welcome.

tonight's commonwealth club world event. my name is ken broad and i'm a longtime supporter with my wife jackie and both delighted tonight to be sponsoring the program. before we get started, if reminders all the usual stuff. first one is this is being recorded. so make sure to silence your cell phones. duration of our program. and if you have any questions, our guest speaker or the moderator please fill them out. they'll be coming around and grabbing them. or if you're viewing online, you can put it in the chat that way. and for those of you in person here, everyone gets a copy of the book. i see there already quite a few in the audience here, which is. great. there's nothing that warms my heart more seeing people with physical books and my copy happy to sign them afterwards. we also have a wine reception afterwards as well. this is a reward for people coming out in person. and now it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's guests. mike madrid is one of the co-founders of the lincoln

project and author. which be described i'm sure it goes either way the audience, hey, this is a friendly audience for the lincoln project and author of the new book, which many of you have, the latino century how america's largest minority is transforming democracy. i've read it. it's fantastic. mike is the expert over his extensive political. mike has served as the senior adviser, both republicans and democrats, and is one of the country's leading experts on latino voters. so i think that's really one of the great things about you, is you've represented both sides and a dual agent, if you will. he was a spring 2019 fellow at usc's center for the political future, which is an organization that i'm involved with as well in 2020, latinos became largest ethnic voting group in the country the second largest sorry. mike's new book, the latino century, explores the historic rise and growth of latino voters

and why the two major political parties in the us have failed to understand the appeal to a significant voting bloc that's important. both sides have overlooked group. moderating tonight's program is guy marshall ramsey correspondent to kick your readers california politics and government desk. please join me in welcoming both mike and guy guy awesome. well thank you can delighted to be here with you mike. i think just so much in this book the latino century that really unpacks many of the key currents that are kind of shaping our electorate today and the 2024 election. but a lot, you know, kind of up in air right now about the 2024 elections, starting at the top of the ticket. you are, i think, at your heart a numbers guy, a data guy. i think your twitter bio says numbers and data breakfast. yeah, like that. so if you were a numbers guy in the white house right now, the biden campaign, what are numbers you'd be looking at to determine in the direction democrats go from here whether the president

should remain at the top of the ticket? it's a really big question, so i'll try to answer it as tightly as can i to understand what is happening in. the american political system today, it's most important to understand that the key driver is this idea of what we call negative partizanship. we all know partizanship is we all know what hyper partizanship is negative is the idea that people are animated passionately and driven by what they're against, as opposed what they're for. and can set aside a discussion on what that means for democracy, but what that really tells us is that the electorate is extraordinary narrowly calcified. republicans will do they will vote somebody who is as flawed as their candidate with go off on the of that and democrats are behaving the exact same way. they both view the elections now as an threat to their worldview

more than they view the strengths of, their candidates and. so when you hear president biden and, his campaign team say there's been kind of a negligible effect regardless of this disastrous debate, the data is bearing that out. there has just been very little movement and the question, i think, really incidentally, that same range would exist for whoever the democratic nominee is. so it's not like it's a pro biden thing. it's just a this is our champion at the moment, 75%, 83% say he's too old to be president. they don't care. they that that's baked in and same is reversed on the other side. so when when biden says me staying the course is the best pass able route there's a very good argument for that because. most of his negatives, his weaknesses are baked in as

opposed another candidate who hasn't been tested as much. but keep in mind the delta, the differential is plus or minus two points way. so there's a good case to be made for him staying, a good case for him to be made for, him leaving. i'm the opinion that you go with it. i don't mean this literally but you go with the devil that you know. yeah. as opposed to what you don't know. there are very few things you can control and campaigns very few. so you control as many variables as you possibly can to set yourself on the best course to win a race. and if i were had to make the decision, i would say we know what weaknesses are. we know that going to make more fumbles he is there will be and they may be considerable. the data tells us, will have a very negligible, if any, effect through the course of the campaign. i think what concerns lot of democrats is the president a base problem before the debate.

right that was a concern bringing out the same coalition that elected him in 2020. and given the fact that look most candidates who are where he is right now in the polling do go on to win. that's not always the case i think george bush came back from a summer deficit in 2004, but it take a comeback that's somewhat out the ordinary. do you feel like ultimately, though, those democrats come back home in this calcified environment, it's just those democrats are going to get to the polls november. how much of the short answer is yes? but i want to unpack question a little bit, because it is really fascinating. least i believe that it is. joe biden has consistently had very weak polling numbers with his own. but on election, we've had 50 primaries to test the theory case. he's overperform the polling in about 47 of them. so that that's a data point you have to pay attention to. it's telling us something donald trump his polling shows very

secure his base is but he has dramatically underperformed about 47 of them to the point where he's. 20% of base republican vote against candidates that dropped out of the race as a competitive right. so that's a data point. you have to pay attention to. and while you can't speculate too much on what that means, it cannot be ignored. and so when we're looking at performance, both party label and candidates based and compare that to polling. as they say in the military, if the map doesn't match the terrain, you follow the terrain because. the terrain is real. the map is, you know, it's a hypothetical and you've got to be able to look, you know, what is before you and i think and again, i want to really qualify this because of what i just said in the previous answer i was going to say i, think biden and the fundamentals have him in a very strong position.

let me rephrase that by he's not in a weak position. people think he is. and that's the way i'm assessing the race and looking at it is biden has polling problem that doesn't manifest the at the election booth. trump has an election day problem that is not manifesting in the polling i think regardless of who's at the top of the ticket for the democrats, there are a couple of fascinating trends that will decide this election and your work and this book are really kind of at the of both. one is this shift of suburban voters, in many cases women away republicans towards the democratic party to the type of voters that you targeted. yes. working on the lincoln project. the other trend is this move of blue collar voters. and when we talk about blue kind of voters, increasingly we're talking about latino voters moving towards republican. so how do you see those two trends kind of intersecting converging? we move towards november. i love that because for whatever peculiar in the cosmos, i have an expertise in both of those

like those are my two main demographics and. those are the two that are moving at this moment in time in this extremely calcified environment at this extremely calcified political hyperpartisan environment. the only two measurable voter groups that are moving are college educated white voters. large independents and republican. not a lot of republicans, but enough to and they're moving and have been moving since 2016 to the left. and what's fascinating as a republican has been working with voter groups, republican voter for three decades is they're moving cultural reasons. we used to close republicans and bring them home on election day on tax cuts and regulation and and free market messaging. that kind of classic conservative stuff and. a lot of times we would find specifically women would be like, well, you know, i'm pro-choice. i support the right to choose. it's a pro-life party. i'm not really comfortable with it. but, you know, tax cuts, come on, tax and they come back home

and support tax cuts that that in 2020 we doubled down with the lincoln project exclusively. you never saw a tax cut ad from us was all culture. it's culture culture because we were shaking those college educated women. and it wasn't just women, but it was largely women. but the exact is happening with the class as the education divide, as we call it, reshaped contours of the country. those a college degree, a rapidly canceled dating under the democratic party's banner, those without a college degree equally as rapidly consolidating under the republican banner and divide is getting bigger and. it's manifesting not just in terms of an economic divide, although that true, it's really a culture. it's a perspective it's a world view divide and latinos. two to your point are are moving. and i want to be very careful on how i say this are increasingly

not voting with the democratic party. there are two things i did not say. i did not say that are increasingly compelled to move to the republican party because those issues, although there is some truth, that but more importantly. i did not say that they are shifting to the right or realigning the right. and i want this to be driven home really, really clearly. the reason i am not saying that is because what we are witnessing is the emergence an entirely new electorate. a realignment presupposes that there's a vote history or a pattern of voting one way and changing alignment through percent of latino voters are 30 years of age or younger, so they don't have that vote history very as a more a more populist, especially with economic and political populism that is more apparent and more attractive and what we would call the american

right. and i'm getting comfortable uncomfortable on how. i phrase this a little bit because i don't believe that the right left spectrum exists much anymore. i believe we are on a very populist moment where. the establishment is kind of crumbling along with institutions we're watching that in the democratic party right now and. and the rise of populist sentiment amongst key voting groups, particularly working class folks is dominating discourse. 60% of voters don't have college degree, so there's more fish in that barrel and they're increasingly latino. so about the long answer. oh, no, the nerdy apologize. but that's that's essentially what is happening. and as latinos become the fastest growing group of the class, the challenge for democrats particularly isn't losing white voters in the rust belt, the economic anxiety voters, their saviors are not going to be. gretchen whitmer or tim ryan or amy klobuchar, although that's where dc is looking.

their saviors will be ruben gallego, catherine cortez masto and alex padilla in, the sunbelt in the southwest. to flip that dynamic the other way, then does the question become for donald, can he gain more of those working class voters than he's losing in the suburbs? that will you just ask the question of who's going to be next president of states? and in fact, tim, alberta just wrote a piece in the atlantic on this yesterday where la civil de and susan wiles, the two cope campaign managers for trump, were exploring just that topic, just the fact that they're seeing the race way tells me they have a decided advantage because the democrats right now are more worried about putting george clooney and, new york times telling the president to get while they're actually looking at demographics and math and the democrats are looking at something entirely different. but to answer the question, the the democrats believe that they can i believe because of the we were talking about at the

polling, because of the performance post dobbs in lower turnout elections and because the the the democrats also i think that the propensity u.s. born hispanic men specifically is not significant enough to surpass what think they can peel off. the trump campaign actually believes the opposite. and that's where the fight is going to be. we're going to get back to a lot of this 2024 and trends, but i want to talk a little bit about your journey in you lay out in this book you grew up in ventura county home of reagan library all of the reagan library. how did that kind of shape your worldview, your, you know, political view growing up. yeah, you know, i grew up in a home of lower income. latino, mexican-american, catholic catholic and was kind of imbued with sense of the world in many ways. it was not unlike the trajectory of a lot of ethnic catholics at the turn of the last century

through ellis island. but we were imbued with a very strong sense of of looking out for the least among and having an obligation to the poor and and dedicating our lives to doing that. and politics became my parents were not politically involved but they were very politically aware and so very political discussions were part of that conversation and the more i listened to my father the he didn't sound like a democrat to me. and and i would point that out as a young son sometimes does and and your brother. yeah well no pretty directly and you know may desert time tough because by the time we got there the conversations were pretty heated but but that encouraged in my family and to me you know moorpark i'm from a little town moorpark moorpark had a really curious distinction it's a

little city right in the of ventura county. my family moved there in 71. the population was about 2500, 3000 people by the time i graduated from high school, it was about a little shy of 40,000. so was one of the fastest growing communities in southern california at the time. this is 1980s reagan defense spending. the economy is going fantastic, but it had one very curious distinction. it was the only city in california that had a declining population. the small little mexican agricultural that i was in was kind of being swallowed up by suburban mcmansions up around it while around california was becoming more latino. so i had to really learn how to navigate my private life with my friends in settings with the broader construct of of california. i think it made me a better political consultant but the lasting image, i think my mind is, you know, the name moorpark is a type of apricot because we had apricot orchards around us. and i remember the field workers

coming in seasonal, field workers and right above the field were where the horizon where the reagan library was built. and my senior year of high school. so so both of those were very, very comfortable in both of those. they actually asked to speak at the reagan library on this book on october eight. so it's a real homecoming for me because i feel as natural and comfortable there as i do amongst field. to me, it's natural, although politically it seems kind of diametrically opposed, it actually makes perfect sense. me it strikes me that you're contemporary of what we in california politics as the prop 187 generation, a lot of the leading in our state politics. alex padilla john perez, lorena gonzales they came up around this campaign, you know, opposing a ballot measure would have restricted public benefits for undocumented immigrants. what was your experience in that moment? that's a great question because i was actually an undergraduate student who went to georgetown

university, right after the primary. so i wasn't actually here, but i was reading about it in paper, literally because this was kind of pre-internet. so i literally get the washington post and try to read about what was going on back home and call friends page long distance rates on my landline and try to try to understand what was happening. and now i had done campaign in 1992 for a real kind of fire breather. a republican congressman by the of elton gallegly and elton was one of the first really strong anti crusaders he and like dana rohrabacher and b one bob dornan and yeah, truly and i was kind of steeped in in how powerful the immigration issue was, how visceral it is to people from an identity perspective and how threatening it all is and can be. and i think at that moment understanding that dichotomy of me, the reagan library, the field worker and this issue and

how explosive it was, i was like, i to get it, i got to do this for a living like, got it. this is like fascinating but one of the things, the more to the point of your question and everybody you mentioned, they're they're all they're all dear friends is interesting because even though i'm a republican they they knew that my primary concern was for the for the community and even though we disagree a lot of issues alex padilla call me and say my need to talk to you about antonio villaraigosa asked me run his governor's race. lorena gonzalez, i will fight about union issues all day long because we see eye to eye on those issues at all. but one thing i did notice, and this really became an impetus for for the way i started to target voters i was the grandson of immigrants, am the grandson of immigrants with a very strong affinity for my americanness and for my identity nearly who was and driven action by that issue

was. the son or daughter of immigrants, almost every one of them. and that difference a very profound mark on the way i understood the politicization process. and it became really foundational for this book, for this work because the rapid explosion of what we're seeing in the latino voter now is third and fourth generation. now, fourth generation voters like i'm in my early fifties, early fifties. and and now there's discernible fourth generation of latinos which that that age cohort didn't exist. when i you know, the past 30 years we couldn't test that or focus group it or pull it in and it's it's 180 degrees different than the first and second generation voter. so again, my lived experience paying attention to what i was feeling, i seeing what i was experiencing compared to the latino sort of political establishment, couldn't have been more.

and one of the great things about having most of these folks as friends is i could from a data perspective, explain why what they were doing politically was wrong and they would kind of nod and say, okay but continue to do what they were doing because. they were acting rationally as politic actions at my job is not a politician minus more. i see it as to kind of explain some of what's going. there's ways to actually survive in getting the votes to keep moving that career forward. yeah, and i don't mean that as a pejorative. yeah, that's her job. you kind of rose up through the ranks in the state republican party. what didn't you feel like? so this was, you know, throughout nineties, early 2000. what do you feel like you were bringing to the party during those times? what do you mean? what did you take from from that experience, those years? well, that's a really good question. i mean, first of all, you know, i really had to use my of navigating sort my latino

expertise used in a non latino world. i was the political at 26 years old, but i was getting regular, regular to, you know, go back to the country where i from from my own party daily. i mean it's constant and every time my name would on an immigration issue, there would always be some sort of fracas at the republican party headquarters because base republican voters were like, who is this guy? why is he the one talking on behalf of republicans? he's not even an american. i think your first campaign boss thought you were a spy. yeah, my first campaign was that i was a spy because i this is early in voter data history. they're like, how can a mexican-american kid with a surname in a family of democrats be a republican? because i knew i was republican. i registered republican on my 18th birthday. like i couldn't wait to register. i knew like i was that weird kid, right? i guess. but it made perfect sense to me. but these were the early days of voter data where you could look that stuff up and.

so they thought i was was a spy. and so my first, my first. and there are spies in campaigns by. the way that does happen, of course i had no idea. so i walked and wanted to volunteer for my congressman men. and they were like, why would a mexican kid from a democratic family want to work for a congressman who's pretty anti-illegal immigration? like, what's going on. and my first job in politics was to take off stamps from envelopes that had been stamped. they wanted to make sure they wanted to make sure. i, of course, had no idea. thought i was saving the republic right. so i'm like peeling stamps off. and they put me in a storage closet, isolated me from everybody, and i would be there for hours just trying to peel them off perfectly so that congresswoman could use them again. and after hours and hours and hours of doing it, they just realized he's a spy. he's just he's just a weird kid. so that was my first job in politics. and and that was where i learned

to i was so committed and, wanted to help the congressman out and they ended up offering me a job and was kind of on my way in and in republican politics, when you're when you were thinking about in those days, like putting the coalition to win these campaigns, i mean that kind of nativist undercurrent was always i mean, pat buchanan, so much of what he was saying. yeah, from what i saw. was that something you were thinking of? okay, we need to tolerate we need to have these people in the tent to win the election or how were you thinking about that, i guess at that time i'm not going to say i wasn't uncomfortable with it, but i'm also not going to say it was very to me. because what i will say is this i want to be very methodical in how i pick my words here. the america first stuff was was very strongly, not entirely very strongly imbued with a sense of nativism that was clearly a blood and soil component to you could see it at conventions and

there was a lot of really nasty, ugly anti-mexican stuff specifically in the 1990s when i was a political director that, was making its way through convention halls at the time. but i also i also very much subscribe to the idea that a lot of what i was hearing on the left was equally racially charged and what i could never reconcile why. some of it was okay on the left. if it's not on the right isn't it equally bad? and what does mean and think through the course of my journey in politics, it's what i came to understand, dan, was we will probably a species never completely over come that and. so we've got to be somewhat situational with it. and i don't know that's right. or if that's wrong, i just know that that's where i'm at now in recognizing that when there are inequities that are so obvious that are so disparate.

we we can't just say, well, we've got to be a colorblind. we have to do something as a community to reconcile, even if there are temporary and run their course and something works during the 70 is in the eighties, but no longer now we have to be sophisticated enough a society and as a culture to be okay with. because if we don't, we're not self-reflective enough to address some of the very deep seated. i don't even know what the right word is, but just the deep seated flaw in the american story. and i think as i've gotten, maybe it's because of life experiences, i'm much more comfortable looking at america and loving her more because she is flawed, not despite those flaws, because it reminds me, i

guess, of my own journey is we all have our scars and we become a better person if we acknowledge it and make a commitment to be better, not to just pretend it never existed at all. just don't look at it. but donald trump came down that elevator 2015. speaking of ugly scars, you see that as something just to ride you. you were early breaking point and had been emerging a while for me because, look, a lot of people, the universality of classic conservatism, as i call it now, i still have a deep, passionate love for that. when i heard jack kemp speak about about policies that addressed poor, that spoke to that mexican catholic poor kid in me where i could dedicate my life. and there somebody who cared about it that talked about ownership and the human spirit and the value of lifting up all like i. i didn't just believe that i

passionately committed my life to it. and, and that sorry. i kind of went down rabbit hole there because i really that's what still drives me is whether it whether and i'm not i'm not particularly, you know, committed to the policy on one side or the other to me is if somebody is hungry you can feed them. now without saying well you're you know, hurting this person we can talk about a longer term solution. but i guess what i'm saying is the republican changed and i know exactly the moment of when it changed the universality of where was really, i believe, trying desperately hold true to the creed that we are all by our creator. or when reagan gave the city on a hill speech, which was which was an immigration speech, republicans always stop that speech when he says windswept

and god blessed the next sentence. in that speech is where he and if there must be a wall, it must have a great gates that can be opened to all who want to come here. that is an enormously confident statement about our values that moving in the toward home. yeah. and what it says is not just that we're a beacon, but that those beliefs spread by our commitments to them. it's the same sentiment as. lincoln's right makes my speech at cooper union that started the republican and there's an arc between lincoln and reaganism. it ends it ends on 911. and i on george bush's campaigns and the promise of what george bush was doing with being very pro immigration, pro hispanic pro diversity. if you i guess, in today's parlance, was that confidenc