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I'm a registered Democrat – I even interned in the Obama administration. Pell Grants enabled me to attend community college and a public university. I am disabled and Obamacare ensured that I cannot be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition.

But I never felt completely at home in the Democratic Party. Maybe because after graduating from a prestigious university and moving to Washington, I realized that many Democrats lived in a bubble within the political machine that was disconnected from the needs of real people. But there's another reason: My parents were Republicans for most of my youth.

My father is a classic right winger from Texas. One year I gave him a calendar with Ronald Reagan for his birthday – I mean that much of a classic right-winger. My mother, a Californian who grew up at the height of the Reagan era, admired Republicans like George H. W. Bush for signing the Americans With Disabilities Act, and when we lived in San Antonio, she liked that then-Governor George W. Bush invested in special education.

These days, Mom—a born-again Christian if there ever was one—almost always votes for the Democrats, and that's largely because of the Iraq War.

Notice what I didn't mention in these reasons for our political beliefs, even though I'm Latino: immigration. That's because our family, at least on my mother's side, moved here 100 years ago. This was before there was such a thing as legal and illegal immigration; According to my late grandmother, her parents only paid a penny to cross the US-Mexico border. That doesn't mean we didn't care about the problem. But it was more that it was in the rearview mirror for us.

That's why, of all the big shocks on election night, Latino voters' hard swing to Donald Trump didn't surprise me in the least. The speed at which it happened may have surprised me, but the fact that it happened didn't surprise me. Ever since Trump performed better with Latino voters in 2020 — after calling Mexicans drug dealers, rapists and criminals in 2016 — I've been aware of this shift. And I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what's behind it, especially when it comes to Latino men.

The warning signs were there. A few weeks ago, a USA today/A Suffolk University poll found that a majority of Latino men between the ages of 18 and 34 supported Trump. Kamala Harris' campaign tried to head off her Latino problem by sending Latino surrogates to places like Arizona. But it looks like it was either all for naught or that the Democrats just didn't reach out to them in the ways that matter. People who follow me on social media know that I tend not to trust election polls. But districts with a high percentage of Latinos speak for themselves.

Take Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won a little less than three-quarters of the vote. But last night Trump won 85 percent of the vote.

During Ted Cruz's victory party in Texas last night, he spoke about the decisive rightward shift among several demographic groups, saying, “Tonight's results – this decisive victory – should shake the Democratic establishment to its core.” He has a point. For decades, Democrats have banked on the idea that Latinos would reflexively vote for them because Latinos would view Republican language on immigration as inherently racist (and much of it is).

But last night's results show that this is simply not true. Poll after poll shows that Latinos vote more with their wallets than on immigration. UnidosUS also showed that the cost of living ranked high for Latinos in every swing state, even though many of them were broke for Harris.

And not just in the border districts. Take Osceola County, Florida, for example, where there are many Puerto Ricans. Many Democrats thought comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of trash” would anger Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. mainland. However, that wasn't the case. Instead, Osceola went from voting for Joe Biden by 14 points to voting for Trump by 1.5 points.

This should be seen as an apocalyptic moment for Democrats, suggesting a reckoning. At its core, the Democratic Party needs to refocus on being the prosperous party above all else if it wants to have any fighting chance of winning back Latinos from Trump.