Luis Miranda Jr. is ‘pissed off’

Veteran Puerto Rican political consultant Luis Miranda Jr. is fed up with how the Democratic political class talks about Latino voters after as many as 46% of them this year voted for Donald Trump. 

“I get pissed off every time someone tells me: ‘What happened with you guys?’ And it's usually a white person in the media asking me that. And I say, ‘What happened with you guys?!’” Miranda said, noting that a majority of white women voted for Trump and white men “overwhelmingly” chose Trump. While that moment of finger-pointing garnered applause in his audience at the Somos political conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Miranda did offer a take on “what happened.” He spoke on a panel called “Navigating Change Together: The Latino Vote 2024.”

Miranda’s take: Working class Latinos were not convinced that the U.S. economy is in good shape – even though macroeconomic indicators might have suggested that, he said. Trump, “who had made a persona of being rich,” garnered their trust that he could improve their individual financial situations.  

And some Latinos are also concerned about perceived unchecked immigration, he said. The guy at his supermarket told him that his brother waited five years to get documents to live in the United States – while he watched newly arrived migrants who have been allowed to stay. “For a chunk of our community, that perceived unfairness had an impact,” Miranda said. 

Miranda has a long history in New York politics dating back to the Koch administration. He ran Fernando Ferrer’s mayoral campaigns and has consulted Chuck Schumer, Letitia James and Hillary Clinton. 

As he described the threat Trump’s proposed policies pose to undocumented immigrants in particular, Miranda vented: If mass deportations happen, “the ones who have to worry the most are white people. I was telling a lady who I know paid her nanny cash. I said, ‘You better start resigning from your job, because that nanny is going to be deported, and now you are going to have to stay home and take care of your children.’ 

Or, ‘You know that African dude who wipes your dad's ass so that you can go and work? He's going to be deported, and you're going to have to start wiping your dad's ass.’ 

And there is someone who said, ‘My son just graduated with a BA,’ I said, ‘So he better begin to learn knife skills, because he's going to have to cut chickens like we do every single day throughout this country.’ If we are deported, we are going to have an economic transformation in the United States, because we really do the jobs that nobody else wants to do.”

Again, applause.