Who Are the Young Nonwhite Voters Turning to Trump? A 23-Year-Old Is Happy to Explain.

Hilario Deleon is 23 years old. He is Latino. He is the chair of the Milwaukee County Republican Party. And he is having the time of his life this week.

Over the past couple days, I saw Deleon mingle with MAGA celebrities all over the Republican National Convention. He was thrilled to personally welcome to Wisconsin Lara Trump, the RNC co-chair who spoke Tuesday. “We’re going to continue fighting for your grandfather!” he exclaimed to her, before catching himself. “Oh! I mean your father-in-law!” She seemed charmed. “Well, you should be fighting for my grandfather, too,” she said.

Deleon is aware his biographical details make him an outlier, both at this ebullient Republican gathering and also in a Wisconsin county that went for Joe Biden by 69 percent in 2020. In fact, he suspects that might have something to do with why he has his job. And he embraces it.

Born and raised on Milwaukee’s south side, Deleon was in high school and didn’t particularly care one way or another when Trump was elected back in 2016. He decided against college, and he was washing dishes at a bar just before COVID-19 hit. Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, mandated a lockdown. Deleon, only 19 at the time, suddenly found himself at home and bored. “After I lost that job, I said to myself, ‘Well, shit. I got lots of free time on my hands. Might as well try out politics.’ ”

So he started volunteering with the local Republican Party. He explained that he had long been an avid Civil War reenactor, with a friend from high school. (He said the friend played Ulysses S. Grant, and he would play Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert.) He had met many local Republicans that way, turning him on to the party.

He tried to help organize a Wisconsin for Trump rally to counter the Democratic National Convention, which was supposed to be in Milwaukee that summer. Both were canceled because of COVID. But his efforts caught the Trump campaign’s attention. He received a call from a regional field director offering him a job as a field organizer on the spot. “I was speechless,” he said. “What if I didn’t take that call? What if I didn’t pick up?” He accepted the job immediately.

“I learned a lot on the Trump campaign. It really shaped me,” he said. He was crushed when Trump lost. “In 2020, we were winning Wisconsin, then everything changed overnight. Early on, I bought into the stolen election theory, but now I focus on building the movement,” he said.

Deleon joined the local Milwaukee Republican Party, encouraged by the former county chairman. Soon after, a vice-chair position became vacant when a high-ranking member passed away. Deleon, still only 20, was surprised to be asked to fill the role. He said he thought his age and ethnicity probably played a role. “Maybe they thought my age was a good way to reach young people, but I also just kept showing up. People say, ‘Man, you’re everywhere,’ and I am,” he said.

This did seem accurate: I unexpectedly found myself on the phone with Deleon one week before the convention began after I called the local office to see if anyone in town wanted to talk outside the compound. I was swiftly connected directly to his cell phone. He has become a frequent call for the local press and earlier this week enjoyed a shiny (if skeptical) Politico profile. While plenty of Republicans have been dodging me in and around Milwaukee this week, he whisked me around the compound, happily talking away into my microphone.

Deleon was candid about his frustrations with the local Republican Party. The state party hired him as an outreach director ahead of the 2022 election cycle, when it opened a Hispanic community center in north Milwaukee. He said he worked to court more minority voters there. “You never know who’s gonna walk into that door. Some people thought it was a tax office. Other people thought it was a Chinese restaurant. I don’t know where they got the Chinese restaurant from. It was an office.” He handed out pamphlets to visitors, offering Spanish language pamphlets when needed, though he doesn’t speak Spanish himself.

When the anticipated red wave didn’t come and the Wisconsin GOP lost the governor race, Deleon felt defeated. His frustration grew when the party decided to close the community center. “I think it had some impact because it showed it put us on the map,” he said, but the investment in the community was short-lived.

Then, when the chairman position opened for the county party, he saw an opportunity. “I wasn’t happy with where I thought the party was. I thought it was stagnant for a long time. People would do events, but it was the same people showing up over and over again,” he recalled. “There are thousands of people being left behind that we’re not reaching out to. I kept running into people who had no idea we existed.”

He threw his hat in the ring and treated it like a campaign, presenting a five-year plan. “Some people thought I was crazy,’” he said. In 2023, after edging out six other candidates, he became, by his description, the youngest Midwest chairman of a local Republican Party ever.

On Tuesday morning, after the first day of the convention, Deleon met me outside the Fiserv Forum, home of the Milwaukee Bucks. Soon Trump would appear for this first time at the convention to cheers, as if he were an injured player.

He is a fervent champion of the area. When I told him I was a first-time visitor, he said, “You have to try the cheese curds. If people come to Wisconsin and don’t try the cheese curds, I don’t know, I think they should just be deported.” As we strolled around the convention campus, he told me more about his backstory, including his adoption at a young age by a single white mother and growing up with a Black sister. He said plenty of locals in this left-leaning area complained that the RNC was coming to town, but he dismissed their concerns.

And what of Trump’s comments describing his beloved city as “horrible”?

“What he actually said was in response to Claudia Tenney, the congresswoman from New York, about election integrity. He listed off a few worrisome cities and mentioned crime. Milwaukee does have a big problem with that. But believe me, if he really thought it was a horrible city, he wouldn’t be here,” Deleon said. “These inner cities are horrible. That’s the problem. There’s a lot of building going on here, but there’s areas all across Milwaukee that are forgotten neighborhoods. And that’s unfortunate. I agree with him in a sense.”

But, he insisted to me, “President Trump has a way of bringing in a whole group of people who for a long time took a back seat or were not involved in the political process.” I asked who those people were, and he smiled. “People like me. I’m only 23. I’m part of that new generation that’s coming in. I was inspired by him.”

It was true there were some young Republicans amid the sea of men and women who looked closer to Trump’s and Joe Biden’s age. At one point, we came across another young man, and the conversation turned to Amber Rose’s appearance and the criticism of it from conservative mouthpiece Matt Walsh. “We’ve got to move past taking shots at each other. No pun intended,” he said, remembering the events of last weekend. “Maybe that’s a bad use of terminology. We’ve got to stop throwing rocks. There you go. That’s better.”

Deleon pressed forward with pronouncements about shifts among Hispanic voters. Though a majority still generally favor the Democratic Party, Republicans have made gains with that demographic since the Trump-ification of the party, and new polling showed a jump in voter enthusiasm among Latino Republicans. And it might only take 1 percent of Wisconsin’s young voters and Hispanic voters and Black voters to make the difference, he reminded me.

“Hispanic voters are concerned about the economy, immigration, and international issues. They don’t like seeing their hard-earned tax dollars being sent overseas to fund wars,” he said. “The party has really changed in terms of listening more rather than always pushing an agenda. That’s where I am, hoping to help influence the party. The community, too, has to be open and not be so set in its ways. Try to hear all sides and make your decision, but let’s be civil about it.”

What about the racism from Republicans in top leadership positions, who have implied Hispanics are “poisoning the blood of our country”? What about the “Mass Deportation Now” signs at the convention? He scoffed. “People say, ‘Oh, you’re gonna get deported,’ and I’m like, are you kidding me? That’s such a dumb statement,” he said. “In high school, I heard a lot of that because no one knew what President Trump’s policies were going to be.” When I tried to talk about those specific policies, he brushed me off: “The Republican movement is paving the way for young leaders now stepping up. Generation Z is starting to become one of the largest demographics in this election cycle.”

As we continued our walk, Deleon marveled at the grounds. “You never know who you’ll run into,” he said excitedly, listing a few favorites, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Rudy Giuliani. He also pointedly mentioned that Ben Carson was his personal hero. “He came from humble beginnings and was raised by a single mom. I’m raised by a single mom. I really relate to him and his story,” he said.

Then, just as we finished talking, Deleon spotted Carson. I watched as he hovered for several minutes for his turn to shake hands and take a photo. “This is awesome,” he said. “You know, they say never meet your heroes. That’s always a bullshit statement when it comes to people in Republican politics.”

Eventually, we had the cheese curds. He filmed me eating one for the first time.

Despite the encounter with Carson, the scene at the convention didn’t exactly back up Deleon’s enthusiasm. Day after day, crowd after crowd, it was overwhelmingly white. After I left Deleon on Tuesday, I spoke to another young Trump Republican, A.J., who said she was one of the only Black delegates from Texas. She wore a sparkling American flag shirt and matching blazer with tight leggings with a patterned print of Donald Trump’s face that wrapped down to her golden Trump light-up sneakers.

“Man, I’m like a sponge. I’m just soaking it all up. This is my atmosphere right here. I’m around mostly white people, but you got some chocolate sprinkled in here. I feel like family,” she said. We counted how many Black people we could see out of the approximately 300 in our sights. She counted three. We both laughed.

I asked her, too, why she feels so comfortable at the RNC. “The Republican Party is God, family, and country, in that order. If you share those values, we’re family. We all bleed red at the end of the day,” she said. “I see about 300 people here. Maybe two or three are Black, but guess what? I feel just as welcome as if I was at a cookout. I catch more grief from my so-called people that look like me because I happen to vote in a way that they disagree with. It’s a narrative issue. The Democratic Party and the mainstream liberal media have control over the narrative,” she said. “I think the tides are changing, and President Trump is definitely bringing about an awakening. People are beginning to research themselves, become critical thinkers, become more open-minded.”

If he had been there, Deleon probably would have hugged her. The Republican Party might close down an outreach center after one bad election and demonize whatever community suits it. But a few young true believers were making their case in Milwaukee, and if they win, they’re ready to take their message much bigger.