It's the Brian Laira show on WNYC.

Good Friday morning, everybody.

So we're 10 days out from the election,

and the political world is still trying to understand what happened in New York,

New Jersey, and elsewhere, with Latino voters who had swung meaningfully toward Donald Trump

last year, but way back to the Democrats last week. What does it say about different groups of

Latino voters? We all know Latinos are not a monolith. And what

the last week's results say about American politics in general right now? You know, on many

measures, Latinos are in the political center quite frequently. So the lessons from the Latino

voters aren't only about the Latino voters.

With us for this is Eli Valentin, assistant dean of graduate studies at Virginia Union

University's Graduate Center in Harlem.

He is also a contributing writer for city limits and a guest political analyst at Univision.

Eli, very interesting times.

Thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC. Thanks for having me, Brian. A pleasure. So after Mamdani won the primary in June,

you wrote an article in city limits called Latino voters and the political earthquake in New York

City, who even called Mamdani's win in the Democratic primary back then

a seismic shift, an unexpected political earthquake. And that was just the primary. Why a

description that strong as it related to Latino voters after June 24th?

Well, I think for the most part, the assumption is that Latinos tend to be more on the conservative side.

And in fact, there is some validity to that, especially older Latino voters that tend to be,

right, again, more in the center and tend to support more establishment candidates.

...