Trump’s racial politics shape midterm elections
“Oh Juan, why do you have to make everything about race?” That is a common complaint I get on social media. But how can anyone honestly discuss the Florida midterm elections without talking about race?
Let’s start with Latino voters, before looking at Black and white voters. President Trump’s national approval among Latino voters is way underwater at 27 percent, according to NBC. That is a political shock, given that Trump won the Latino vote in Florida in 2024 as well as the majority of Latino men nationwide.
In the last two years, Trump’s numbers with Latinos, about 20 percent of the state’s voters, have fallen off the map. His polling with Latinos is now so bad that Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) ran an separating herself from Trump’s immigration enforcement.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar said in the ad. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
Republicans like Salazar are desperate to protect their political lives.
Who can forget that last year the Cuban-born leader of “Latinos for Trump” himself faced deportation by ICE? The co-founder of “Latinas for Trump,” sounded a similar note last year. She wrote: “This is not what we voted for. … What we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings.”
Florida cities and even rural farms have been the scene of ICE tearing at the Latino population by wrongfully arresting and deporting people without criminal records.
Sixty-six percent of Latinos in a recent NBC poll agree that Trump’s handling of illegal immigration has “gone too far.”
Florida’s Republican governor and legislature did nothing to protest Trump’s policies and even endorsed some of them. So did the state’s Republican congressional delegation, including a Black man now running for governor and a white woman now running for the U.S. Senate.
U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), the gubernatorial candidate, stood by the immigration raids executed by Trump’s immigration officers. It fit his efforts to prove that despite being Black, he is loyal to Trump and his hard-right, MAGA-brand conservatism.
Donalds had no signature legislative accomplishments in five years in Congress. But he was one of only two Black representatives to vote against impeaching Trump for inciting an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Trump supporters who violently surged into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 included a man waving a large Confederate Flag.
Also silent on Trump’s aggressive immigration actions is the white woman running for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s former Senate seat.
Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.), formerly Florida’s attorney general, is best known for always standing with Trump. She signed on to a lawsuit contesting Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. To this day, she refuses to concede that Trump lost.
Moody’s opponent is a Black woman, state Rep. Angie Nixon (D), a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a strong critic of Trump’s immigration policy, willing to point out the masked ICE agents grabbing Latinos off the street, often only on the basis of their accents and skin color. Nixon is also speaking out against ICE deportations of Haitians, noting Florida is home to the largest Haitian community of any state.
“They fled horrific violence and political instability to build lives here,” she said recently.”
She favors impeaching Trump and his Cabinet officers because “they’ve all committed impeachable offenses,” Nixon told The Bulwark. Unlike Moody or Donalds, she is willing to address the fact that Trump smeared Mexicans as “rapists.”
Nixon can also talk to Latinos in the state about how Trump has left Cuba stalled without adequate oil or food. Unlike her opponents, she does not ignore or excuse that Trump famously shared Thanksgiving dinner at his Florida estate with the white supremacist podcaster Nick Fuentes.
Donalds’ opponent in the governor’s race is a white man and former Republican, David Jolly. Unlike Donalds, he is clear in standing opposed to Trump’s use of race to stir populist anger among his MAGA supporters.
Jolly was one of the first Republicans to separate himself from Trump in 2015 when Trump proposed to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S.
According to the last Census, Florida is about 50 percent non-Hispanic white, 30 percent Hispanic and 15 percent Black.
Its large Hispanic population makes it a key measure inside polls showing a potential wave of victories for Democrats in the midterms.
A prime example outside of Florida is in the Republican stronghold of Texas, where Latino voters have a Latina running a tight race against the incumbent governor.
Inside Florida, a strong showing of Latinos voting for Democrats could lift Democratic House candidates across the state’s 28 congressional districts. The seats most likely to flip are in South Florida, which has the largest concentration of Hispanic voters.
National Democrats had better start paying attention and investing resources. If they turn Florida, it will open new paths to the presidency in 2028, lined with changing racial attitudes.
Keep in mind that Florida voted twice for President Barack Obama.
My social media critics are right: not everything is about race. But this year’s midterms in Florida are absolutely about fallout from Trump’s racial politics.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.“
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