The media are very disappointed in Hispanic voters

Trump increased his share of the black male vote from 13% to 17%, according to exit polls. He doubled his share of the black female vote from 4% to 8%. This was among significantly increased black turnout. That is, it seems Trump governed in a way that appealed to black voters of both sexes.

He expanded his share of the vote among Hispanic women and men, according to those same exit polls. Others estimate a 2-point improvement in the black vote and a 5-point improvement in the Hispanic vote.

Trump won 47% of Hispanics in Florida and 40% in Texas, exit polls say. And while the sample size is small (and thus the margin of error large), he appears to have won 40% of Hispanics in Georgia and 39% in North Carolina.

That is, where he competed for the Hispanic vote, he got more than 40% of it.

And this is probably an undercount of Trump’s Hispanic support.

Exit polls are not perfect, and all polls have shown large errors. But anywhere you look for evidence, you see Trump doing great among Hispanics.

In Texas, Trump is winning Zapata County (95% Hispanic), Val Verde County (85% Hispanic), and Hudspeth County (77% Hispanic). Trump improved by 21 points in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is 80% Hispanic and 40% foreign-born.

It’s clear that the guy branded as the most racist president, at least since Andrew Jackson, has increased his party’s appeal to racial minorities.

These nonwhite voters have really disappointed our commentariat.

This reaction reveals something important: When liberal journalists say something is racist or white supremacist, they don’t use the words the way normal people use them. We see now that they detach concepts of whiteness, blackness, etc., from skin color, family, or ancestry and attach it instead to ideology and party.

You’re white if you’re a Hispanic who votes Republican. You’re white supremacist if you’re a black voter who votes Republican. This shows us that racist and white supremacist, coming from these quarters, might just mean Republican or conservative.

What’s more, we learn something about how minority voters see politics and politicians in contrast to how media elites do.

Trump’s most famous offenses on the score of racism include his denigrating Gonzalo Curiel, a Mexican American (Indiana-born) federal judge, as hopelessly biased against Trump. Trump said, “We are building a wall. He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.” That’s juvenile reasoning from Trump grounded in zero evidence. Ironically, it’s the same sort of racial determinism that much of the media engages in: Because Trump’s policy goal is seen as an offense against Mexicans who want to come here, the press assumed that Americans of Mexican descent and legal immigrants would automatically hate Trump.

Just as Trump was wrong about Curiel, the media was wrong about thousands of other Mexican Americans.

Trump’s other offenses included his serial equivocation in the face of naked racism. When commenting on the white supremacist protests in Charlottesville that led to a murder, Trump bumbled and fumbled into the phrase “fine people on both sides,” which sounded like an endorsement of neo-Nazis and Klan members. Was he trying to endorse Nazis and the Klan as fine? Obviously not, if you take it in context. But Trump’s stubbornness, his ineloquence, and his all-consuming self-centeredness left his message unclear and offensive.

Offensive is the key word here. Trump wasn’t saying, “I respect the view that black people are inferior.” He was failing to condemn, as one ought to condemn, people expressing horrible, racist views.

Maybe regular voters don’t care all that much about such things. Maybe constantly distancing oneself from racism isn’t as important to the average American — white, black, brown — as it is to the media class and the political class.

This isn’t just a question of “out-of-touch elites” not getting the gritty working guy. It’s important for statesmen and commentators to denounce bad things clearly. But in our cancel culture and age of social media, this requirement seems to be transferred to ordinary people. Everyone is worried that if they don’t know the right jargon or if they don’t properly denounce the right villains, their life can be ruined.

“He talks like us,” Bob at Smitty’s in Uniontown told me. “He tells it like it is,” and “he’s not a politician,” thousands of voters have told me for five years. These explanations don’t mean that millions of voters hate Mexicans or love KKK members. It doesn’t mean Trump speaks the truth. And it’s not an apt riposte to point out this nonpolitician is the incumbent.

The point is that ordinary people don’t think speech-policing is the same as combating racism. And they don’t think Trump’s poor rhetoric on race is morally equivalent to racism.

And to the degree Trump’s attitude toward Mexicans — he suggested Mexican immigrants are largely rapists — is a negative in the eyes of Mexican American working-class citizens, maybe it’s a venial sin. And maybe, it’s more than made up for by record employment for black and Hispanic workers and rising wages among those without college degrees.

Whatever the explanation, it’s clear that nonwhite voters don’t think the way liberal commentators think they should.