Trump did not have success with Hispanic voters because of “anything conservatives did,” but rather “things that the Left has done,” according to Mike Gonzalez, author of “A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans.”

The “Left has actually done 95% of it, of the work” of driving Hispanics to the Republican Party “by going crazy, completely crazy over woke issues that are completely rejected by Hispanics,” he said.

Gonzalez, who serves as a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the central issues that drove Hispanic voters across the aisle to Trump. […]

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On Tuesday, Donald Trump earned 9,443 votes in the county, which is 97% Hispanic or Latino, and Kamala Harris received 6,845 votes, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office.

Starr County is located in the Rio Grande Valley and is one of 18 Texas counties that sits on or within 20 miles of Mexico’s border. Trump won 14 out of the 18 Texas border counties, many of which were Democrat strongholds.

Starr, Hidalgo, Willacy, and Cameron counties comprise most of the Rio Grande Valley. Despite voting for Joe Biden in 2020, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008, all four Rio Grande Valley counties supported Trump in 2024.

Trump’s victory in the valley “is historic,” Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said during a recent conversation on “The Daily Signal Podcast.” […]

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But during Tuesday’s election, Golden State voters said they’ve had enough of rampant crime.

By an overwhelming margin, voters passed Proposition 36, a measure that will ncrease penalties for property crime, illicit drug use, and retail theft. By the latest count, over 70% voted “yes” on Prop 36.

The measure essentially repudiates Proposition 47, a soft-on-crime law approved in 2014 that drastically reduced penalties for a whole host of crimes.

That wasn’t the end of California’s turn against the most noxious elements of the Left’s criminal justice reforms. […]

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Meanwhile, Alaska voted to do away with ranked choice voting, after adopting it just four years ago.

District of Columbia voters approved Initiative 83 to allow unaffiliated voters to vote in a party primary. It also would establish ranked choice voting for general elections beginning in 2026.

South Dakota voters rejected a measure to replace party primaries with a ranked choice voting system, Ballotpedia reported.

Supporters of ranked choice voting outspent opponents by at least 2 to 1, and often 10 to 1, according to campaign finance reports cited by Ballotpedia. […]

— Read More: www.dailysignal.com

Final polling averages suggest that Trump has the advantage—and the momentum—heading into Election Day. Real Clear Polling has Trump edging out Harris by 0.1% in national polling and up in enough swing states to pass the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.

There has not been an election-altering October surprise—no Hunter Biden laptop, no missing emails. If there was one, however, it was President Joe Biden calling Trump supporters garbage.

“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something,” the president said during a virtual event, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

The comments outraged Trump’s supporters, just as Hillary Clinton’s comment calling them “deplorables” did in 2016. Nevertheless, the Trump campaign took the comments in stride. Following Biden’s comments, the former president held a press conference from the cockpit of a garbage truck with full campaign branding on the side.

Trump has completely derailed my evening. I have spent 90 minutes laughing at this man’s genius.

Again, hate em if ya want, but our 45th president just showed up in a garbage truck and is now speaking at his rally in an orange garbage man vest. I can’t even. #MAGA pic.twitter.com/FN1oFORjyJ

— Lindsay In South Carolina (@LindsayJPitcher) October 30, 2024

The former president even did a rally wearing a sanitation worker’s high-visibility vest after the stunt.

Left-wing media outlets have been after Trump since his first run for office in 2016.

The Media Research Center released findings on Oct. 28 that showed Trump’s media coverage was 85% negative compared to Harris’s 78% positive coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news broadcasts for the 2024 presidential race. Media Research Center analysts reviewed 660 stories about the presidential election on the news channels from July 21, the day Biden ended his candidacy, to Oct. 25.

In the 2016 presidential race, both Trump and Clinton received high amounts of negative coverage, with 91% negative for Trump and 79% negative for Clinton. In the coverage for the 2020 race, Trump received 92% negative coverage and Biden received 66% positive coverage.

Nevertheless, media bias has not prevented Trump from broadening his support.

Standing room only at Vance rally in Holland, Michigan, with a long line out the door! pic.twitter.com/xAatpL6ARe

— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) October 29, 2024

Trump, with a bold alternative media strategy, has brought together a motley crew of voices across the political spectrum, such as former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., entrepreneur Elon Musk, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, R-Hawaii.

During a recent interview on Fox News, Gabbard said she asks people in the audience to raise their hand if they are a Democrat or a former Democrat whenever she speaks at a Trump event.

“In almost every event, somewhere between 35-50% of the room will raise their hand,” she said in the Oct. 29 interview on Fox & Friends Weekend.

What excited Gabbard even more was the reaction of Trump supporters to those whose hands were raised. Trump supporters “stood up and cheered and welcomed them [Democrats and former Democrats] and just surrounded them, really, with love and kindness.”

Gabbard said a lot of people shared their experiences with her after the event.

“I had so many people come up to me at the end of that saying, ‘I came in here afraid. I’ve never been to a political rally before. I didn’t know what to expect. I’m a Democrat, lifelong Democrat, never voted before.’ Different variations of this, but each walking out saying, ‘I’m voting for Donald Trump because of what I experienced here today,’” Gabbard said.

American voters may have come to Trump rallies for the fun, but Trump needs them to stay for Election Day to win.

Polls indicate Trump and Harris are neck and neck in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Within each swing state are several counties that are also too close to call and could be the deciding factors in who wins each state.

Control of the House of Representatives and the Senate also hang in the balance this election, with close races in several states expected to determine whether Congress will flip for the next two years, and if one party might enjoy control of both chambers.

Below are all the states and races to watch on Election Day.

• Arizona
• Electoral Votes: 11
• 2020 Results:
• Biden – 49.4%
• Trump – 49.1%
• Counties to Watch:
• Maricopa […]

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Americans are tired of talking heads and the opinions of editorialists masquerading as journalists. But this should not be confused with declining interest in news or politics; viewers are simply moving to channels where they can get an unfiltered view of the candidates from personalities they trust.

If there is one clear lesson from the 2024 election cycle, it’s that candidates for public office must be prepared to engage in this new media landscape to stay competitive, especially on long-form podcasts.

The last time we had a shift this significant was 1960, when America saw the first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The Kennedy-Nixon debate underscored the power of television to shape public perception.

Remember, past is prologue. Take, for example, Donald Trump’s appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Already, it’s racked up about 45 million views—just on YouTube alone. Trump’s interview with Theo Von received 14 million views. For her part, Kamala Harris’ appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast received 733,000 views and she received 665,000 views on the “All the Smoke” podcast.

While traditional media audiences are shrinking, these appearances have outperformed the average audiences of these podcasts oftentimes 10 to 1. Remarkably, the candidates’ episodes are even outpacing episodes featuring internationally known Hollywood celebrities.

Voters are hungry to hear from the candidates on an unfiltered, authentic platform, and podcasts are filling that need.

This shift is redefining how viable candidates will approach media going forward. Those who want to succeed in politics but are afraid, or unable, to allow the public a view into who they really are going to have a ceiling on their career if they don’t do long-form interviews.

Political campaigns are going to change in two ways due to this dynamic.

1. Candidates need to get comfortable in their own skin, open up and answer personal questions about heartache, addiction, and what makes their spouse smile. This open, honest, and unvarnished content mirrors what the public is receiving in their social media feeds already, so it makes sense that they are demanding the same transparency from their political leaders.
2. It’s going to transform the way political professionals engage with the electorate. According to GWI, a consumer research company, the “typical” internet user spends almost 2.5 hours each day using social media platforms, equating to more than one-third of their total time online. As a result, campaign resources should shift to talking to the electorate where they are spending their time, which is on their phone. That is where people are getting their news, listening to podcasts, vegging out, and forming opinions about who they will vote for.

The reason these podcasters and creators carry so much influence is because of the community and trust they build with their audience. As James Clear, author of The New York Times bestseller of “Atomic Habits,” says about changing opinions, “Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does.”

This election year, I was part of an effort that enlisted thousands of podcasters and social media personalities to encourage unregistered and low propensity voters to engage in the political process. Content creators in coordination with Vote4America delivered billions of impressions to tens of millions of voters. The posts calling on people to engage in the election significantly overperformed the average post of the creator, much like the success of the Trump and Harris podcast appearances.

We won’t know the full effect of all this content until all the votes are counted, but we can already see that 8.5% of all early votes are being cast by previously eligible first-time voters, meaning they are of age to have voted in past elections but decided not to.

The authenticity and trust of these podcasters and content creators is clearly having an effect on voter behavior.

What Jeff Bezos got wrong was his slight at podcasts as “unresearched.” The public clearly disagrees.

Americans are choosing podcasts over Bezos’ newspaper as their trusted source of news and information. Traditional media and candidates for office now must grapple with the new expectations of the electorate: unfiltered, unedited, authentic content.

Illegal aliens don’t stay in the state, according to Pinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Mark Lamb. Instead, they travel to “California, Massachusetts, New York, Chicago, Iowa, Alabama,” he says, adding, “But what we are feeling is, just like every state and every American family, we’re feeling the effects of fentanyl.”

Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

“I don’t want to take away from 9/11, but I want to put it into perspective,” Lamb says. “On 9/11 we lost, I think, about 3,600 American lives that day … and we went to war for 20 years for that.”

An estimated 74,702 people died from fentanyl poisoning in America in 2023, a slight decline from the 76,226 fentanyl-related deaths in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. […]

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First came the mammoth $430 billion plan birthed before the ’22 midterms that made the student loans of 40 million borrowers eligible for cancellation.

That died the following spring at the Supreme Court only to be succeeded by the “Saving on a Valuable Education” plan, which drastically reduced the income borrowers must contribute toward repaying their loans at an estimated 10-year cost of $475 billion.

SAVE, which two Democrat-appointed judges enjoined in April, was then followed by four related rules canceling the debts of borrowers who have spent a long time in repayment without actually repaying their loans.

The latest proposal is another example of the administration’s ingrained reflex to respond to its own unpopularity with spending. Although the general objections to it are familiar, still, specific features of the latest plan are worth examining, especially because of their timing.

At this stage, the proposed rules would not be finalized until 2025. Moreover, the rules’ stated pretension is to provide an avenue for debt cancellation for “student loan borrowers for generations to come.”

The rules create two new paths for cancellation: a one-time automatic cancellation initiated by the secretary of education for loans at risk of default and an ongoing option that borrowers can access by application that “holistically” demonstrates the borrower’s hardship.

Purportedly, these address borrower needs not “sufficiently” covered in the preceding rounds of rulemaking or by readily available loan deferrals. That may be the closest the administration gets to acknowledging the redundancy of its plan that layers forgiveness atop forgiveness.

Much like the previous efforts, there’s a good deal of dissonance in how the administration presents the rule to different audiences. The Department of Education heralds the rules publicly as a courageous achievement, power procured through a righteous fight to provide “hope to millions of struggling Americans,” something no other administration has done before.

At least that last bit is true. But the rules themselves attempt to speak softly and modestly to a mostly legal audience, insisting that they are not the creation of some strange new power, but only a specification of how the secretary intends to apply the discretion that he has always had.

And though the rule is supposed to help “millions,” the secretary assures would-be critics that he will exercise his discretion only in “relatively rare” circumstances where “the costs of enforcing the full amount of the debt are not justified by the expected benefits.”

So, rest assured, dear taxpayer, these rules will save you money despite all appearances that your money is being given away.

Officious paternalism works tolerably well as a description of the rules’ tenor. The administration promises to anticipate and address borrower needs before they even arise by authorizing the Department of Education to cancel loans automatically if the department deems them at risk of defaulting.

How does the department make that determination? By consulting a “non-exhaustive” 17-factor list, of course. How else?

The borrowers the administration hopes to assist are evidently so distressed that they have not even bothered to apply for relief. Perhaps after years of COVID-19-based transfer payments and the gratuitous benefits of previous loan pauses and cancellations, borrowers are just accustomed to receiving without asking.

But then it falls to the rest of us to ask: Does any other segment of the population receive this much financial solicitude from the federal government?

The proposal’s most audacious quality is not its indulgent attitude toward borrowers, but its insouciance toward the matter of legal authority.

Since it took office, the Biden-Harris administration has combed the statutes for the few stray words they could morph into transformational debt-cancelling authority.

To date, they’re still searching for a rationale that would satisfy a judge. But the fact is, they are out of plausible alternatives, so they are recycling the same tortured reading of the Higher Education Act used to justify two of the preceding attempts.

Courts have already previewed the merits of this argument: Two Democrat-appointed judges have found that opponents of the rules are “likely to succeed on the merits” of their legal challenges. But that has in no way dissuaded the administration from this fourth attempt because the administration refuses to take the hint.

In the twilight of Biden-Harris administration, its policy approach resembles a movie studio that has misunderstood its audience and run out of ideas to keep them engaged.

These rules are sequels that appeal only to the most niche audience—the coalition of organizations dedicated to the abolition of student debt and their enablers within the Department of Education.

With the broader American audience, the approach is a liability. A poll conducted by University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy found that 40% of Americans “strongly disapprove” of the Biden-Harris administration’s repeated intrigues to transfer student debt to taxpayers. Another poll from the libertarian Cato Institute found that roughly 70% of Americans disapprove of student-loan cancellation when apprised of its effects on taxes and inflation.

Nevertheless, the administration persists in offering the same non-cure for the student-debt ailment. Despite the administration’s professed interest in addressing “root causes,” these rules, like their predecessors, barely acknowledge, let alone address, the variables that have made higher education such a debt-intensive undertaking or the variables that make the American economy one in which it is difficult for borrowers to repay the burdens they have assumed.

Instead, it cues up another installment of bourgeois socialism, a redistribution of monies to those who have spent too much money to attain fewer privileges than they would like.

With little fanfare in March 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the agencies of the federal government to increase involvement in American elections by helping to register voters and turn out the vote.

“If you target it neutrally, probably not the worst thing in the world. We want civic engagement in the country,” Brosnan told me.

The implementation of Biden’s Executive Order 14019, however, has been anything but neutral.

Biden’s critics deride the order as “Biden Bucks.” […]

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