Among Arizona’s Latino Men, Trump’s Appeal Is Maddening but No Mystery

Robert Meza, a Democratic activist who served in the Arizona state legislature for 20 years, is trying to sort out what is happening in his state. Latinos, who make up 31 percent of the 7.3 million population and a quarter of the electorate, are showing a tilt toward Donald Trump, notably among men. “Podcasts and social media are big influences with young Latino men. They don’t watch TV news. They only turn on extreme right-wing podcasts, support Trump, hate Kamala. That’s how they get their news. That’s more influential than political ads or the debates, or the news.” 

Political commentator Enrique Davis-Mazlum, Arizona state director for UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, figures that Latino men support Trump despite his coarse insults against immigrants because they believe “he’s a powerful man, physically and economically.”  

“There’s a lot of confusion on the economy with men,” Davis-Mazlum says. “Their thinking is, ‘I have less money for groceries and rent than four years ago.’ They have a very short memory span; that we had Covid and all the shortages in the supply chain, that Russia and Saudi Arabia produced less oil and that increased gas prices. They forget all that happened under Trump. And the other thing they forget is that two years ago everybody was talking that the United States was going to have a worse recession, worse than in the 1930s, and we’re not there yet. That’s the thing they’re forgetting. They’re economically ignorant.”   

Trump has deployed his TV star charisma and self-made image as a billionaire and strongman across the “bro” podcasting world and social media in rallies and interviews. Besides a steady stream of anti-feminist and anti-immigrant insults and dark fascist threats, he engineered the overthrow of women’s right to abortion, an issue with appeal to conservative Latino men. “Abortion is harder for men than for women,” Davis-Mazlum says, noting that a proposition to protect abortion rights is on the ballot in Arizona. “Men don’t understand it. It’s their machismo.”

But Trump’s deal with Latinos may have hit a bump this week. His closing rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, a spectacle of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and moral turpitude, exposed one of the campaign’s cringiest moments, when a speaker called Puerto Rico, home to 3.5 million American citizens, “a floating island of garbage.” 

Puerto Rican celebrities and leaders Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, and U.S. Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez retaliated instantly, forcing the Trump campaign, though not Trump himself, to play down the offensive comments, especially noting the sizable Puerto Rican vote in must-win battleground Pennsylvania.

In Phoenix and Maricopa County, where the vote could decide the deadlocked election, Michael Segovia, an insurance trainer and former high school football coach, explained that young Latinos are drawn to Trump because “he’s entertaining and tries to come across as tough. And right-wing media is full of things that go unchecked. Right-wing media said, with no evidence, that Kamala got the debate questions ahead of time. To the point that Elon Musk and Trump himself retweeted it, and it’s been liked and shared over five million times. It’s totally false, but to those five million people, it is true, because they saw and read it online.’’

To Moses Sanchez, a MAGA supporter born in Panama, retired Navy, and manager of an SEO company, “There’s no politician like Trump,’’ especially when it comes to the economy. “Latino men, especially young Latinos, support Trump because he had the best economic output during 2016–2020 ever. Trump, the businessman, has a strong economic record and global security. No wars!”

He waves aside Trump’s insults: “I don’t like it, and I wish he spoke with more dignity about people. I think many of the young Latinos that are voting for Trump feel the same way. Nobody likes how he carries himself, but the alternative is Kamala Harris, who has an atrocious track record with minorities as attorney general in California, and during the Biden-Harris years global insecurity is higher than in the previous administration.” 

And, says Sanchez, “Latinos care more about the economic realities facing them and providing for a better life for their families. The elites already have created better opportunities and care more about the long-term political agendas. Latinos care more about the cost of eggs than about politics.”

It’s no surprise that support for Trump among some Latino men is straining families and friends. Maritza Miranda Saenz, senior vice president of Lumen Strategies, a Phoenix political consulting group that works with Democrats, has seen those conflicts firsthand, among some of her friends and family.

Setting aside her own Democratic political leanings, she explains Trump’s appeal to Latinos, especially to those who come from socialist countries like Venezuela. “They fled from those countries, they reject socialism, and they think that the Democratic Party is too liberal for them. Latinos look at Trump as something they want to be. He’s el patrón, the one who tells people what to do. Latinos get a little piece of that.… This man is saying, ‘If you don’t vote for me, you’re not American.’ Trump is giving Latinos a club to belong to—despite the chauvinism, the machismo, and the racism, he speaks to them.”

Stan Barnes likes to say that “Trump makes his own weather.” Barnes, a Republican lobbyist and media strategist, who says he’s not working on Trump’s campaign, predicts, “He’s going to have more young people vote for him than any other GOP candidate in my lifetime. He’s going to have more ethnic minority support than any Republican nominee perhaps since Richard Nixon in 1972.”

He sees two main components: One, the Democratic Party has taken Latino and African American support for granted, and two, “Men respect strength, and the perception is Donald Trump is a strong person. And the perception is Kamala Harris is not a strong person. And that perception has moved more Latino men to the Republican side than we’ve seen in the past.”

He ran down the issues at stake. On immigration, “Latino men are like Caucasian men, they want strength. The Democrats think that Latinos don’t want border security. But they are not happy with a wide-open southern border, not only for safety reasons but for economic reasons. Everyone on the ground in Arizona knows that the southern border is not controlled by the United States. It’s controlled by the Mexican cartels. And who is happy with that?”

But Arizona, with a history of conservative politics, has lately elected Democrats to high offices as an influx of Latinos and other people from blue states and the Midwest has moved in. Senator Kyrsten Sinema was elected in 2018, the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in the state since 1995. Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, won the seat held by the late John McCain in 2020, and Democrat Katie Hobbs won the governorship in 2022. 

This year, U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego, a centrist Latino Democrat who came to Arizona from the Midwest, is running for the Senate seat Sinema is giving up and is expected to win handily against Kari Lake, a Trump clone who lost the governor’s race to Hobbs two years ago but still claims victory.   

In 2020, 3.3 million people voted in the presidential election in Arizona, about a third of them Latinos, who gave Biden 61 percent of their vote (Trump got 37 percent). Until recently, Harris held an 11-point edge over Trump according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, a drop from Biden’s support, and among all likely voters in Arizona, she was behind Trump but within the margin of error. She could get 40 percent or so of Arizona’s white vote, as Biden did. To win the state, improvement among Latinos will be key.   

Once again, Democrats are pinning their hopes on Latinos to tip the election in favor of Kamala Harris, just as they did four years ago for Joe Biden. “Kamala will win the presidency and Arizona,” Robert Meza says. “The Latinization of Arizona will pull her through.”