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.


















photo courtesy of Michael Varga.
An Independent Voter's Perspective on Current Political Divides
In the column, "Is Donald Trump Right?", Fulcrum Executive Editor, Hugo Balta, wrote:
For millions of Americans, President Trump’s second term isn’t a threat to democracy—it’s the fulfillment of a promise they believe was long overdue.
Is Donald Trump right?
Should the presidency serve as a force for disruption or a safeguard of preservation?
Balta invited readers to share their thoughts at newsroom@fulcrum.us.
David Levine from Portland, Oregon, shared these thoughts...
I am an independent voter who voted for Kamala Harris in the last election.
I pay very close attention to the events going on, and I try and avoid taking other people's opinions as fact, so the following writing should be looked at with that in mind:
Is Trump right? On some things, absolutely.
As to DEI, there is a strong feeling that you cannot fight racism with more racism or sexism with more sexism. Standards have to be the same across the board, and the idea that only white people can be racist is one that I think a lot of us find delusional on its face. The question is not whether we want equality in the workplace, but whether these systems are the mechanism to achieve it, despite their claims to virtue, and many of us feel they are not.
I think if the Democrats want to take back immigration as an issue then every single illegal alien no matter how they are discovered needs to be processed and sanctuary cities need to end, every single illegal alien needs to be found at that point Democrats could argue for an amnesty for those who have shown they have been Good actors for a period of time but the dynamic of simply ignoring those who break the law by coming here illegally is I think a losing issue for the Democrats, they need to bend the knee and make a deal.
I think you have to quit calling the man Hitler or a fascist because an actual fascist would simply shoot the protesters, the journalists, and anyone else who challenges him. And while he definitely has authoritarian tendencies, the Democrats are overplaying their hand using those words, and it makes them look foolish.
Most of us understand that the tariffs are a game of economic chicken, and whether it is successful or not depends on who blinks before the midterms. Still, the Democrats' continuous attacks on the man make them look disloyal to the country, not to Trump.
Referring to any group of people as marginalized is to many of us the same as referring to them as lesser, and it seems racist and insulting.
We invite you to read the opinions of other Fulrum Readers:
Trump's Policies: A Threat to Farmers and American Values
The Trump Era: A Bitter Pill for American Renewal
Federal Hill's Warning: A Baltimorean's Reflection on Leadership
Also, check out "Is Donald Trump Right?" and consider accepting Hugo's invitation to share your thoughts at newsroom@fulcrum.us.
The Fulcrum will select a range of submissions to share with readers as part of our ongoing civic dialogue.
We offer this platform for discussion and debate.