Know Your Enemy - The Minority Voters Moving Right (w/ Daniel Martinez HoSang)

Matt and Sam talk with Daniel HoSang about the gains the GOP and Trump are making with racial minorities.

Duration: 1h 27m
Broadcast on: 18 Aug 2025
Audio Format: other

A major topic following Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election has been his gains with racial and ethnic minorities, a trend that's scrambled many people's assumptions about American politics, not least those of anti-racist liberals. Why have minority voters drifted toward Trump, despite his many comments and campaign pledges that demonize or disparage them? To try to understand this phenomenon, we talked to Daniel Martinez HoSang, who has studied the minorities entering the GOP coalition, not only but especially in the MAGA era, including extraordinarily rich interview with people of color on the right attending Turning Point USA conference, CPAC, Trump rallies, following right wing influencers, and more.

Sources:

Daniel Martinez HoSang, "Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right," New York Times, July 24, 2025

Daniel Martinez HoSang, Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone, (2023)

Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference, (2021)

Joseph E. Lowndes & Daniel Martinez HoSang, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (2019)

Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (2008)

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All right. Welcome listeners to episode 118 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippen, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam Heather Bow. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. We are always excited for our episodes. But this was such a smart and interesting conversation with Dan Hosang, and I've been thinking about the conversation for days after. Yeah. Dan, whose books and articles are written under the name Daniel Martinez, Hosang, is somebody who I've admired has worked for a long time. He wrote a book with Joseph E. Lowndes called Producers Parasites, Patriots, Race and the New Right Wing Politics of Pricarity. And then just at the end of July, he published this piece in New York Times opinion that was called Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right. And after I read this, I knew that I wanted to talk to him. And this piece was based on all these interviews that he and Joe had done with non-white people of color, minority activists, organizers, and participants in these right wing conferences, especially for young people. So it's been a preoccupation of his and Joe's for a long time. He's collaborator Joe Lowndes to track the rising kind of visibility and kind of salience of non-white conservatives in particular, the MAGA era. Not only, as you'll hear from the interview, their interest in this topic started earlier than that. But his piece in the Times was just this really interesting kind of window into how various people of non-white identities are experiencing those identities in relation to their enthusiasm for Trump, MAGA, for some kind of version of conservatism, but not really one that is completely the same as the kind of traditional conservatism we talk about in the podcast a lot. It really is distinctive, and that was one of his major kind of insights about this was that this really is a new kind of thing, a new kind of way of relating America's racial histories, people's own stories and relationship to their identities to conservatism. And it's really complicated, but it's also like really rich. And it feels like something that comes up after each of Trump's elections, you know, where we look and see, oh, wow, he did better with people of color than you would have thought, better with Latinos, better with Asians, and improving his margins with blacks too. And there isn't often like that fulfilling of an answer from anybody in the media, really, for why that's happening. And I think Dan and Joe have their finger on the pulse of a set of possible answers. And that's what this conversation is about. Yes. For those who aren't familiar with Dan's work, Daniel Martinez-Hosang is a professor of American studies at Yale and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, The Politics of the Multiracial Right that grows out of the work we're going to discuss with him. And so I will be looking forward to its publication. He's written or co-edited six other books on social movements and racial justice and is a current race and democracy fellow with the Roosevelt Institute. And I just want to say again that I was so impressed with the kind of precision and thoughtfulness and appropriate balance of interest, empathy perhaps, but never losing his critical edge.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam talk with Daniel HoSang about the gains the GOP and Trump are making with racial minorities.