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I’m your standard-issue monolingual American.
Sure, I took the requisite two years of a foreign language in high school. I chose Spanish. It seemed the obvious choice. I grew up surrounded by Spanish speakers, lived in a city with a Spanish name, drove streets with Spanish names, and, not insignificantly, harbored a lifelong affection for Mexican food. And don’t get me wrong. I can ask where the bathroom is or request permission to use the pencil sharpener with the mellifluous delivery of Julio Iglesias. Anything else I may have learned has long since been reclaimed by time.
Most of my life, my illiteracy wasn’t merely linguistic. It was cultural. Historical. Geographical, if I'm being completely honest. Mexico, in my mind, was a single place populated by interchangeable Mexicans. Beyond that lay Central and South America, which I mentally filed under "more places where people speak Spanish." It embarrasses me to admit that I had compressed dozens of countries, hundreds of millions of people, and centuries of history into one large, conveniently blurry idea.
As I grew older, I was convinced I finally understood and appreciated the diversity of the Spanish-speaking world.
Then came the 2024 presidential election.
Trump's support among Hispanic voters had been climbing for years. According to Pew Research Center, he won 48 percent of Hispanic voters in 2024, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. I found this bewildering. Here was a candidate whose dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants, hardline immigration agenda, and habit of turning nearly every disagreement into a cultural grievance seemed designed to repel Latino voters. And yet, nearly half had supported him. Why?
The moment I asked the question, I realized I was repeating the very mistake I had just condemned.
My mistake was assuming there was such a thing as "the Latino vote."
Whether you call people Hispanic or Latino, those are demographic labels, not political identities. They encompass people whose roots span more than twenty countries and whose histories, priorities, and lived experiences are often radically different. A Cuban American in Miami, a Mexican American in Southern California, a Puerto Rican in Philadelphia, a Venezuelan refugee in Florida, and a third-generation Latino in Arizona may all check the same census box while seeing the world in entirely different ways.
Why, then, had I expected them to vote alike? And why do journalists, pollsters, pundits, and political strategists so often speak as though they do?
The statistics explain what happened, but not what they foretold. Was 2024 the beginning of something enduring, or simply the product of a particular political moment? A year and a half into Trump’s presidency, we’re finally in a position to find out.
I had wanted to devote an installment of Among the Believers to Hispanic conservatives from the very beginning because I wanted to understand the people hidden behind a label I had come to realize I barely understood.
But where was I going to find such a group?
I’m almost embarrassed to admit how limited my own world was. I lived in Southern California, surrounded by millions of Hispanic Americans, yet most of my interactions amounted to little more than transactions, brief conversations, and familiar faces I never truly came to know.
Enter my brother-in-law.
He has spent most of his career in the wine industry, and his company happened to be sponsoring the Hispanic 100 Celebrity Golf Classic and reception. The event was organized by the Hispanic 100 Foundation, a nonprofit with deep ties to conservative politics and Hispanic Republican leaders. As one of the sponsors, he had a couple of complimentary tickets and invited me along.
I should confess that I have a longstanding dislike of golf. It commandeers vast tracts of land, guzzles water, dumps fertilizer and pesticides into the environment, and somehow expects the rest of us to regard this as a perfectly sensible use of resources simply because wealthy people enjoy it.
But I wasn't there for the golf. I was there for the golfers.
More accurately, I was there for the reception afterward. It offered something I’d been looking for since the election: the chance to replace articles, polling data, and demographic analyses with actual conversations.
Statistics can reveal patterns. They cannot introduce you to a single human being.
Before we go any further, I should probably tell you where I stand.
Regular readers of Open Letters by Mersault, and Among the Believers in particular, know that my tone is never accidental. Some of the communities I explore earn ridicule. Others earn respect.
I disagree with much of what the Hispanic 100 Foundation stands for politically. But I also believe in giving credit where it’s due. For more than a decade, it has funded scholarships, paired first-generation college students with mentors, and invested in developing young leaders. I can oppose its politics while respecting the good it does in the community. The world is complicated enough that both things can be true at once.
As for the people I met that evening, I’ll let them speak for themselves.
So, if you came expecting the customary cynicism and snark, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until the next article.
A line often attributed to Mark Twain is that “golf is a good walk spoiled.” I’d only add that being a golf spectator is an afternoon you’ll never get back. Following a gallery from hole to hole in hopes of catching a better glimpse of someone taking another swing at a little white ball lost its novelty almost immediately. I spent most of the tournament in the hospitality tent, drinking my weight in iced tea and waiting for the reception to begin.
In earlier installments of Among the Believers, I approached my subjects with a fair amount of anxiety. This time, much of that evaporated thanks to my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law is one of those maddeningly gregarious people who can strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. Within minutes he was introducing me around the room, explaining who I was and what I was writing.
I braced for suspicion. Instead, I found curiosity. People didn’t seem bothered that I was there to write about them. Quite the opposite. They were eager to tell their stories.
The conversations were too numerous—and too overlapping—to recount one by one. What follows isn't a chronology but a collection of the themes that emerged over the course of the evening.
It didn’t take long before I started hearing the same objection. Sometimes politely. Sometimes not.
“Latinos aren’t a monolith... they are people of different countries and backgrounds.”
Another person put it even more bluntly.
“Latino is an absurdly broad demographic category made up of extremely different groups of people.”
One person offered an analogy that perfectly captured the absurdity of treating millions of people as a single political constituency.
“While a British person, a German, a Croatian, a Spanish and a Danish are all European they are never covered as a true monolith... they would refer to their own country first than ‘European.’”
Others pointed out that even the labels we casually use erase enormous differences.
“A Cuban-American voter is fundamentally different from a Mexican-American voter. The only thing lumping them together does is create articles every four years trying to make sense of us.”
Several people rejected the idea that ethnicity itself should predict politics.
“We vote based on our perceived needs. We’re very independent minded and don’t vote on brand loyalty.”
Another captured the same frustration from a different angle.
“People need to stop treating Latinos like we’re one giant voting bloc.”
One person finally put words to the frustration I'd been hearing all evening.
“We’re not the maids, we’re not the fucking gardener, and we’re not children here for anyone’s lectures. We’ve got just as much right to vote like assholes as anyone.”
That was the moment I stopped looking for the Latino vote and started looking for Latino voters.
Once people stopped talking about ethnicity, they started talking about something else entirely: how they were raised. Again and again, politics took a back seat to values.
One commenter summarized what I would hear throughout the evening.
“Most immigrants have conservative views. They came here to work, raise a family, and build a better life.”
Another offered a reminder that political values don’t emerge in a vacuum.
“Politics in Latin America are written in blood.”
For many immigrants, politics isn’t an abstract debate over tax rates or regulatory policy. It’s shaped by memories of authoritarian governments, corruption, violence, confiscated property, and economic collapse. Whether those memories came from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or elsewhere, they inevitably traveled with them. Americans often inherit political parties. Many immigrants inherit political memories. Those aren’t the same thing.
The more people talked, the less I felt I was hearing a single “Latino perspective.” I was hearing different histories arriving at many of the same values. Family surfaced first. Not taxes. Not immigration. Not even Trump. Family.
“The Republicans have done a good job of selling the party as one of God and family. Things Latins support and identify with.”
Another explained why many relatives had drifted away from Democrats.
“Many Latins see Democrats as a party of queers and trans. A party of ungodliness destroying the family... It’s all about messaging.”
It’s all about messaging.
Whether that caricature bears any resemblance to reality is almost beside the point. Political campaigns rarely succeed by changing people’s values. They succeed by convincing people the values they already hold are under attack. You don’t have to persuade someone to love their family. You only have to persuade them their family is in danger. For years, Republican politicians and conservative media have framed political disagreements not as debates over tax policy or health care, but as existential battles over God, family, children, and civilization itself.
Democrats, meanwhile, were trying to persuade voters with legislative accomplishments. Republicans were persuading them with anxieties. One side was selling policy. The other was selling apocalypse. History suggests apocalypse is a much easier sell. Fear has always enjoyed a better marketing department than hope.
Religion surfaced just as often.
“Latinos are overwhelmingly Catholic and socially conservative.”
For many, those beliefs translated directly into political priorities.
“With the more Catholic members, they will vote for anyone... who is against abortion rights.”
But even here, the picture refused to stay simple.
“Conservatism doesn’t look the same in every country... no one in my family likes Trump despite being conservative and religious.”
That comment reminded me that we’ve developed a bad habit of treating “conservative” as though it means the same thing everywhere. It doesn’t. A conservative raised under Castro, Chávez, or Ortega arrives at that label by a very different path than someone raised in Orange County or Alabama. Shared values don’t necessarily produce shared politics.
Then came the comment I couldn’t stop thinking about.
“All my family voted for Trump and regret what he has done to our community, but they are afraid of trans people. Doesn’t matter if it’s real or not.”
That may have been the most revealing sentence of the evening.
Fear doesn’t have to be factual to become politically powerful. It simply has to feel plausible. Once it does, evidence begins fighting uphill. For years, Republican politicians and conservative media have devoted extraordinary attention to transgender people, who make up less than one percent of the population, portraying them as one of the defining threats to American families and children. Listening that evening, I couldn't escape the conclusion that the strategy had been all too effective. Here was someone describing family members who regretted what Trump had done to their own community, yet remained motivated by fears that, in the speaker’s own words, “didn’t matter if it was real or not.” Fear had become powerful enough to outweigh lived experience.
Another person summarized it more bluntly.
“The right-wing propaganda machine is strong.”
I think that’s true, but not because Latino voters are uniquely susceptible to propaganda. Human beings are. We all gravitate toward stories that affirm our values and validate our fears. Politics has understood that for thousands of years. The technology has changed. Human nature hasn’t.
By now, a pattern had become impossible to ignore. I had started the evening asking what politics had done to Latino voters. I left wondering what life had done to them first. Long before anyone became a Republican or a Democrat, they had already become a parent. A Catholic. A refugee. A business owner. A survivor of corruption. Those experiences shaped the values they carried into the voting booth. Political parties weren't creating those priorities. They were competing to claim them.
If you enjoy what you read, please subscribe and share it on Substack and social media. That’s how this publication has grown, and I’m grateful for every reader who helps spread the word.
If there was one issue I assumed might unite Latino voters, it was immigration. Instead, it exposed one of the deepest divides of the evening.
The people who favored stricter immigration enforcement almost never framed it as hostility toward immigrants. They framed it as fairness.
One person explained it this way.
“For the people that went through the long legal process, it feels unfair that others just broke the law and came here illegally.”
Beneath many of the conversations was the same story.
“My parents waited years to come here legally. They followed every rule, paid every fee, and sacrificed more than most people can imagine. It’s hard not to feel resentful when someone else gets what they spent years earning.”
I understood the moral logic. If your parents spent years navigating America’s immigration system, it’s easy to resent the perception that someone else skipped the process. Legal immigration wasn’t simply paperwork. It represented sacrifice, perseverance, and respect for the rules. If others appeared to bypass that process, it didn’t merely feel illegal. It felt as though those sacrifices had been diminished.
To many progressives, that position can seem hard to understand. Shouldn’t shared heritage produce shared empathy?
Apparently not.
For many of the people I met, the issue wasn’t ethnicity. It was fairness.
What I hadn’t expected was how many people distinguished between supporting secure borders and supporting everything done in the name of securing them. That’s a distinction our politics rarely bothers to make. You can believe a country has the right to control its borders while recoiling at masked ICE agents detaining people outside courthouses. The principle hadn’t changed. The implementation had.
Others in the room viewed the issue through an entirely different moral framework. They spoke about asylum seekers fleeing gangs, political persecution, or collapsing economies. They wondered what exactly desperate families were supposed to do when the legal path had become so narrow that, for many, it effectively no longer existed. To them, the moral failure wasn’t crossing the border. It was leaving people with no realistic alternative.
The phrase “they should come legally” has become one of the most successful slogans in American politics because it quietly assumes something that often isn’t true: that a functioning legal pathway exists for anyone willing to use it. That’s the part Republicans rarely mention. It's difficult to celebrate legal immigration when the legal process itself has become so unpredictable—or so perilous—that many people conclude there is no front door left to use.
Same border. Different definitions of fairness.
That tension surfaced in one of the evening’s most memorable observations.
“Nothing more anti-immigrant than a Latino with papers.”
Another person described it differently.
“Same for the Cubans in Miami... Now they want to pull up the ladder behind them.”
The accusation is familiar: I got mine.
But not everyone accepted that characterization. One person challenged the premise entirely.
“People don’t see it as pro- or anti-Latino. It’s American vs. foreigner.”
That sentence explained why so many conversations about immigration never seem to go anywhere.
Progressives often begin with human suffering. Many Latino conservatives begin with citizenship. One side asks what we owe desperate people. The other asks what we owe the people who followed the rules. Neither side believes it’s arguing against compassion. Neither side thinks it’s arguing against fairness. They’re simply defining those words differently.
That doesn’t mean the politics surrounding immigration have been honest. They haven’t. For more than a decade, Republicans have transformed immigration from a policy debate into a permanent emergency. They weren’t simply arguing for stronger borders. They were telling a story about invasion, crime, national decline, and a country slipping away. Every story needs a villain, and immigrants became an unusually convenient one.
Democrats, meanwhile, answered with policy papers, economic studies, and labor statistics. Those facts mattered. They weren’t answering the same emotional question. Republicans were telling people what to fear. Democrats were explaining labor markets.
Stories beat spreadsheets. Especially frightening ones.
Listening that evening, I’d been asking the wrong question. I wanted to know what Latino voters thought about immigration. What I should have been asking was why people who often shared the same underlying values could arrive at such different conclusions.
The answer wasn’t ethnicity. It was biography.
The evening had certainly revealed how effectively Republicans had turned immigration, crime, religion, and cultural change into emotionally compelling stories. But the more people I listened to, the more I realized that explaining Republican success was only half the story. The other half was understanding why Democrats seemed so consistently surprised by it.
Again and again, I heard people resist being reduced to a demographic. They didn’t reject being Latino. They rejected the assumption that being Latino should determine how they voted.
“We vote based on our perceived needs. We’re very independent minded and don’t vote on brand loyalty.”
Another attendee put it even more personally.
“Every election I’m suddenly ‘the Latino voter.’ The rest of the time I’m just a father trying to pay my mortgage, raise my kids, and take care of my parents.”
Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, Today I’d like to spend the day representing my demographic. They wake up thinking about work, the mortgage, whether the car needs new brakes, whether their daughter is happy at college, or how they’re going to help an aging parent. Politics, meanwhile, keeps insisting they introduce themselves as census categories.
As the conversations accumulated, I noticed something else. Almost nobody described themselves the way political consultants describe them. They didn’t introduce themselves as Latino voters, members of a coalition, or part of an emerging demographic. They talked about children heading off to college, businesses they were trying to keep afloat, churches that anchored their lives, neighborhoods that had changed, and grocery bills that seemed to rise every week. One attendee summed up that frustration better than I ever could.
“Stop talking to me like I’m a demographic. Talk to me like I’m someone who’s trying to build a life.”
I wasn’t convinced Democrats actually misunderstood what these voters valued. If anything, many of the policies Democrats champion speak directly to the concerns I heard all evening. Parents wanted affordable childcare and better schools. Families worried about healthcare costs. Adult children worried about aging parents. Small business owners wanted economic stability. Students wanted opportunity. On paper, Democrats had answers for many of those concerns.
So why wasn’t that translating into political support?
Because voters weren’t rejecting the values behind Democratic policies. They often weren’t hearing those values in the first place.
Political researcher Melissa Morales stumbled onto part of the answer while testing Democratic messaging. When voters heard the Child Tax Credit described as a government program designed to reduce poverty, support actually declined. When they heard the identical policy described as helping hardworking parents provide for their families, support increased. Her explanation was devastatingly simple: “We set up the government as the hero and working people as people who need to be saved.” Her alternative framing was even more revealing: “It is the working parent who is the hero of that economic story.”
Suddenly, the conversations I'd been having all evening made more sense. The people I met didn’t see themselves as victims waiting to be rescued. Many would have found that suggestion insulting. They saw themselves as people who had already overcome extraordinary obstacles. Their parents had crossed borders, escaped failed governments, started businesses, worked multiple jobs, learned a new language, and built lives from scratch. They didn’t want politicians congratulating themselves for helping them. They wanted politicians to recognize what they had already accomplished.
Respect, I realized, wasn’t another issue on the ballot. It was the language people wanted every issue spoken in.
One conversation after another returned to that same emotional terrain.
“My parents didn’t build a life here because government rescued them. They built it because they worked harder than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“Don’t tell me how you’re going to help Latinos. Tell me you understand what my family has already overcome.”
I believe we often mistake those sentiments for conservative values.
They’re not. They’re immigrant values. They’re working-class values. They’re the values of millions of Americans who believe dignity begins with earning your own way, even when you occasionally need a hand.
Somewhere along the way, Democrats became extraordinarily good at explaining government and surprisingly bad at explaining people. They talked about programs instead of purpose, benefits instead of aspiration, legislation instead of the lives that legislation was meant to improve.
Republicans, meanwhile, rarely started with legislation at all. They started with stories—about families, neighborhoods, churches, children, patriotism, and belonging. Many of those stories were exaggerated, misleading, or simply false. But they succeeded because they attached themselves to identities people already held long before politics entered the conversation.
That, I suspect, is what Democrats still don’t fully understand.
Most people don’t vote for legislation.
They vote for the lives they hope that legislation will make possible.
A child who can afford college. A grandmother who can pay for her medication. Parents who no longer have to choose between seeing a doctor and paying the electric bill. A small business that survives another year. A family that finally has enough left over at the end of the month to stop worrying.
Long before anyone becomes “the Latino voter,” they’ve already become a parent. A worker. A son. A daughter. A believer. A business owner. Politics doesn’t erase those identities. At its best, it speaks to them. At its worst, it replaces them with a demographic label.
After several hours of conversations, I realized the Democratic Party didn’t really have a policy problem.
It had a storytelling problem.
Somewhere between people’s values and Democratic policies, the story got lost. The people I met weren’t looking for a party that could recite a platform. They were looking for one that understood the lives they’d already built before anyone ever asked them to become “the Latino voter.”
By the end of the evening, I realized that the people who were reconsidering Trump hadn’t abandoned the values that led them to vote for him. They were measuring him against those very values.
For months, I’d listened to pundits describe Latino voters as though they’d undergone some dramatic ideological conversion. What I found instead was something much more ordinary. Most people hadn’t changed their beliefs about family, hard work, faith, responsibility, or opportunity. The change wasn't in their values. It was their assessment of whether the Republican Party was still living up to them.
The first cracks appeared when the conversation turned to the economy. Many people had voted for Trump believing he would make life more affordable. They weren’t quoting inflation statistics or economic forecasts. They were talking about grocery stores, rent checks, utility bills, and family budgets.
“I voted for Trump because I wanted lower prices and a stronger economy. I didn’t vote to spend another year wondering which groceries I could afford.”
“Every month I kept thinking, ‘Maybe next month it’ll get better.’ Eventually I stopped waiting.”
“I voted with my wallet. My wallet isn’t thanking me.”
Economic disappointment alone probably wouldn’t have changed many minds. Politicians have been overpromising on the economy for generations. But disappointment has a way of making people look more closely at everything else.
Immigration was where those doubts became harder to ignore.
Earlier in the evening, I’d heard people passionately defend secure borders and legal immigration. Those convictions hadn’t disappeared. What had changed was the growing realization that enforcing immigration law and treating immigrants with dignity weren’t mutually exclusive.
“I still believe in secure borders. I just don’t believe cruelty is a border policy.”
“I thought they were going after dangerous criminals. I didn’t expect families who were trying to follow the rules.”
“When people are afraid to show up for their own immigration hearings, something has gone very wrong.”
“I voted for Trump, 100 percent, but I never thought we would get this type of lawlessness... People are never going to forget what the fuck we are going through right now.”
Republicans spent years insisting immigrants should come “the right way.” Then people watched asylum seekers arrested at court hearings, longtime residents detained during routine ICE check-ins, and families separated while attempting to comply with the legal process. For many, the contradiction became impossible to ignore. It’s difficult to praise legal immigration while making the legal process itself an act of peril.
But immigration was never really the point. Every conversation eventually circled back to family.
Family had surfaced in nearly every discussion throughout the evening. Parents wanted better lives for their children. Adult children worried about aging parents. Grandparents wanted safe neighborhoods and good schools. Family wasn’t simply another political issue. It was the lens through which almost every political issue was judged.
Family still mattered. Faith still mattered. Security still mattered. But many were beginning to ask whether the party they’d trusted was still honoring those priorities.
Earlier that evening, someone had unknowingly summarized the entire conversation.
“We vote based on our perceived needs.”
The standard hadn’t changed.
People were still judging politicians by whether they protected their families, rewarded hard work, respected faith, created opportunity, and treated people with dignity. What had changed was the growing belief that Trump and the Republican Party were no longer living up to that standard.
One attendee summarized that realization.
“I didn’t leave the Republican Party. It stopped looking like the party I thought I was joining. The values that brought me here are the same values making me question whether I should stay.”
I heard versions of that sentiment throughout the evening. Not from everyone. But often enough that it no longer felt anecdotal.
That, more than anything else I heard all evening, gave me hope.
Not because I suddenly believed Democrats were winning Latino voters. I didn’t. Most of the people I met remained skeptical of both parties.
It gave me hope because they were doing something citizens in a healthy democracy are supposed to do: holding the people they trusted accountable.
For years we’ve described Latino voters as though they were moving from one ideological box to another. That isn’t what I witnessed. I watched people carry the same values into a changing political landscape and ask whether the party they’d trusted still deserved them.
As those values lead them away from Trump, it's not because they changed.
It's because, in their eyes, he did.
As I’d hoped, the Hispanic 100 Celebrity Golf Classic broadened my understanding of Latino conservatives.
Sadly, my opinion of golf made no comparable progress.
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My next Among the Believers adventure is already lined up. If all goes according to plan, it’ll make for a good story. If it doesn’t... it’ll probably make for an even better one. Either way, subscribers will be the first to read it.
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