Democrats are in a “huge bit of trouble” and have “no path” to future election success if the party doesn’t reverse 2024’s exodus of Latinos, ex-Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer dramatically warned.
“There’s no way to look at this without recognizing the massive scale of our problems,” Pfieffer told ex-Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau on Friday’s episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast.
“You can kind of tell yourself that things might be kind of OK by looking at just the shift from ’20 to ’24,” he added. “But if you really want to assess where we are as a party, you have to look at the shift from 2016 to 2024.”
Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on November 4, 2024. AFP via Getty Images
Dan Pfeiffer of ‘Pod Save America’ speaks in 2018. Getty ImagesPfeiffer, 49, noted that Hillary Clinton had walloped President Trump by about 70 percentage points among Hispanic voters, a wider margin than even Obama had managed.
But on Nov. 5, former Vice President Kamala Harris only won the bloc by 54 percentage points, with some exit polls indicating Trump had defeated Harris among Latino men.
“It’s not all about men. Latinos moved 17 points [to the right] in eight years. Latino men went 14 points [toward the GOP] in eight years,” Pfieffer said. “Latinos are the fastest-growing population in the country. They are particularly politically powerful because of how the population is distributed in electoral-rich sunbelt states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada.”
Pfeiffer added that the Democratic Party had been losing Latino voters since 2016. Courtesy of Sen. Ileana Garcia“They are becoming more of the electorate, and we are losing more of them at a very fast rate. If that trend continues, there is no path to Democrats winning elections.”
Trump became the first Republican candidate since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote when he defeated Harris to become the 47th president.
There are 65.2 million Hispanics and Latinos in the US, about a fifth of the population, according to the US Census Bureau.
Obama with Pfeiffer in 2013. AP“The message I take from this is, anyone who thinks that we can get away with just tinkering around the edges, just hoping that Donald Trump becomes unpopular or they nominate some yahoo in 2028 or we’re going to ride the wave of tariffs and inflation to a narrow House victory is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Pfieffer added.
“We have to be willing to ask very hard questions.”
