GOP Candidates Distance From Trump as Charlie Sykes Says He 'Aggressively Squandered' His 2024 Coalition
Key Takeaways
- •Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar, whose Miami-area 27th District is nearly 74 percent Latin American, released a midterm ad breaking with Trump on immigration and saying some mass deportation efforts have gone too far.
- •Trump carried Salazar's district by roughly 15 points in 2024 amid a major shift of Latino voters toward Republicans that year.
- •Charlie Sykes, co-founder of The Bulwark, said Trump has aggressively squandered the coalition that won him the 2024 election, calling the Hispanic and Latino vote the most dramatic example of the erosion.
- •Sykes argued the trend extends beyond Florida to any state with significant concentrations of Latino voters, including Texas.
- •Sykes cited Republicans dismissing Trump's proposed $5,000 giveaway and GOP governors urging caution on data center issues as evidence that the party is tuning the president out.
Republican candidates heading into the 2026 midterms, which will determine control of the next Congress, are increasingly distancing themselves from President Donald Trump — or simply tuning him out. One conservative commentator says the reason is that the president has "aggressively squandered" the political strengths that won him reelection.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican who has represented the Miami-area 27th District since 2021, turned heads across the political world this past week when she released a new midterm ad firmly breaking with Trump on immigration, saying that some of his mass deportation efforts have "gone too far." Her district is nearly 74 percent Latin American, and Trump carried it by around 15 points in 2024, amid a major shift of Latino voters toward Republicans that year.
Anti-Trump conservative Charlie Sykes, a co-founder of the website The Bulwark, said that voting bloc has since swung dramatically away from the president, producing an ad like Salazar's that would once have seemed unthinkable given Trump's sway over the GOP. Sykes made the remarks on journalist Molly Jong-Fast's "Fast Politics" podcast.
"She calls out Donald Trump, saying that Hispanic voters feel betrayed," Sykes said. "You know, when she ran last time, she told them, you can trust Donald Trump. This is an indication of what's happening with the Hispanic vote, not just in Florida, but all around the country, and so I think this is not just a Florida story. It's a Texas story. It's, you know, wherever you have significant concentrations [of Latino voters]. And it is amazing... Donald Trump put together, let's be honest about it, kind of an impressive coalition to get elected in 2024. He has aggressively squandered that coalition, and there's no more dramatic example than the Hispanic Latino vote. And so, yeah, I mean, that ad has got to be raising lots of eyebrows."
Jong-Fast asked whether this could be the "beginning" of a broader trend of GOP candidates and leaders breaking with Trump on his most unpopular issues. Sykes hesitated to go that far, but suggested that "if they're not abandoning [Trump], they're tuning him out."
"Have you noticed a couple of things? Number one, when he proposed the $5,000 giveaway to everybody, Republicans, like, kind of rolled their eyes and it just kind of disappeared," Sykes added. "Used to be that, you know, when he said something, the herd would move. Not anymore. He's declaring all of the warnings about AI to be a big hoax. You know, that's the bat signal right to his base, and yet you're not seeing the numbers. You're seeing one Republican governor after another say, 'Maybe we ought to hold up on the data center issue.'"
The report was originally published by Alternet.
