The GOP's Bad Bunny Problem

A silly episode of culture war outrage points to a much larger political problem for Republicans

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I don’t speak Spanish, so I didn’t understand most of Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl, but I still thought it was one of the best halftime shows ever. The production values and the set design were like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and the entire show was a gorgeous celebration of Puerto Rican history and culture. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend checking it out. (The link is here.)

As for the controversy around Bad Bunny’s appearance at the Super Bowl, it is Peak Culture War Outrage, but at the same time, an instructive political moment. It dramatizes the open, almost unapologetic embrace of racism by the far right and, from a political standpoint, why the GOP is in such deep political trouble right now.

Here, for example, was President Trump’s take on the show.

Keep in mind that the alternative Super Bowl show, intended to cater to conservative voters, featured Kid Rock, who, besides being a terrible musician, once wrote a song extolling statutory rape.

But the subtext of Trump’s statement is that Americans who speak Spanish don’t deserve to be celebrated at major cultural events and that a halftime show that salutes Puerto Rican or Hispanic culture is a “slap in the face” to America. Oddly, few conservatives complained when the Super Bowl halftime show previously featured performances by artists from Barbados (Rihanna), Colombia (Shakira), Canada (The Weeknd), Ireland (U2), or the United Kingdom (The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Coldplay). Big Bunny stands apart from these past acts in that he is an actual American citizen.

Yet, conservative commentary about Big Bunny’s performance has largely focused on the fact that the show was in Spanish and that Big Bunny has been critical of Trump’s administration's campaign of mass deportation.

There is a larger context to the Bad Bunny freakout: it’s emblematic of how Trump and the GOP have squandered the inroads they made with Hispanic voters in 2024.

In 2024, according to Pew Research, Trump lost Hispanic voters: 51-48. That’s the best performance by a Republican presidential candidate among this cohort since 2024.

But let’s take a look at some of Trump’s current polling with Hispanic voters.

1/30 Marist: 38-54

1/28 Marquette: 30-69 (49% strong disapproval)

1/26 Pew: 26-71 (53% strong disapproval)

1/17 NYT: 39-58 (42% strong disapproval)

I’m only including high-quality pollsters, and keep in mind that not every pollster provides cross-tabs, but if you average out these four polls, Trump is 33-63 with Hispanic voters.

On paper, this is bad. But when you look at recent election results, the numbers get even worse. Remember that Texas Senate District that Democrats flipped last week … Hispanic voters abandoning the GOP played an outsized role:

Democrat Taylor Rehmet’s recent upset victory over a MAGA star to represent a reliably red Texas Senate district was, at least in part, due to a significant leftward shift by Latino voters.

Precincts in Senate District 9 with a majority of Hispanic residents swung on average 34 percentage points toward Rehmet compared to the margin garnered by the Democratic nominee in 2022, when the seat was last on the ballot.

Across the entire district, VoteHub estimated that Rehmet captured about 79% of the Hispanic vote, a 26-point improvement on the 53% that went for Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024 — the biggest shift of any racial group in the district.

Or consider what happened in last November’s New Jersey gubernatorial election. The Democrats’ biggest improvement from 2024 came in locations with the highest Hispanic populations … and the two cities that shifted the most to Democrats (Union City and Perth Amboy) had the largest percentage of Hispanic voters in New Jersey.

In both Texas and New Jersey, the biggest demographic shifts were among Hispanics.

Some of this movement is likely due to economic concerns (this is also likely a big reason Hispanics abandoned Harris in 2024). But it’s hard not to escape the conclusion that the White House’s immigration strategy, which has disproportionately affected Hispanics, is also playing a significant role. Getting in a public spat with one of the most popular Hispanic artists in the country — and suggesting that speaking Spanish makes one less American — ain’t gonna help.

A Problem That Is Only Getting Worse

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The GOP’s downturn with Hispanic voters is a major electoral problem. First, the main reasons Trump won the White House in 2024 are that a) occasional Trump voters turned out for him, b) Democratic voters were more likely to stay home, and c) he made significant inroads with young people and voters of color, particularly Hispanics.

Republicans have not shown the ability to turn out occasional Trump voters when he is not on the ticket … Democrats are very unlikely to stay home in November … and without support from young people and Hispanics, the base of potential GOP voters shrinks significantly.

A smart political party would look for ways to repair the relationship with Hispanics, but that’s easier said than done when so much of Trump’s support comes from white voters who are stridently anti-immigrant — and who lap up conservative culture war outrage like Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl. This has always been the key tension with Republicans hoping to improve their lot with voters of color. Their political base is hostile toward them.

Throw in the fact that Stephen Miller, who is a white supremacist obsessed with deporting as many people of color as possible, is running the White House’s mass deportation campaign, and you have a political problem that will only get worse.

The conservative outrage over Bad Bunny might seem like a tempest in a teapot … but in reality it’s the GOP’s political dilemma in a nutshell.

What’s Going On

• So I have a new day job: I’m a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center, where I run a new project called “Is War Worth It?” You can read about it here, or check out our first article, which looks at the question of whether the US military raid in Venezuela was worth it.

• Republicans thought they might pick up a seat over the weekend in a special election in Louisiana for a state House seat. Though recently held by a Democrat, Trump won the district in 2024 by 13 points. Instead, the Democratic candidate won by 24 points — a 37-point shift from just 15 months ago.

• Good piece in The Argument on the increasingly insufferable Jon Stewart.

• Howard Lutnick is knee deep in the Epstein files. He might be the most expendable Trump Cabinet secretary because it seems few people in the administration like him.

• When I was a kid, the plight of the disappearing bald eagle was a major environmental story. In 1996, only an estimated 5,000 of the birds were still alive. Today, there are more than 316,000 in the lower 48!!

• Remember how ICE was going to change its tactics in Minneapolis after the death of Alex Pretti? So far, it ain’t happening.

That ‘70s Movie Podcast

This week on “That ‘70s Movie Podcast, Jonathan and I discussed the 1971 crime thriller classic, “The French Connection.”

We talked at length about the film’s multiple, bravura chase scenes and asked if the famous car-train sequence is even the best one in the movie! We debated whether Popeye Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, is a good cop, and questioned whether his character was too one-dimensional and, even more importantly, too amoral.

We poked a few holes in the film’s plot, but agreed that this is peak ‘70s action filmmaking and the high point of New Hollywood!

So buckle up your seat belts, break out your walking stick, and check out this week’s episode. But whatever you do ... don’t pick your feet!

Musical Interlude