Obama advisor warns Dems have 'no path' to victory if they don't win back key voter demographic
A former advisor to Barack Obama has warned that Democrats have 'no path' back to the White House unless they win back Latino voters.
Ex-presidential aide Dan Pfeiffer, 49, told Pod Save America the demographic holds the key to the beleaguered party's redemption at the next election.
'There's no way to look at this without recognizing the massive scale of our problems,' Pfieffer told former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau on Friday's episode of the left-leaning podcast.
'You can kind of tell yourself that things might be kind of OK by looking at just the shift from '20 to '24,' he added.
'But if you really want to assess where we are as a party, you have to look at the shift from 2016 to 2024.'
Pfeiffer pointed out that former Democrat hopeful Hillary Clinton was much more popular among the Hispanic population than President Trump.
She gained around 70 percentage points more from the demographic voter pool than Trump did - a wider margin than Obama.
But former Vice President Kamala Harris secured the group by only 54 percentage points on Trump. Several exit polls even indicated that Trump gained more of the vote among Latino men.
'Latinos moved 17 points (to the right) in eight years,' Pfeiffer said. 'Latino men went 14 points (toward the GOP) in eight years.'
He added that 'Latinos are the fastest-growing population' in the country.
'They are particularly politically powerful because of how the population is distributed in electoral-rich sunbelt states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada,' he said.
'They are becoming more of the electorate, and we are losing more of them at a very fast rate. If that trend continues, there is no path to Democrats winning elections.'
It comes as voter polls indicate that New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be the Democratic Party's next presidential candidate.
There are 65.2 million Hispanics and Latinos in the US, or around one-fifth of the population, according to the US Census Bureau.
'The message I take from this is, anyone who thinks that we can get away with just tinkering around the edges, just hoping that Donald Trump becomes unpopular or they nominate some yahoo in 2028 or we're going to ride the wave of tariffs and inflation to a narrow House victory is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,' Pfieffer added.
'We have to be willing to ask very hard questions.'
Efforts by Trump's campaign group to sway over millions of Hispanic voters proved hugely successful, despite a massive pre-election controversy when a comedian at a Trump rally compared Puerto Rico to a 'floating island of garbage'.
Trump's biggest gains among Hispanic voters were evident in the key states of Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Before midnight on election night, Trump became the first Republican since George H. W. Bush in 1988 to win Miami-Dade, a county where two-thirds of residents are Latino.
As well as targeting Hispanic voters, Team Trump also aimed to sway over African-Americans — another huge demographic group in the US.
But there was less of a noticeable impact on African-American voters.
Exit polls suggested Trump narrowed the gap with Harris among Black men by two points, compared with 2020.
Of the 100-plus counties with a Black population of at least 50 percent, the Republicans gained ground in all but eight.
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