President Donald Trump boosted his share of Latino votes because of religious and social issues, not because of his successful economic record, according to former President Barack Obama.

Obama made the claim as he admitted November 25 to a radio host that urban Democrats are often oblivious to the views of people outside their social circle.

“People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump,” Obama told The Breakfast Club, a radio show run by Lenard Larry McKelvey, who calls himself “Charlamagne tha God.” Obama continued:

But there’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, you know, undocumented workers, in cages — they think that’s less important than the fact that, you know, he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion, right?

Obama’s comments echoed his 2008 dismissal of midwestern voters’ economic worries in a speech to elite donors in San Francisco:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Numerous post-election surveys show that the GOP’s share of the Latino vote grew because most Latinos want to be ordinary Americans, and to escape from their assigned task of brown voters in the Democrats’ diverse alliance of racial identity groups.

Because they are ordinary Americans, Latinos liked Trump’s good economic record — median household income rose by seven percent in 2019! — and they liked the GOP’s support for anti-crime laws and other mainstream priorities — including marriage and abortion.

For example, on November 23, moderate author Christopher Caldwell wrote in the far-left New Republic magazine:

Trump didn’t sell out his supporters. In fact, his presidency saw something extraordinary, even if it was all but invisible from the country’s globalized cities: the first egalitarian boom since well back into the twentieth century. In 2019, the last non-Covid year, he presided over an average 3.7 percent unemployment rate and 4.7 percent wage growth among the lowest quartile of earners. All income brackets increased their take. That had happened in the last three Obama years, too. The difference is that in the Obama part of the boom, the income of the top decile rose by 20 percent, with tiny gains for other groups. In the Trump economy, the distribution was different. Net worth of the top 10 percent rose only marginally, while that of all other groups vaulted ahead. In 2019, the share of overall earnings going to the bottom 90 percent of earners rose for the first time in a decade.

…

the great demographic surprise of the election—Trump’s uptick among Black and Latino men—owed more to this wage progress than to Lil Wayne’s endorsement, or to Trump’s musing aloud that he had done more for Blacks in America than any president since Abraham Lincoln.

Even Politico admitted:

But, in interviews with more than a dozen experts on Hispanic voters in six states, no factor was as salient as Trump’s blue-collar appeal for Latinos. “Most Latinos identify first as working-class Americans, and Trump spoke to that,” said Josh Zaragoza, a top Democratic data specialist in Arizona, adding that Hispanic men in particular “are very entrepreneurial. Their economic language is more aligned with the way Republicans speak: pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, owning your own business.”

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“Most Latinos in this country are working class,” [Harvard academic Ryan] Enos said. “One would have to assume that this identity of being working class is more important than this identity of being Latino.”

Even the New York Times posted an op-ed admitting that most Latinos dislike Obama-style identity politics. Breitbart News reported:

The political problem for Biden’s progressive allies is that only about 25 percent of Latinos identify themselves as a progressive-style “people of color” identity group, the authors said. The majority of Latinos “rejected this designation [because] they preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.”

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For example, numerous polls show that Latinos say they favor immigration but they strongly prefer border security, oppose welfare for migrants and want employers to hire Americans before importing workers.

Breitbart News reported polling data that shows Latinos favor Trump’s immigration policies:

Exit polling conducted by Zogby Analytics for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found that Hispanic voters — including those who voted for Democrat Joe Biden — are overwhelmingly supportive of reducing overall legal immigration to the U.S., nearly as much as white Americans.

For instance, nearly 73 percent of Hispanic voters said they support reducing immigration while tens of millions of Americans are jobless or underemployed. This is just a five percent difference between white Americans who support reducing immigration.

Similarly, 6-in-10 Hispanic voters said overall legal immigration should be reduced even after the U.S. recovers from its unemployment crisis to “protect American jobs” for Americans. This is only a six percent difference between white Americans who support the policy.