see Americans. They see voting blocs. Every issue is filtered through race, ethnicity, gender, or some other identity marker. It's why they're perpetually shocked whenever Americans refuse to fit neatly inside the boxes they've created.
Take illegal immigration.
The political class often talks about the border as an abstraction. For millions of Americans living near it, especially in heavily Hispanic communities, it isn't an abstraction at all. It's reality. They see the consequences of failed policies firsthand. They deal with the strain on local resources, the public safety concerns, and the economic disruptions long before cable news decides to cover them.
What Democrats interpreted as ideological disagreement was often something much simpler: people responding to what they could see with their own eyes.
The same pattern has emerged on cultural issues. Many Latino families place tremendous value on faith, family, personal responsibility, and common sense. They aren't interested in being told that biological reality is negotiable or that longstanding traditions are somehow offensive. They don't spend their days obsessing over identity politics because they're busy raising families, running businesses, and building communities.
What the Left keeps mistaking for political disloyalty is actually independence and a vibrant, thinking population.
That's one of the reasons I wrote my new book. Despite what some may assume from the title, the book isn't really about ethnicity. It's about freedom. It's about the growing number of Americans who are rejecting the politics of division and embracing the idea that citizenship matters more than identity. Millions of liberty-loving Latinos just embraced this mindset.
That's why these kinds of conversations resonate with political observers nowadays. It’s not about segmenting individuals into broader groups; Americans who don’t drink the liberal Kool-Aid are tired of being sorted into categories and instructed how they're supposed to think.
The Left spent decades telling Hispanic Americans who they were. They weren’t ready when liberty-loving Latinos, with traditional American and Latino values, started answering back: We are Americans first!
That's the political realignment unfolding before our eyes. It's larger than any one election cycle, larger than any one candidate, and larger than any one demographic group.
The rise of millions of liberty-loving Latinos like me is simply one chapter in a much bigger story — the story of Americans rejecting identity politics and rediscovering the principles that unite us.
And that’s why Democrats are in a panic. Because their leftist political movement has always been built on division.
Chris Salcedo, author of "The Rise of the Liberty-Loving Latino: A New American Revolution," is a veteran television and radio broadcaster, political analyst, and podcaster who is also a proud Latino Conservative. He is Executive Director of the Conservative Hispanic Society.