Mike Madrid

If you have an open primary, these Latino voters can show up.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Latino Vote Podcast, coming to you live from Rocha Studios here in Washington, D.C. Mike Madrid, are you in your mama's kitchen? My God.

I am in my mama's kitchen, actually.

I am heading down to the Los Angeles area, starting my teaching gig at USC, and you can't see mom enough, so I thought I'd stop and see my mom before I made that transition.

Most of the polling has him up.

Now, look, we all know Susan Collins has exceeded expectations many times.

For all of you super-numbered nerds, Mike Madrid, y'all should know that Susan Collins carried Maine by eight points at the same time that Joe Biden also carried it by eight.

Now I'm not a mathematician, Mike, but that seems like a 16 point jigger knot.

It all says a lot about one of the nation's fastest growing demographics, and it could change the way our elections shape up this fall.

Here to talk about it all is Mike Madrid, a longtime political consultant, co-host of the Latino Vote podcast, author of the Latino Century as well.

Good morning, Mike.

Thanks for coming back on the show.

They're being negatively pushed by whichever party is in power that prioritize these economic issues and incessantly focuses on these cultural issues that Latinos really could not care much about.

Sounds like a big opportunity.

Mike Madrid, longtime political consultant, co-host of the Latino Vote podcast.

The book is Latino Century, How America's Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy.

Latino voters could play a big role in Texas politics this November.

But longtime Latino vote analyst Mike Madrid says politicians may be focusing on the wrong issues when trying to win their support.

They

want an economy that works, an aspirational working class economy.

It means to achieve the American dream, which has been taken from them.

Because they believe that people have manipulated and stolen that opportunity from them up top.

Madrid says Latino voters increasingly believe both political parties have failed to deliver on economic issues.

Part of the cloudy skies this evening, overnight low near 80.

So apart from content generation, talk about how campaigns, the smart campaigns, the savvy campaigns, are thinking about using AI to get in front of voters, to give them an edge in campaign season.

I will just remind people that I think it was three or four weeks ago now I had a conversation with Mike Madrid about the synthetic electorate and pollsters now modeling voters without ever asking them questions and testing messages on a synthetic electorate that basically aren't real people.

But And also how the campaigns are deploying chatbots on their websites where constituents or potential voters can come and have a conversation with the virtual candidate and ask them all kinds of questions.

And I thought that technique was a little bit gimmicky, probably is going to be gimmicky for a while because people...

Liz Crampton of Politico noted that Republicans are in full-out panic mode after the election, especially over the swing of Hispanic voters toward Remet.

Republican consultant Mike Madrid referred back to the newly gerrymandered maps and the voting patterns of young Hispanic men when he told Crampton, "They've banged three of these five new Republican seats on a demographic that Democrats were never able to turn out for thirty, forty years." Now, though, they had turned toward Democrats as Trump's arrests, detentions, and deportation policies had angered and upset them.

In the wake of the election, Trump immediately began talking about nationalizing voting in the country, despite the provisions in the US Constitution establishing that states, not the federal government, are in charge of elections.

"If you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections," Trump said during a press conference at the White House in early February.

It's around the Tampa area.

But the Johnny Garcia seat, to Mike Madrid's point, he loves when I do this, was an R plus 12 for Trump in the last election.

Yeah.

And he's winning.

And it's Donald Trump just trying to create chaos.

So folks, again, is the federal government really going to count my vote if I send this thing in by mail? He just wants to create enough chaos.

He knows, let me stop and take a breath and say, if me and Mike Madrid, dumb ass Chuck Rocha, and in Africa, Mike Madrid thinks that we know what this election is going to be like, I promise you Donald Trump is smart enough to read a poll.

And the people around him can read a poll.