In 2022, Diego Morales was elected to become the 63rd Secretary of State and the first Latino elected to statewide office in Indiana. Born in Guatemala in 1979, Morales and his family immigrated to the United States in 1999. He served as an aide for future Republican Vice President Mike Pence during Pence’s tenure as Governor of Indiana (2013 – 2017). The Secretary of State’s biography in the Congressional record proudly noted that he served in both the U.S. Army and National Guard “with a Green Card in his wallet.”[1]
To Morales’ opponents and state media, however, the candidate was problematic for a very particular reason: Morales was previously fired from the office he was campaigning to lead. As the Associated Press reported, Morales worked in the office and was fired in both 2009 and 2011 under different Secretaries of State for refusing to sign a work improvement plan. His 2009 dismissal cited “incomplete” work and “inefficient execution.” While Indiana’s Democratic Party hoped to portray Morales as unqualified, Morales, and the Indiana Republican Party promoted his background in the military and as an immigrant as an integral part of his campaign strategy after Morales secured the nomination. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the outcome was that Morales, who deemed the 2020 Election a “scam,” was now elected to preserve the integrity of elections within the “Crossroads of America.”[2]
Morales and his career might be perplexing, but he represents a critical moment in U.S. political history and the history of the GOP. In her definitive study, Political Scientist Cristina Beltrán notes that Latinos are “a site of permanent political contestation.”[3] While a majority of Latino voters have historically voted for Democratic candidates, the politics of this demographic are not as simple as red or blue.[4] Simply, Morales’s rise is far from an isolated incident.
In 2022, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) celebrated Morales and the 768 other Republican women and people of color candidates who won state elections nationwide. Established in 2002 as a counterpart to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), the RSLC has diligently worked to compete for the “new electorate” of non-white voters and candidates to win elections down-ballot. While these successes were initially limited, they are increasingly showing promise for the Republican Party in new electoral battlegrounds, and they are an unmistakable reminder that demographics are not destiny for either political party.[5]
To understand the political landscapes of the 21st century and the changing demographics of our electorate, I argue that just as political historians have dissected the evolution of a New Democrat, to understand Latino conservatism and Latinos on the right, we must dissect the archetype of the New Latino Republican.[6] Who is the New Latino Republican? For decades, the Republican Party lamented dwindling support among urban, working-class communities. Strategists and leadership within the GOP presented the party’s future clearly: they needed to engage new voters to remain viable as a political party.[7] Understanding who they attracted will help us dissect the dynamism of the Republican Party that gave rise to Diego Morales.
Hispanic Republicans like Diego Morales are not new to Indiana. Benjamin “Boxcar” Fernandez who, in 1980 was the first Latino to run for President of the United States, was born in Kansas and raised in East Chicago, Indiana – an historically blue part of the red state.[8] Fernandez was important in the formation of the Republican Hispanic National Assembly and represented a traditional form of Latino conservatism. He embraced small government, advocated pro-business policies, and took pride in being Mexican American.
The New Latino Republican, however, represents a pivot away from those groups who traditionally drove Latino politics (Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban) to the changing demographics of the Latino population. We must attend to evolving political behavior of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans who have come to the United States over the last five decades. Additionally, this typology allows us to break away from exclusively examining states like Texas and Florida that have been Republican strongholds. New Latino Republicans have emerged in battleground states as the new electorate where, for the last twenty years, Latin American migrants have driven population growth.
It is also important to analyze these trends at the state level, rather than just through the history of metropolitan regions like Miami or New York City. While this lack of attention could be because of scholars viewing the state as a unit “too parochial” or as “individual and quirky,” they represent essential elements of our democracy that need further attention.[9] The framework of the New Latino Republican simultaneously offers us an opportunity to acknowledge the changing nature of Latinidad and the array of issues that attract Latinos to the Republican Party.
From this perspective, Morales serves as a vital way to understand the strategies being pursued within an increasingly contested Republican Party. Morales joins an already existing political tradition of Latino conservatives affiliated with the Republican Party and represents its expansion to more recent Latino immigrants from Central and South America. His election should spur further consideration of how this not-so-new archetype may remake the once-Blue Wall of the Midwest.
An Introspective Turn and Courting Latinos
Morales is a symptom of decades of Republican introspection about the future of the party, debates that Midwestern conservatives entered. In 1964, one pundit worried that the nomination of Sen. Barry Goldwater for president “opened the floodgates of factionalism.”[10] The Los Angeles Times proclaimed that the campaign’s decision to ignore the Black vote and deliberately ostracize it would represent “The Goldwater Folly.”[11] However, it was Ray Bliss, who served as the GOP State Chair of Ohio (1945-1965) and as Chairman of the Republican National Committee (1965-1969), who offered perhaps the bleakest assessment of the party’s viability in urban environments. Bliss lamented that the Republicans were “woefully weak and just as frequently nonexistent” in many urban districts.[12] As African American Republicans declined, the prominence of Latino Republicans increased, forming, as one historian noted, an “X” on a hypothetical graph to demarcate the relationship.[13]
While initially tied to the Black vote in the 1960s, Republicans also worked to make inroads with Latino voters. As historian Benjamin Francis-Fallon has argued, Latino Republicans’ promotion of a “multicultural conservatism” offered a replacement for their “dwindling African American constituency” amid a postwar political realignment.[14]The abandonment of African Americans by the Republican Party allowed a growing cohort of Hispanic Republicans an opportunity to leverage their importance as a new demographic for conservative candidates. As generations of political historians noted, the promise of New Deal Era programs only started what Goldwater’s admonishing of civil rights legislation cemented, the exodus of African American voters from the GOP’s reliable voting bloc. In the 1980s, the Republican Party channeled this growth into some of the earliest Latino Republican elected representatives in states like California and Florida. The party attracted this demographic by emphasizing economic issues. In fact, after winning over 30 percent of the Latino vote in 1980, President Ronald Reagan faced some declining support during his first term from Latinos due to concerns about high unemployment and other economic issues.[15] This pattern highlighted the continued pattern of bread-and-butter issues for a multicultural constituency of voters.
The New Latino Republican was crafted by decades of reflection and internal examination by the GOP that mirrored the work of the political opposition. In his 1962 report to the Republican National Committee as chair of the Republican Committee on Big City Politics, Ray Bliss noted that the GOP possessed “no powerful auxiliary such as the Democrats.”[16] Fearing a period of prolonged Democratic dominance at all levels of government, Bliss turned to the Democratic Party organization as a model for understanding how the GOP could reinvent itself.[17] Similarly, after the 1992 election, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) aimed to assist state-level Democrats in winning down-ballot races, electing state legislatures, and building Democratic majority status in state chambers. In 2002, the Republicans established the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC). Within a few years, the RSLC developed a multi-million-dollar fund to elect Republicans at the state level; key positions in the upcoming redistricting that would follow the 2010 census. When James Carville and pollster Stan Greenberg founded Democracy Corp in 1999, the Republicans responded with Republican Resurgent in 2009, founded by former RNC chair Ed Gillespie and GOP pollster Whit Ayres. The Wall Street Journal labeled their efforts on the right as a “vast rag-tag conspiracy” as opposed to the Democratic “tightly coordinated, terrifically funded, outside organizations” with “conspiracy-like levels of organization and fund raising.”[18] This endeavor would become known as “Red Map,” a project launched by RSLC to flip as many statehouses as possible into majorities. The project backed 22 races in states that would soon redistrict – and won 18 of those races.[19]
In 2013, the Republican National Committee released the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” often called the “RNC autopsy.” Nearly fifty years after the Big City Politics report, the autopsy revealed the limits of progress for the Republican Party. As the report argued, “our candidates and office holders need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms and we need to go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and make our case.” While the report emphasized that “Policy always matters,” it also admitted that the GOP needed to campaign within marginalized communities and recruit candidates from them.[20]
Because Trump criticized the report and rejected its recommendations for the GOP to be more inclusive and diverse, many subsequent editorials asked what Trump’s victory in 2016 meant for the Republican autopsy.[21] And how, then, can we understand the election of Diego Morales when decades of introspection and evaluation seem ignored by the Trump campaign?
Morales and the Latino Right in the Heartland
Morales grew up in Sellersburg, Indiana, a town of just over 9,000 people near the Kentucky border. As a high school student, he migrated to the United States with his parents and sisters, and graduated in 2000 from Silver Creek High School. This area has voted overwhelmingly Republican since 2000. The region reflected two key patterns in Indiana: the influx of Latin American and Latino communities and the state’s transition from a relatively competitive, or purple state, to a Republican supermajority. As one report noted, Indiana, like every state in the Midwest, had their population changes fueled primarily by groups from Latin American.[22] This, coupled with the twenty-year-long presence of a GOP supermajority in the state legislature, has concentrated the political landscape in favor of the Republican Party. Within the supermajority, bipartisanship is severely limited, and Democratic legislators need Republican support even to have a bill read. For generations coming of political age, Republicans remain the party in power and a vehicle for the New Latino Republican.
In 2018, Morales first pushed for elected office in the race for Indiana’s 4th congressional district. While unsuccessful in his bid for the nomination in the Republican Party, the primary race revealed a sordid and complicated history for the aspiring politician. As one paper reported, Morales was disciplined for “incomplete work,” “inefficient execution,” and a “lack of focus” while working for the Secretary of State in 2009 and 2011. However, this history of poor work performance was countered by fashioning himself as a dedicated laborer. While on the trail, Morales relayed, “I worked two to three jobs to pay for my college education. I created my business that created jobs. And then I sold it to pursue my MBA at Purdue University. That’s the American Dream.”[23] The bootstrap mentality emphasized the long-established association of conservatism with hard work – values influential among immigrant communities. Leaving out the quality of work, Morales’ comments resonated with working-class Indiana residents, and ideally, immigrants who believed they could only succeed through extensive work.
When Morales returned for his run for Secretary of State in Indiana, he became one of seventeen candidates supported by the America First Secretary of State Coalition. This coalition formed after President Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election. Through framing their coalition as one aimed at eliminating voter fraud, their policies included eliminating mail-in ballot access, requiring single-day voting, and pursuing massive purges of the voter rolls in their states.[24] Because of its role in certifying elections, the position became highly coveted for Republicans and the America First Coalition. Steve Cortes, a Senior Advisor to the Trump Re-Election Campaign of 2020, framed the coalition’s endorsement as rooted in Morales’ emphasis on election integrity, his outsider status, and background as critical for the America First movement as it becomes “more populist, nationalist, and working-class.” Morales secured the Republican Nomination and later the position as part of a coalition that perpetrated myths of non-citizen voting.[25]
Conclusion
Diego Morales’s trailblazer career in the Midwestern GOP is anything but a surprise. Morales’ ascent in Indiana reveals the need for further study about Latinos in the Midwest, the diversity of the mosaic of Latinidad, and Republican organizing strategies at the state level. As Democrats plan for 2028, renewed attention to the state leadership developing among Latino Republicans will offer a key area of reflection. Individuals like Mark Cisneros (Iowa), Alessandro Cutrona (Ohio), and Eric Lucero (Minnesota) force us to reconceptualize how we’ve understood Latinos on the right and engagement with the Republican Party. The decision by the GOP to open new outreach centers in predominantly Latino neighborhoods, such as in Milwaukee in 2024, highlight the changing nature of campaigning and politics as the parties vie for a 21st century realignment over Latino voters. Weeks before the 2024 election, Morales and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita asked for verification of nearly 600,000 voters.[26] This heavily criticized move solicited considerable response given its timeliness and performative aspects to tackle a relatively nonexistent problem of voter fraud in the state. Morales’ review of the citizenship status of hundreds of thousands of voterssignifies the extent to which he is prepared to buy into the often-baseless allegations of voter fraud. Before the 2024 election, Morales unveiled new bilingual signs outside polling places statewide that repeated the anxiety. These signs read: “Only U.S. Citizens Can Vote in Indiana.”[27]
Morales and this new cohort of Latino Republicans offers an opportunity to reexamine core questions within Latino history and politics. How do experiences in home countries influence Latinos’ political development? How might groups outside of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans craft their political identities in the United States? As the 2013 Republican autopsy noted, “America Looks Different,” so, too, will its political parties.[28]
Endnotes
[1] “Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales Bio,” U.S. House of Representatives 118th Congress. Accessed December 28th, 2024. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117375/witnesses/HHRG-118-SM00-Bio-MoralesD-20240604.pdf
[2] “Crossroads of America” was the former slogan for the state of Indiana.
[3] Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble With Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9.
[4] See Beltrán, The Trouble With Unity; Benjamin Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), and Geraldo Cadava, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, From Nixon to Trump (New York, NY: Ecco, 2020).
[5] See Bernard L. Fraga and Paru Shah, “Did Women and Candidates of Color Lead or Ride the Democratic Wave in 2018?” PS: Political Science & Politics vol. 53 no. 3 (July 2020): 435-439. Fraga and Shah’s data shows that in 2018, candidates of color won 62 state legislative races. This is a drastic discrepancy from the 768 women and candidates of color that the RSLC celebrated just four years later.
[6] See Geraldo Cadava, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, From Nixon to Trump (New York, NY: Ecco, 2020) and Lily Geismer, Left Behind: The Democrats Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2022).
[7] Political Scientist Bernard L. Fraga offers similar thoughts in his work The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[8] While his Midwestern roots are not discussed, both Cadava and Francis-Fallon dedicate considerable attention to Fernandez and his role in shaping the identity of Hispanic Republicans in the late twentieth century.
[9] Julie Novkov, “Bringing the States Back In: Understanding Legal Subordination and Identity through Political Development,” Polity vol. 40 no. 1 (January 2008): 45.
[10] Robert J. Donovan, The Future of the Republican Party (New York, NY: Nal-World Book, 1964), ix.
[11] Donovan, The Future of the Republican Party, 87.
[12] As quoted in Donovan, The Future of the Republican Party, 132.
[13] Cadava, The Hispanic Republican, x.
[14] Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote, 5-6.
[15] “Courting Hispanic Voters Now a Reagan Priority,” New York Times, May 19, 1983.
[16] “Republican Committee on Big City Politics Report to RNC,” January 2, 1962.
[17] Richard Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2001) and Brian Conley, “Route to ’66: Ray Bliss, the 1966 Election and the Development of the Republican Service Party,” American Review of Politics vol. 31 (Summer 2010): 67-89.
[18] Kimberley A. Strassel, “The Right Ramps Up; A vast conservative conspiracy? We’ll see in November,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2010.
[19] Red Map was documented by investigative reporter Jane Mayer. See Mayer, “State for Sale,” The New Yorker, October 2, 2011.
[20] “Growth and Opportunity Project,” (Republican National Committee, 2013), 6.
[21] For a sample, see “Trump kills GOP autopsy,” Politico, March 4, 2016; “The GOP learned one lesson from Romney’s loss. Trump taught them another.” Vox, March 4, 2016; “Will 2020 be the year the RNC’s ‘autopsy’ was right?” Roll Call, May 11, 2020; and “Trump Defied the 2013 GOP Autopsy. So Was It A ‘Failure’?” NPR, July 16, 2020;
[22] Jie Zong, “A Mosaic, Not a Monolith: A Profile of the U.S. Latino Population, 2000-2020,” Latino Policy & Politics Institute (University of California, Los Angeles), October 26, 2022.
[23] “Ex-Pence Indiana aide running for Congress defends resume,” Journal & Courier, March 15, 2018.
[24] “In Races to Run Elections, Candidates Are Backed by Key 2020 Deniers,” The New York Times, June 5, 2022.
[25] Steve Cortes, “Diego Morales for Indiana Secretary of State,” Hoosier State Today, January 20, 2022. Brian Howey, “Diego Morales and the press,” WTHR, October 27, 2022.
[26] “Rokita, Morales ask feds to verify citizenship of nearly 600,000 voters,” Indianapolis Star, October 18, 2024.
[27] Morales himself was one of those accused of voter fraud in 2022, days ahead of his election. See “Republican running on election integrity’ might have voted illegally,” Indianapolis Star, November 3, 2022. During the campaign, Morales was also targeted for using campaign funds to purchase a new vehicle, his use of the label “veteran,” and accusations of sexual assault, which he has denied.
[28] “Growth and Opportunity Project,” 7.
Featured Photo Credit: “Diego Morales” by Elekes Andor is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. In May 2023, Morales speaks at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering in Budapest, Hungary.