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Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights

Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.

I asked him where Democrats are in the most trouble with Hispanic voters, and Odio didn’t hesitate. It’s the place where he lives: Miami, Florida.

“The idea that what we’re seeing from the Hispanic vote recently is a deviation, and that they will snap back to their historic preference for the Democrats two to one, I think it’s a total illusion,” he said. “The real question is how far this trend goes.”

The timing couldn’t be worse for Democrats. According to Pew Research, the U.S. Hispanic population has grown to 62 million from fewer than 10 million in 1970. (Hispanics accounted for more than half of America’s population growth from 2010 to 2020.) In the last election, Hispanics eclipsed African Americans in terms of raw eligible voters.

in several key battleground states, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, they have become the most essential, and most coveted, demographic.

Neither man is wrong. Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party for many different reasons. This represents “a sea change” in our politics, Teixeira said,

As the 2014 midterm campaign got under way, Democrats spoke with a certainty—bordering on arrogance—about the Hispanic vote being locked up. Those who had turned out for Obama, Cuba told me, were now considered part of the party base. Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for governor, campaigned as if Hispanics were a sure thing. They would vote, and they would vote for Democrats.

To some extent, López said, the same principle applies to other issues she feels Democrats are enamored of—green energy and racial justice, individual pronouns and group identities. “What the hell is a ‘Latinx’?

The messages used by Clinton and her Democratic allies to mobilize Hispanic voters were nothing like what they’d used in the Obama campaigns. There was little about hope and change. It was mostly about fear and victimhood.

I’m an immigrant myself, and when I think back to what worked on those Obama campaigns, it was really that he spoke to the aspirations of Hispanics. He talked about the American dream. H

“But by 2016, we’d become less the party of the American dream, and more the party of anti-Trump.”

Obama won the state’s most populous county by 16 points in 2008 and 24 points in 2012. In a place where Republicans had spent a generation building relationships with Hispanic voters—much of it thanks to Jeb Bush, the popular bilingual governor, whose brother ran two ultracompetitive presidential campaigns in Miami-Dade—Obama’s triumphs felt like a watershed.

“I’ll never forget, we did a focus group with Hispanic voters in 2019,” Cuba said. “It was clear that a lot of these Hispanics voted against Trump in 2016 because they were scared of him. And by 2019, they weren’t scared anymore.”

While Trump successfully portrayed himself as a populist achieving hard-won economic growth—signing tax cuts into law, touting a record-shattering stock market, boasting the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history—Democrats came across as a bunch of out-of-touch idealogues. Promises of shared social progress, she told me, offend the sensibilities of many first- and second-generation immigrants who hate the idea of government handouts.

“We’re not a political party; we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”

She counts herself as a progressive on nearly every issue. But, López said, many of her fellow progressives don’t appreciate how fundamentally conservative the Hispanic community is—more religious, more entrepreneurial, more working class—relative to the other cogs in the Democratic coalition.

. I’m telling every single one of my candidates here, do not talk about abortion in this campaign,” López said. “You have a lot of Latinos who are fine with abortion being the law of the land—but they are against it morally. They may not be, quote-unquote, pro-life, but don’t shove the issue in their face. Don’t force them to choose sides. They might not choose the side you would think.”

Cuba, who rose to the position of county party chair in 2017, recalls how quickly the anti-Trump message began losing potency. The economy was roaring to life after eight sluggish years of post-recession recovery at the same time that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, emboldened by Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in 2016, was espousing an open distrust of capitalism and questioning the existence of opportunity and upward mobility in America.

López said it’s all about opportunity cost: Every minute Democrats spend on topics that appeal to small portions of their existing base is time that could have been spent speaking to a single theme that preoccupies voters across the ideological spectrum: jobs, opportunity, upward mobility. “You can still be the party of all those other things,” she said. “Just don’t talk about them so much.”

the challenge for Democrats isn’t just modulating the message; it’s also combatting the right-wing misinformation machine.

A political party is only as good as its rhetoric, Garcia told me, and in South Florida, “Democrats are losing the rhetoric war to Republicans—badly.”

Republicans have always been craftier in delivering their messages on Spanish-language TV and radio. What’s new, he said, is the way conservatives have swarmed the most popular social-media pages and WhatsApp chat groups in his community, relentlessly circulating half-sourced posts that portray the Democratic Party as weak on crime and soft on socialism.

“Look at Biden’s new Cuba policies, for instance,” Garcia said. What the administration announced in the spring—the relaunching of a family-reunification program, increased flights to the island, an easing of restrictions on the money Americans can send and invest there—“should actually be more popular with Cubans than Trump’s hard-line policies,” Garcia said.

It was a Republican dream come true. By the time Trump ran for reelection in 2020, the GOP had scaled up the socialism attacks nationwide. The reward was clearest in South Florida: Republicans knocked off two Democratic congressional incumbents, and Trump closed the gap in Miami-Dade to seven points, a 23-point swing from the 2016 election.

But the White House—according to numerous Democrats on the ground—did nothing to coordinate a messaging strategy around these policy changes. Nobody here could get booked on a local news program, or write a social-media post defending the new policies, because they found out about them at the same time everyone in the general public did. As a result, Garcia told me, puffing a massive Cuban cigar, “Democrats are getting killed, every single day, on Spanish-language media here, even though it’s an argument we should be winning.”

Garcia pointed to 2018, when Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum for governor—a candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Garcia and his fellow Democrats in Miami could already recite the attacks on Gillum as a sleeper socialist. When those attacks came, Gillum didn’t do much to dispel them. (When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he was a socialist, Gillum replied simply, “No, I’m a Democrat.”) He wound up winning Miami-Dade by 21 points—down from Clinton’s 30-point margin two years before—and lost the election by 32,463 votes statewide. “Let’s face it,” Garcia said. “We lost the governorship to Ron DeSantis because our nominee wouldn’t come out and say, ‘I’m not a goddamn socialist.’”

Democrats here say the national party should have learned a hard lesson from that campaign. Instead, after 2018, the party’s ranks began to swell with influential young progressives, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who championed far-left policies while openly embracing the socialist label

The conviction that history and demography are on the Democrats’ side dulls the political instinct of persuasion. “Look, I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. But he turned our party into a religious order,” he said. “When you think you’re right—no, when you know you’re right—everybody should just get it. You stop making the argument.”

By turning the young representative into a boogeyman, Garcia told me, Republicans forced Democrats to play defense over labels and abstractions while rendering the left’s version of 21st-century populism unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate that might otherwise be receptive to it.

“She is not Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao, or anything like that. She’s a classic northeastern liberal who’s pushing a social agenda that, in many respects, has real viability at a time like this,” Garcia said of Ocasio-Cortez. “So, how do you shut down the debate? You engage in name-calling. You use propaganda to scare us from acting on the issues most important to our base.”

This is what Carlos Odio meant when he told me national Democrats have “let go of the rope” in Miami-Dade County. It wasn’t that his party would no longer compete for votes down there; rather, it was that his party was acknowledging a new reality, in which affluent white voters are a higher political priority than are working-class Hispanics. This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. I asked Garcia if he was comfortable with such a trade-off.

The city could not handle the influx; its border-processing facilities were at capacity, its humanitarian workers past their breaking point. The community was panicked. Lozano, then the mayor, was desperate. Some of these migrants, he thought, were going to die.“I’m right here, at the bridge, watching this thing spiral out of control. And Democrats in Washington are like, ‘Nothing to see here,’” Lozano said.

Lozano said he began sounding the alarm almost as soon as Biden took office. He told his fellow Democrats that, for all the damage done by Trump’s cruel border-security policies, a relaxed approach to border enforcement could prove even more disastrous. He warned them of a potential humanitarian or national-security crisis

He told me they refused to listen. And today, Lozano said, pulling into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn a few miles from the border, the problem is worse than ever.

“Where is our respect for laws? Where is our respect for the people already here?” Perales said. “I’m an immigrant; I’m also an American. We are allowing our country to be overrun.”

Technically, the border is not open. But you wouldn’t know it from spending a few days in Del Rio. People I spoke with down there said they’d never seen anything like the mass of humanity moving across the border since Biden became president. In fairness, apprehensions at the southern border began to rise in the spring of 2020 and continued to climb throughout Trump’s final year as president. But the numbers spiked much higher after Biden took office.

the conclusion that Democrats have made it easier for migrants to attempt and complete an unlawful crossing into the U.S., making a historically bad problem much worse.

She hated some of the hard-line policies of the Trump administration, including the forced separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the more she listened to activists and elected officials on the left, the more worried she became that Democrats would embrace the other extreme—refusing to secure the border at all.

Perales ended up voting for Trump. Despite disagreeing with him and the Republican Party on a host of issues, she told me, she plans to vote a straight-GOP ticket in 2022, because of the chaos Democrats have brought to her community.

“This is the biggest wave of illegal immigration in American history, and we’re at the epicenter of it here in Del Rio,” Jason Owens, the Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent of the Del Rio sector, announced at the luncheon. “In the last 24 hours, we’ve apprehended 2,240 people in this sector alone.”

Studies and polling suggest that Hispanics who entered the U.S. legally tend to be more conservative on questions of immigration. S

Martinez said most of the Democrats he’s known over the years have become skeptical of the party. For longer than he can remember, he’s had a weekly breakfast with the same group of seven or eight guys at the Ramada. They were always Democrats—all of them. Now, he said, there’s only one holdout. The rest have switched sides.

In the sheriff’s view—and he said it’s part perception, part reality—his party has become too progressive for Hispanics in a community like his. “This talk of defunding the police, it’s had a real impact,”

“Democrats refuse to even call it a crisis. They’re gaslighting me,” Lozano said. He ran through a list of requests: more funding for Border Patrol; better technology to monitor movement; more support for humanitarian groups on the ground; stricter processing policies to deter would-be migrants; and, yes, in certain places, reinforced physical barriers. Above all, he wants Democrats to stop signaling that America has an open border.

Throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, he noted, the party’s aspiring leaders took a host of positions—on decriminalizing border crossings, or providing health insurance to undocumented immigrants—that broke with decades of orthodoxy, to appease the progressive base.

Even if their social-justice efforts are regarded as genuine, Democrats are pushing an agenda that doesn’t resonate with a wide array of voters during this time of economic uncertainty.

“A lot of Latinos, they’re just not moved by these issues,” he said. “They may think Republicans are racist, but some of them are going to vote for the Republicans anyway, because they’re better on the economy, better on small business, better on regulation.”

“It’s very hard for an individual to vote for somebody who leans more on social justice than on the economy,” Chávez told me in a coffee shop not far from the state capitol. “When a person has to choose between paying for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas, every other issue goes out the window.”

One woman, a longtime progressive activist named Petra Falcon, tells me that Hispanics “have no idea what Democrats really stand for anymore.” Anita Ritter, who serves as the secretary of the American Legion post next door, says she doesn’t know of many of her members who still vote for Democrats.

Luis Acosta. A respected Democratic campaign consultant, Acosta is also a so-called Dreamer. His mother brought him to the U.S. when he was 2; his earliest memory is crawling under the chain-link border fence. Inspired by Obama’s candidacy, Acosta threw himself into Democratic politics. He helped elect numerous candidates to office. But now, he tells me, he’s “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections.

We’ve supported the Democrats my whole life. Now, we want to know: Are we more than a talking point to you?”

“Maybe the best we can hope for is that these voters”—Mary Rose nods toward one of her adult grandsons nearby—“become independents, and we fight for them on a race-by-race basis,” she says. “And honestly, that’s a win for Republicans.”

“Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022,” LeCun responded. “What about you?”

To which Musk posted: “That’s nothing, you’re going soft. Try harder!

At stake are the hearts and minds of AI experts—academic and otherwise—needed to usher in the technology

“Join xAI,” LeCun wrote, “if you can stand a boss who:– claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).– claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).– claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”

Some read Musk’s “science” dig as dismissing the role research has played for a generation of AI experts. For years, the Metas and Googles of the world have hired the top minds in AI from universities, indulging their desires to keep a foot in both worlds by allowing them to release their research publicly, while also trying to deploy products. 

For an academic such as LeCun, published research, whether peer-reviewed or not, allowed ideas to flourish and reputations to be built, which in turn helped build stars in the system.

LeCun has been at Meta since 2013 while serving as an NYU professor since 2003. His tweets suggest he subscribes to the philosophy that one’s work needs to be published—put through the rigors of being shown to be correct and reproducible—to really be considered science. 

“If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not Science,” he posted in a lengthy tweet Tuesday rebutting Musk. “If you never published your research but somehow developed it into a product, you might die rich,” he concluded. “But you’ll still be a bit bitter and largely forgotten.” 

After pushback, he later clarified in another post: “What I *AM* saying is that science progresses through the collision of ideas, verification, analysis, reproduction, and improvements. If you don’t publish your research *in some way* your research will likely have no impact.”

The spat inspired debate throughout the scientific community. “What is science?” Nature, a scientific journal, asked in a headline about the dust-up.

Others, such as Palmer Luckey, a former Facebook executive and founder of Anduril Industries, a defense startup, took issue with LeCun’s definition of science. “The extreme arrogance and elitism is what people have a problem with,” he tweeted.

For Musk, who prides himself on his physics-based viewpoint and likes to tout how he once aspired to work at a particle accelerator in pursuit of the universe’s big questions, LeCun’s definition of science might sound too ivory-tower. 

Musk has blamed universities for helping promote what he sees as overly liberal thinking and other symptoms of what he calls the Woke Mind Virus. 

Over the years, an appeal of working for Musk has been the impression that his companies move quickly, filled with engineers attracted to tackling hard problems and seeing their ideas put into practice.

“I’ve teamed up with Elon to see if we can actually apply these new technologies to really make a dent in our understanding of the universe,” Igor Babuschkin, an AI expert who worked at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, said last year as part of announcing xAI’s mission. 

The creation of xAI quickly sent ripples through the AI labor market, with one rival complaining it was hard to compete for potential candidates attracted to Musk and his reputation for creating value

that was before xAI’s latest round raised billions of dollars, putting its valuation at $24 billion, kicking off a new recruiting drive. 

It was already a seller’s market for AI talent, with estimates that there might be only a couple hundred people out there qualified to deal with certain pressing challenges in the industry and that top candidates can easily earn compensation packages worth $1 million or more

Since the launch, Musk has been quick to criticize competitors for what he perceived as liberal biases in rival AI chatbots. His pitch of xAI being the anti-woke bastion seems to have worked to attract some like-minded engineers.

As for Musk’s final response to LeCun’s defense of research, he posted a meme featuring Pepé Le Pew that read: “my honest reaction.”