JASMINE CROCKETT
Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was reelected in 1956 with 39 percent of the Black vote. Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, lost the presidency in 1960 despite getting 32 percent Black support. However, in 1964, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson won a record 94 percent of the Black vote because his Republican opponent was against federal civil rights legislation.
For the next four decades, the Black vote for most Republican presidential candidates remained in single digits. During that time, Black Democrats saw anyone who voted Republican as someone who was not looking out for the best interests of the Black community.
In 2020, Nikole Hanna-Jones, the creator of The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, went further. She explained that there was a difference between being “racially Black” and “politically Black.” Political blackness is far left and anti-right. Black Democrats saw political blackness as a common identity that might bring them together in response to the problems posed by right-wing policies that disproportionately impacted Black communities.
Thus, Black individuals who supported “the right” had a “slave mentality.”
In 2024, Vanity Fair interviewed U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) following Donald Trump’s presidential victory over Democrat Kamala Harris. The interviewer questioned Crockett about why Trump performed better among Black and Hispanic voters than prior Republican candidates. Crockett claimed that Black people remained devoted to the Democratic Party—Trump only increased votes from misogynistic Black men, and Hispanic support for Trump was reminiscent of a “slave mentality,” which Crockett defined as slaves’ hatred for themselves.
In other words, the Hispanics who backed Trump were not “politically Latino.”
The “slave mentality” comment resurfaced when Crockett announced her candidacy for Senate the next year. Crockett was asked in a CNN interview whether all Hispanic Trump voters still had a “slave mentality.” Crockett replied that she did not say all Hispanic voters but added that she found it perplexing that some Latinos insisted that there were people who entered the country “the wrong way.”
The problem with Crockett and her ilk is that when they don’t understand why other people vote against Democrats, they lack the intellectual curiosity to investigate the reasons; instead, they assume the worst about those individuals and insult them.
As expected, Crockett’s Senate campaign was unsuccessful. She did not receive enough Hispanic support and lost the Democratic primary. The Latino rejection of Crockett enraged “politically Black” Crockett supporters, particularly sports journalist and political commentator Jemele Hill.
Remember, Hill was a staunch supporter of Kamala Harris for president and was angered when Trump referred to her as a “low-IQ person.” When Harris lost, Hill remarked that she took Trump’s reelection personally since the presidential dreams of an “overqualified Black woman” were shattered by overt racism and misogyny.
Hill was upset with all Hispanic voters after Crockett was defeated.
She stated that the Cubans, as we know, that are in Miami are very soft targets for misinformation, particularly because they are often influenced by misleading narratives that exploit their historical fears of socialism and communism. To be honest, many Latino and Hispanic communities are also susceptible to misinformation. As long as Republicans describe democratic policies as socialism or communism, Latinos and Hispanics will vote Republican every time, even if they are voting for themselves to be put out of the country. Avoiding susceptibility to misinformation “requires a level of sophistication,” and “one of the main platforms for disinformation is Univision, along with many Spanish-language newspapers; many of them are owned by conservative, right-leaning people, so [Latinos and Hispanics] are a group that is [constantly] filtered full of misinformation.”
Hill was no different from Trump by insinuating that Latinos and Hispanics are low-IQ voters, but what makes Hill’s statement even more perplexing is that it is irrelevant to Crockett’s defeat. Crockett did not lose the general election to a Republican who fearmongered about the evils of socialism; rather, she lost the Democratic primary to a Democrat who campaigned as a moderate. Latino voters supported Crockett’s opponent because they believed he had a greater chance of defeating the Republican candidate in the general election.
The only person who was misinformed was U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett. It occurred when her advisers predicted that she had enough support to win a statewide election.