A new political event aimed at Latinos piqued the interest of Mike Madrid, longtime political strategist and co-host of the Latino Vote Podcast. So he went — and wrote about it on his Substack, the Great Transformation.
CPAC Latino took place in Miami late last month. It’s an offshoot of sorts of CPAC, or the Conservative Political Action Committee, which has held popular gatherings for those on the political right for several years.
But as Madrid found out, there were some differences between this event and the original. Madrid joined The Show to talk about what he saw and heard in Miami.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: So I want to start with a line that you wrote in your Substack sort of talking about this event, and you write, “This was a sophisticated business crowd looking to network and find value for their enterprises, and they were suckered into a Charlie Kirk podcast.”
It sounds like there might have been a bit of a discrepancy between what the attendees were hoping to get out of this and what the organizers were expecting to give them. Is that a fair assessment?
MIKE MADRID: That’s a perfect encapsulation of what happened. And again, look, I’ve been involved in both Latino and Republican politics for three decades, so to hear that CPAC was going to be doing something with the Latino community, naturally piqued my interest. I’m here in California, in Sacramento. I flew out to Miami, where this would naturally be happening with a large Cuban constituency.
But there was a tremendous, tremendous disconnect between the normal spectacle you see at CPAC conferences — with red, white and blue sequins; your performances happening in the hallway; the real strong grassroots activists — and what this was, which was much more like a chamber of commerce event.
These were established sophisticated Latino business owners. And what they were being served on stage was sort of the red-meat Republican MAGA propaganda, and the business community just was not having any of it. It was really remarkable.
BRODIE: Well, so what does that tell you, at least about for the folks who attended? I mean, it had CPAC in the name, so I would imagine there was maybe some sense of what they were going to get, but it seems as though that wasn’t really what they were there for.
MADRID: Well, that’s exactly right. I don’t want to be entirely dismissive of it, but there were signs, as they say. There was one red MAGA hat out of 700 people, and this was a Republican, a traditional classic Republican business crowd. It wasn’t the MAGA rally, and that’s sort of what they were being offered. And I think that trying to stitch these two together was assigned to these business leaders that the Republican Party was trying to stitch together sort of this entrepreneurial class with the grassroots, and they were more interested in seeing what that was going to look like.
Now keep in mind, this was happening just as the ICE crackdowns were really happening in a very meaningful way in South Florida. So for the first time, you had Cuban emigres and Venezuelan emigres — who were the largest source of Latino support for Donald Trump — suddenly recoiling and saying, “Wait, wait a second, we, we didn’t think this was going to be happening to us.”
And there was no mention, no mention in the two days about the ICE raids, about deportations, about immigration reform. None of that was focused on. You heard a lot about the Israeli-Iranian conflict, you heard a lot about Ukraine and Russia, you heard a lot about foreign policy but nothing about immigration.
BRODIE: Well, so as you say, it seems like they were the organizers trying to stitch this together. In that sense, did it seem almost like an experiment, to you, to see if these similar but in some ways disparate groups could sort of work together?
MADRID: To me, it was really a broad sign that the challenges afflicting the Democratic Party exist in the Republican Party too, as this Latino electorate emerges and both institutions are struggling to understand how to deal with them. Where the Democrats have a real challenge in getting back to sort of their working class roots and lost a lot of working class non-college educated Latinos, specifically men.
This was a clear sign that Republicans are grappling with the other side of that, which is sort of the college-educated, aspirational, entrepreneurial class that has historically been a central piece of its coalition. They’re losing these voters because their message is not as resonant.
And so in many ways, what I want to examine was, one, if this was afflicting both parties. I think it’s clear that it is. And then, how both parties are going to address that. You know, the Republican Party in many ways is becoming what the Democratic Party was in the 1980s, and the Democratic Party is becoming what the Republican Party was in the 1980s.
And in the middle, is this emergent group of Latinos saying, “We don’t really feel comfortable with either party here,” and again this event happened on the same day that the Pew Hispanic Research poll came out with the data from the elections showing, basically, that Donald Trump got 48% of the vote — almost a 50/50 split.
So this vote is entirely in flux. It’s entirely gettable for both parties, but I think both parties really don’t understand how they’re going to address themselves, their own coalition, and then this fast growing segment of the vote.
BRODIE: So let’s at least take the GOP then. Like, how do you think they should be going about building on the gains that President Trump made last year?
MADRID: Well, the one common thread with Latinos — and we are here all the time is that this is not a monolithic voting group, that there’s a lot of diversity — all of that is true. But there is one common thread, and that is it is the fastest growing segment of the blue-collar, working class voter. And so the party that’s able to speak to those blue-collar interests and values, candidly, is going to be the party that’s dominant in the you know for the next generation of American politics.
And for the moment, Donald Trump is speaking to that populism, he was speaking to that anti-institutionalism that neither party is reflecting these views, and it’s manifesting itself in things like housing unaffordability, the incompetence of government’s ability to keep energy prices or grocery prices down. This was real meaningful, impactful messaging during the 2024 election cycle.
Democrats have resorted, to their part, on sort of the immigrant immigration narrative that has defined their party’s relationship with Latinos since the 1990s. And it seems as though — at least at the moment, because of the overreach of these ICE crackdowns and federal overreach — that you’re going to see a push back or return of Latino voters back to the Democratic Party in the midterms, but not solving the underlying problem that Democrats have with this emergent voting block.
So I think what’s gonna be defining our politics for the next decade, next generation is going to be the struggle that both parties are facing in encapsulating a true economic populist sentiment, which is really the defining characteristics of the Latino community — not conservatism, not republicanism, not progressivism and not the Democratic Party — but an anti-institutional economic populist voting group that is unlike anything we’ve seen in this country’s history before.
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