“Casi en todo nos equivocamos,” Jorge Ramos, Univision’s presiding silver fox, observed sadly a little before midnight. “We were wrong about almost everything.”
At the start of the evening, Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas, the Spanish-language network’s election anchors, had used the terms “voto Hispano” and “voto Latino”—“Hispanic vote” and “Latino vote”—so often that I started to wonder if they got a bonus every time they said it. One of the evening’s many false predictions was that changing demographics, a concerted effort to register Latino citizens to vote, and most of all Donald Trump’s venomous anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican pronouncements would make Latinos a deciding factor in a Hillary Clinton win, especially in key states such as Florida and Nevada.
As early as 9 p.m., the mood had changed, and the anchors had started to ask questions that the pollsters and pols on the five-person panel couldn’t answer. If Donald Trump was doing so well in Florida, did that mean he could possibly prosper elsewhere in the country? How could a man who had said such disgusting things receive so many votes?
By 10, when a Clinton victory still seemed vaguely possible, Rosario Marín, U.S. Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, offered a premature verdict on the night’s events: “Hate won.” “Not yet,” Salinas replied. The key word was “yet.”
Eventually, everyone was talking about pain and fear, especially for the millions of undocumented immigrants—and the nearly 2 million dreamers who were brought into the country as children and who had seemed close to gaining status. There was a flash of pride when Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto became the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate, thanks, of course, to the voto Hispano, but it was brief.
“We were supposed to be the kingmakers,” Ramos said in the small hours, staring at the map.
“We’re not always going to win,” said Marín. “This isn’t a utopia. We’re descended from Mayans and Aztecs. People who had to deal with worse things than this.” As she had so often during the evening, Salinas’ response went right to the heart of the matter: “Your side doesn’t always win, but in this case the winner thinks my grandfather is a thief and my uncle’s a rapist.” They cut away before anyone could react.
