Daniel McCarthy

How a Latino wave carried Trump to victory

The Latino vote appears to have been crucial in winning the White House for Donald Trump (Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s victory this time may not be the surprise that his 2016 win was, but for his critics it’s even more of a shock. Trump has been impeached, arrested, convicted, shot at, and relentlessly demonised as a ‘fascist’ over the last four years. None of that was enough to stop him. Just the opposite: Trump is more popular than ever, and appears to have won a national majority of the vote for the first time.

Just how this happened is a question that will be analysed for weeks and months, or years, to come. But one intriguing possibility suggested by exit poll data is that multiculturalism committed suicide. Trump appears to have won a much larger percentage of the Latino population, especially men, than Democrats had ever thought possible.

Trump becomes only the second president in American history to win non-consecutive terms

The conventional wisdom of American politics is that Latinos are offended by anti-immigration rhetoric, since many of them have recent immigrant roots.

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