Baker is a graduate student at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and a former active-duty Marine.
CHARLESTON, S.C. – Inside a vendor’s booth at Charleston’s renowned City Market, Ingrid Ginn gripped a small pair of needle-nosed pliers, twisting a gold wire around itself to finish off a pair of blue and white clay square earrings. A lifelong artist, she opened her small business in 2021 after three decades working in public administration.
Ginn is a wife, a mother, a Colombian immigrant and an American citizen of four years. She has been looking forward to exercising her right to vote in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, in which she plans to cast her ballot for Donald Trump.
She trusts him because he built his own fortune, and she doesn’t believe him to be motivated by personal greed. Ginn pointed to other politicians who’ve sought power and simultaneously become wealthy.
While Trump’s claims about being self-made have been proven false, his appeal to Latino voters like Ginn confirms something that political scientists have noted for years – that while Democrats have historically won the majority of Latino votes in presidential elections, that margin has been narrowing since 2016. And recently polling by The New York Times shows Trump has a 6-point lead among Latino voters, a significant shift since Joe Biden won 60 percent of their votes in 2020.
That shift reflects the increasing generational and ethnic diversity within American Hispanic communities, said Maria Echaveste, who served as a senior policy official during the Clinton administration and now serves on the board of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino-focused civic engagement organization. The Democratic Party has been slow to recognize the nuance within Latino communities, she said, and slow to try to win more Latino votes.
Latinos will make up almost 15 percent of all eligible voters during the 2024 presidential election, but have been largely overlooked as swing voters in recent years, Echaveste said. Democratic leaders have erroneously considered them a monolithic voting bloc.
“They have very incorrectly assumed that Latinos only care about immigration. And that's just not true,” Echaveste said, explaining that most are more concerned about jobs, taxes and the economy when it’s time to vote.
That feeling is true for Ginn.
“Nothing is free in this life,” she told me. “Somebody has to pay for everything,” like health care for illegal immigrants, something that falls in line with Ginn’s deeply held Christian beliefs. But U.S. taxpayers, particularly small-business owners like her, are already taxed enough and shouldn’t foot the bill for more free health care, she said. While she wants to see the border improved, the cost of gas is her most pressing priority. Ginn makes the 40-minute commute three to four times a week to sell her earrings, all handmade without molds, to tourists.
Ginn does not support undocumented immigration. It was difficult for her to gain her citizenship, even though she arrived in the U.S. with a fiancee visa, after two years of dating her now-husband. She had since spent years and at least $2,000 trying to get her mother approved for legal immigration from Colombia, where she still lives.
Ginn is drawn to the Republican Party’s conservative values, including tighter borders, lower taxes and a focus on small businesses. Those characteristics have been attractive to much of the Latino community for decades, said Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College whose work has focused on Latino voters, who noted that Latino voters have a long history of supporting Republicans.
“The idea that Democrats have recently been losing Latinos to the Republican Party reflects a fairly short-term perspective,” Michelson said. “It’s true that a much larger proportion of Latino voters voted for Obama than voted for Clinton or Biden. But if you rewind a little more, you'll notice that George W. Bush won 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, and Ronald Reagan won 35 percent of the Latino vote in 1988.”
Much of Democrats’ false assurance stems from the 2008 election, after which Democrats interpreted Latino voters’ strong support for Obama as a more permanent shift.
“Latinos who voted for a Democrat when it was Obama are now returning to their more Republican perspectives,” Michelson said. “I think it was just a unique situation of the Obama campaign that attracted more Latinos than usual into a multiracial coalition.”
Ginn said while she’s a fervent supporter of Trump, she would have preferred to see South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the Republican nominee. She’s not a fan of former South Carolian Gov. Nikki Haley, who recently lost her home-state primary to Trump and suspended her campaign following additional losses on Super Tuesday, because Ginn believes Haley has betrayed the party by running against her former boss. (Haley served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.)
As for Trump, Ginn believes his false claims that he won in 2020, placing her in the target audience for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus effort to combat Trump’s lies.
Naturalized citizens like Ginn made up one in 10 voters in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, making political outreach efforts on both sides all the more important.
In each of five states, the number of immigrants who became citizens between 2016 and 2020 was greater than the state’s margin of victory in 2020.
During a lull at the City Market, Ginn took a break from finishing a pair of earrings to share a video of her February 2020 citizen ceremony. Her co-workers at the Charleston County Consolidated 9-1-1 Center presented her with an American flag. She described the ceremony as one of the most meaningful moments in her life.
She considers herself an example of the American dream, having immigrated to the United States and successfully started her own business. “Trump wants to save the nation,” she said. Her only savior is Jesus, Ginn said. But Trump isn’t far behind.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.