Just want to be rich, will never happen...

Los Angeles County Shows Why Democrats Lost

A Mother Jones analysis of voting data shows rich voters remained loyal as Latino and Asian voters moved right—revealing fissures in a Democratic party that sees itself as a champion of the working class.

Noah Lanard

Two weeks after the election, I met Dianela Rosario in Huntington Park, California—an almost entirely Latino city that swung hard to the right this year. A 51-year-old Dominican American shopkeeper, Rosario told me that before this year she had never voted for a Republican presidential candidate. But, in 2024, inflation and the prices of groceries were front of mind. President Joe Biden and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris were not fully responsible for the cost of living crisis, she said, but she still wanted someone new.

“If she’s been vice president and there’s been no change, then I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to change things as president,” Rosario, who identifies as Afro-Latina, explained in Spanish about why she had not voted for Harris. “That’s what influenced me the most—that things might stay the same as they are now.”

Earlier that afternoon, a Guatemalan shopkeeper shared a similar perspective. She told me she missed the lower prices of Trump’s first term and that she hoped the incoming president would deport people she saw as causing problems in the area. Unlike Rosario, though, she hadn’t been able to cast a vote. “Soy illegal,” the shopkeeper explained of her own immigration status.

In 2016, stories like these would have been hard to find in cities in Southeast Los Angeles like Huntington Park, where 97 percent of residents are Latino. That year, Trump lost by huge margins. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 84 percent of votes in the area, compared to only 8 percent for Trump. Sometimes, Trump even came in third; in several precincts, Jill Stein was the runner-up to Clinton.

Eight years later, a Mother Jones analysis of precinct-level voting data shows that Democrats have lost more support in Southeast Los Angeles than any other part of Los Angeles County. Democrats’ combined margin of victory in nine cities in the area, which are more than 90 percent Latino on average, has declined by nearly 40 percent since 2016. Trump has gone from getting less than 10 percent of votes to nearly 30 percent.

This is not just a function of Democrats staying home. Trump received more than three times as many votes this year in Southeast Los Angeles than he did during his first presidential run.

“That’s what influenced me the most—that things might stay the same as they are now.”

While the data makes clear that voters in largely working-class Latino areas have moved right, the results do not reveal how individual Latinos who live in more mixed (and often richer) parts of Los Angeles voted. Compared to Southeast Los Angeles, Democrats’ have lost less support since 2016 in more middle-class majority-Latino cities, although those cities remain more conservative overall.

Still, a national trend—working-class Asian and Latino voters shifting to Republicans, and upper-class voters choosing Democrats—can be seen in miniature in Los Angeles County.

The results in Southeast Los Angeles mirror the dramatic drops in Democratic support in heavily Asian and Latino areas across the country, ranging from the border counties of Texas' Rio Grande Valley to the rural towns of California's Central Valley to urban areas of New York and New Jersey. While some of these losses have been offset by gains among affluent college graduates who once voted Republican, it was not enough for Harris to win.

The voting records analyzed by Mother Jones include results for roughly 170 communities. Since 2016, Democrats’ margin of victory has dropped by at least 25 points in about 40 of those places, which is well above the countywide shift of about 17 points during the period. In nearly every single community with that large of a drop, Latinos and Asians comprise a majority of residents. The main exception is Beverly Hills, a famously affluent area with a large Jewish population. (Most of the shift in Beverly Hills happened between 2016 and 2020—meaning that it was not primarily a reaction to how Democrats discussed October 7 and Israel's military campaign in Gaza.)

Karina Macias, the mayor of Huntington Park, said in a phone interview that the shift to the right among her constituents reflected concerns with issues that voters across the country prioritized: price increases, crime, and immigration. Macias noted a significant uptick in the number of families in Huntington Park who rely on food distributions, including among residents who probably would have never considered seeking help in the past.

"The Democrats had the opportunity to help us. They didn't do it. "

“I think a lot of people were looking at their current economic situation, and [were] pissed off about it," Macias said. "Can you blame them? No, right? Especially in a community like Huntington Park, they feel it. They’re paying a lot more for things and are not necessarily being paid a lot more. If they work two jobs, maybe somebody in the household needs to go and get another job, right? We have a lot of families here that are doubling up in an apartment, and that’s how they get by."

The nearly 40-point shift in Southeast Los Angeles is far different from what has happened in some of the wealthier communities in Los Angeles. In the affluent coastal cities of Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, and Hermosa Beach, Democrats have maintained or slightly improved their margin of victory since 2016.

But these voters did not necessarily back Democratic candidates all the way down the ballot. In 2020, Los Angeles County voters elected George Gascón, a progressive Cuban-American district attorney defeated his more moderate opponent by seven points. After the win, a backlash began almost immediately. This year, Gascón still managed to secure the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times. But he ended up losing to Nathan Hochman, a comparatively tough-on-crime challenger who became an independent after running as a Republican for California attorney general office in 2022. Hochman won by 20 points—a 27 point swing from 2020.

Wealthier cities like Manhattan Beach and Santa Monica moved harder against Gascón than most of the county, despite being the areas where Democrats had some of their best results at the top of the ticket. Santa Monica residents went from supporting Gascón by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in 2020 to backing Hochman. In Manhattan Beach, Gascón lost by about 50 points—nearly 40 points worse than he did there four years ago. It meant that there was an almost 80-point gap in the city between Harris and Gascón, even though both are Democrats.

Some of Democrats’ most reliable voters in Los Angeles now seem to be rich people who disdain Trump but also recoil to an unusual degree at the left’s approach to criminal justice reform. This new base leaves Democrats in a complicated place as a party that has long thought of itself as fighting for working people.

It is not hard to imagine a less inflammatory Republican than Trump winning the wealthy back to the GOP. Doing that while keeping most of the party’s inroads among working-class voters intact could be challenging—but such cohesion would be a way for the GOP to upend California, and national, politics.

The Los Angeles data make clear how much Democrats are struggling with Asian voters as well. Those challenges appear to be most severe among working-class Asians. That can be seen by looking at the results in San Marino, a majority-Asian city that is one of the 10 wealthiest communities in the county. It has a median home sale price of $2.3 million and is known for attracting wealthy investors from mainland China. Unusually for a majority Asian city, Democrats have lost no support in San Marino since 2016.

Meanwhile, in Monterey Park, which is also about two-thirds Asian but more middle class compared to San Marino, the Democrats’ margin has shrunk by 20 points. Similarly, Rosemead, which includes a significant Vietnamese American population, has shifted about 35 points to the right.

Still, the loss in support has been most intense in working-class Latino communities, despite Trump's rhetoric about immigrants. Macias mentioned a cousin who told her that he was planning to vote for Trump. When Macias reminded him that they have family members who are undocumented, he argued that Trump's promises about mass deportation were just rhetoric. (Macias stressed that despite her cousin's comment there is a "palpable fear" among many people in Huntington Park about what Trump might do.)

Another dynamic is a belief among some Latino voters that Venezuelans, who crossed the border in record numbers in recent years, and other people arriving today are different from them and their ancestors. Gustavo Arellano, a Los Angeles Times writer who covered the recent political history of Southeast Los Angeles earlier this year, told me before the election about how his cousins objected to "these new immigrants" and were turning Venezuelans into scapegoats.

"Venezuelans they get free everything," Arellano said, paraphrasing his cousins. "Our parents, when they came here illegally, didn't get anything at all. They did it on their own." Arellano tells his relatives that "these immigrants are just like our parents" but they insist otherwise. Macias didn't hear this perspective too often, but did recall someone saying about recent arrivals: "They're demanding things, and we work for them."

It also doesn't help that Democrats—largely as a result of Republican opposition—have been unable to deliver on their promises to provide legal status to family members of some of the voters now turning against them. An undocumented Salvadoran immigrant named Sam made that clear when we spoke in Huntington Park—even though he was one of the strongest Kamala Harris supporters I interviewed.

"The Democrats had the opportunity to help us," Sam explained in Spanish. "They didn't do it. As a result, all the Hispanics that are scattered throughout the United States, who are now citizens, who can now vote, are making them pay."

His partner argued that Americans aren't prepared for the world Republicans are vowing to bring into being through mass deportation: "It's laughable that if you go around Bakersfield, or around where the crops are, there are no Americans there. There's none of that there. I don't think that a person like you, who is a professional who works, let's say, at a different level, is going to go there and pick strawberries. And those strawberries don't pick themselves. So what's going to happen?"

Like most people in Southeast Los Angeles, Sam still favored the Democrats. And the voters who abandoned the party aren't necessarily lost, either.

Rosario, the Dominican shopkeeper, said she considered herself an independent, even though she'd recently voted for Trump. I asked her if she might have voted Democrat if another candidate had been on the ballot. It was possible, she said.

At the start of the campaign, she had leaned Democrat because that was the party she had always supported. But Biden "didn't seem well" so she switched to Trump. After Harris got into the race, she stayed with Trump because Harris was part of the current administration.

It was more about the candidate than the party as a whole. "I think that if Obama’s wife had been running, I would have voted Democrat,” Rosario explained. “I like her a lot.”