The Atlantic published a lengthy story about this topic today. Author Tim Alberta opens the piece by describing how one Phoenix couple, Mary Rose and Earl Wilcox, set out to become a focal point for Hispanic activism on behalf of the Democratic Party for more than 20 years. But recently something changed and not in the way they expected.

Finally, in 2020, a breakthrough: Joe Biden didn’t just win the election, he won Arizona, only the second time since Harry Truman’s administration that a Democrat had carried the state. Given Biden’s winning margin—three-tenths of a percentage point—and the unprecedented turnout of Hispanic voters, there could be no disputing who had delivered Arizona to the president-elect…

On Election Night 2020, they toasted to a new era.

And then the strangest thing happened. People started coming into El Portal to vent their frustrations and unload their grievances—against the Democratic Party.

​​“Our community, we may not be educated at the highest levels, but we have a lot of street smarts. We know when people are bulls**tting us,” Earl tells me, motioning to the people sitting around us. “You know what they say to Democrats now? ‘Es pura cábula.’ Bunch of bulls**t.”

This isn’t speculation. The Wilcoxes run a restaurant so they have lots of time to listen to what their Hispanic patrons are saying about the Democratic Party these days. And what they’re saying sounds a lot like what Republicans are saying: The party has moved too far left. It’s no longer a party that seems committed to the ideals of success through hard work or even to capitalism itself. That’s not a message that resonates with a lot of Hispanic voters who came here specifically because they do believe in those things.

María-Elena López, who held a variety of positions under [Juan] Cuba in [Miami-Dade] county party, saw this shift taking place in real time. She believes that there is no real mystery to it: While Trump successfully portrayed himself as a populist achieving hard-won economic growth—signing tax cuts into law, touting a record-shattering stock market, boasting the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history—Democrats came across as a bunch of out-of-touch idealogues. Promises of shared social progress, she told me, offend the sensibilities of many first- and second-generation immigrants who hate the idea of government handouts.

“We’re not a political party, we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”

And that’s how you get Hispanic conservatives like Mayra Flores (pictured above) winning elections. Ruy Teixeira, one of the co-authors of the book that helped get the “demography is destiny” ball rolling on the left, says he thinks this isn’t a pendulum swing it’s more of a long-term realignment.

Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights. Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.

Neither man is wrong. Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party for many different reasons. This represents “a sea change” in our politics, Teixeira said, whether his fellow Democrats want to accept it or not. “The idea that what we’re seeing from the Hispanic vote recently is a deviation, and that they will snap back to their historic preference for the Democrats two to one, I think it’s a total illusion,” he said. “The real question is how far this trend goes.”

Teixeira wrote something about this today for his own Substack site. As he puts it, Hispanics are “normie voters.”

It is becoming clearer and clearer that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with “people of color” and assuming they embraced a litany of liberal causes around race and other issues that are dear to the hearts of Democratic activists. This was a flawed assumption. In reality, Hispanic voters are overwhelmingly an upwardly mobile, patriotic population with practical and down to earth concerns focused on jobs, the economy, health care, effective schools and public safety.

In short, they are normie voters. And like other normie voters, if they feel Democrats are falling short on the things normie voters care about, they are more than willing to punish the party they hold responsible.

He goes on to list ten poll results to back up that claim. It’s definitely worth reading here. He concludes that Democrats need to stop thinking of Hispanics as “people of color” and start thinking of them as normie voters.