The new video from Dalton, where we returned to speak with Latinos about the past month in America, is up on YouTube. It’s slower and quieter than most of the other editions of Scuffed News, because there was no crowd, no scene, no inherent energy for us to tap into.
We eventually just started walking into Latino businesses and asking people to speak on camera. A surprising number were willing, thanks in no small part to Nancy Vazquez, the Dalton State University student who ran the camera for interviews in English, and conducted the interviews in Spanish. Her skill with people and fluent Spanish got us some of the best stuff in the video, in particular the woman who said the capitol attackers have “no limits” in their homes, their society and their country.
One small disappointment to me, after our two visits to Dalton, was that we ran into no Trump-supporting Hispanics. I would have preferred to have that diversity of opinion represented, especially since Trump did better among Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016. Somebody forwarded me exit polling from Minnesota, which I’m sure has been picked over by reporters there, showing that Trump significantly grew his support in that state among Black and Latino voters. Just under one in five Black men who voted in Minnesota voted for Trump. Just over one in three Latino men in Minnesota who voted, voted for Trump.
But that’s Minnesota, and nobody we spoke with in Dalton fell in that bucket. Them’s the breaks.
We did speak with one guy off camera who was interesting in this respect, a college dropout who started his own video game store. He spoke like a guy who spent a lot of time on Reddit (I mean that as a compliment), and he told us there were a fair number of Catholic Latinos who voted for Trump purely on social issues, and he advised us to ask everyone we spoke with about abortion. He then declined to go on camera because he didn’t think he’d be as concise as he’d like. The abortion question, which we asked from then on, yielded no fruit. My main takeaway from this exercise is that when Trump said Mexico is sending “drug dealers” and “criminals” and “rapists” to the U.S., back at the beginning of his campaign, he lost a lot of Hispanics forever. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
This weekend we’ll be in Daytona, Fla., for the festivities around the Daytona 500. I panicked a little as I wrapped up the Dalton video, and decided to hit a couple big events with a lot of human energy (planning something also on Tuesday, somewhere else in the South, bonus points if you can guess what that is). If you have suggestions for questions to ask people in Daytona, or anywhere else, please send them my way. The impeachment, the pandemic and the future of the country are easy ones. What else?
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Watch these flocks of starlings — Twitter
Marines re-orienting for warfare in western Pacific — USNI
Houston doctor fired for dispersing almost-expired vaccines — NYT
High demand for rooms at Trump’s D.C. hotel on March 4 — Curbed
Eugene Goodman directing Mitt Romney to safety — Recount
Majority of “insurrectionists” had faced financial trouble — WaPo
Kamala Harris’s niece capitalizing, raising eyebrows — LA Times
Quotes
"You can take better care of your secret than another can." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1863
About: I send this email most mornings to force myself to stay informed and in touch. It’s typically ~8 links, a quote, and an update on what I’m working on. Write me back! And please share the email. If I added you and you don’t like it, please click unsubscribe below. I was a newspaper reporter for 14 years at the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Des Moines Register and Minneapolis Star Tribune. I explained why my family left Minneapolis here. Now I work on Scuffed News. Pleas subscribe. Please share this newsletter with anyone you think might enjoy it. If you’d like, you can support all of this work with your money on Patreon.