Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show and the American Electorate

Why would any performer ever want to do a Super Bowl halftime show? I certainly wouldn’t.

Admittedly, that’s pretty easy for a guy devoid of musical talent, who literally no one is asking to perform a Super Bowl halftime show, to claim. So, I’m probably lying, and if I had musical talent by the bucketful and the chance to reach millions of new fans on one of the largest stages in the world, I’m certain I’d take it, even if people were going to pile on with criticism and try to superimpose their own meaning on my show.

After a week of hearing everyone’s deep readings on Bad Bunny’s halftime show, I felt deeply nostalgic for a day when halftime shows could be spoke of in terms like “that was good” or “that was bad” or “I liked that” or “wasn’t that cool?”, instead of being a pitched culture-war battle field in our divided reality, being goaded on one side by social media outrage and on the other by the id of social media; the Trump administration. So, before I too write about Bad Bunny’s show in a way that takes it beyond entertainment and into culture war and political fodder, I’d like to lead off with:

That show was good, and fun. I liked it. I think I liked Kendrick Lamar’s better…something about the overall visuals and vibe of Lamar’s performance, but I still liked this one. Then again, I like most of the halftime shows, but there’s a reason the performers are selected to do halftime shows.

My apologies, in advance, for the mental weight I’m now going to assign to a fun halftime show.

It was really the reactions to the show that spoke volumes about the United States in the present. Alarmed at even the possibility of some form of subversive Spanish-language heresy, the ringleaders of MAGA arranged an alternative halftime show that the faithful could stream after they dutifully turned off their television to block out the mind-controlling powers of Bad Bunny’s reggaeton, San Juan club beat. The online reactions of the American Left during and after the show, however, was just as disappointing as the MAGA mental-bunker.

I didn’t watch the MAGA-time show, because life is too short to miss a properly fun halftime show for what I suspected the MAGA show would be. Not even for the noble cause of writing about it was I going to do that to my evening, and in today’s world video and written commentary would be abundant after the fact anyway. Those were good instincts to take a pass; the show looked — fittingly — as if it were being recorded in a vast bunker, and was bizarrely introduced by Secretary of Defense/G.I. Brosef Pete Hegseth. The performances were…something…I’m not entirely certain that Kid Rock even performed, per se, or if he just jumped around on stage to a recording, effectively cheerleading his own past success. Hegseth’s introduction was, like all his public statements, oddly distasteful. “We’ve got your back” he said to the veterans he seemed to be addressing directly, assuming that they had all retreated to the mental bunker with him, I suppose. Them, and the MAGA faithful who are their apparent allies, all linked together by Hegseth in a line of nativist narrative that stretched from the English/American revolutionaries to todays military. Ostensibly that excluded Puerto Ricans, who are also American citizens and who have served in every uniform. It probably excluded veterans like myself, who were filling ears and eyeballs with Spanish-language reggaeton while Hegseth was introducing the loyal to the bunker show.

President Trump wasn’t in the metaphorical bunker with the followers though. He can’t turn away from even an imagined provocation, and live-posted on his kooky little social media website his oddly capitalized opinions on Bad Bunny’s show. One wonder’s how the MAGA flock felt about the fact that their leader took the opportunity to watch a good show, even if only to complain, while they had to watch a petulant YouTube political show introduced by Pete Hegseth.

The fact that Bad Bunny performs in Spanish doesn’t make his performance political; in Puerto Rico, where the citizens are U.S. citizens, he’s just performing. It’s the MAGA-right who made it political, scrambling for remotes to turn off the TV in protest of the idea that simply having a Spanish-language performer is an inherent rebuke of the U.S…. but the “woke” left played their own nearly equal part in making this political.

I won’t downplay how important and invigorating it was for Hispanic people in the U.S. to celebrate a Spanish language halftime show in an environment in which Federal operatives are free to beat and imprison people just for being brown and/or speaking Spanish. But during the performance, the often-white online Left were doing verbal backflips over the statement of Latino (Latinx?) identity being broadcast onstage, reading all forms of implicit rebuke of the U.S. and Trump into it.

This was most strikingly illustrated during the moment in the show when Bad Bunny presented his Grammy to a young boy watching Bad Bunny on TV. The Very Online Left was instantly alight with the ecstasy of the fact that Bad Bunny had flown Liam Ramos to the game to make perhaps the most powerful identity protest statement possible in the current political moment.

I’m not on social media, but I found out about this glorious moment straining servers across the country through my wife, who relayed it to me from her phone. I didn’t think that the boy was little Liam…but I only got a fleeting look during a quick scene in a busy show…so I simply nodded and wisely kept my considerable skepticism to myself.

Turns out I was right — the boy was a child actor named Lincon Fox Ramadan — and in retrospect the giddy jubilation of the online woke-left is foully redolent of the idea that maybe “they all look the same”. It would be interesting to find out how many of the people glorying in this imagined comeuppance were the same people driving the phrase “why do Latinos vote for strongmen?” to the top of Google’s search term metrics immediately following the 2024 U.S. presidential election. It wasn’t MAGA voters doing that search as they struggled to find answers to the outcome.

I think the answer to “why did Latinos vote for Trump” can be seen in the online cartwheels that the statistically white “woke” left did about “Liam” being given Bad Bunny’s Grammy. They’re tired of being treated like a voter identity group rather than like people. More often than not, Democrats and the “woke” left seldom discuss ideas so much as they do categories, which is really what they did about this very fun halftime show too; to them, it was primarily a show about categories.

I saw a show that celebrated hard work and hard play, good food and family. There was even a wedding, between a man and a woman no less! There were construction sites and lemonade stands manned by hot women, and the kind of slinky and bouncy choreography that reminded me of late-90s MTV, when everything was more fun and even in our divisions we weren’t at each other’s throats. And there was a family watching TV together, which sometimes seems like another relic of the last century. If there were blatant political statements, one of the most striking had to be the showers of sparks from the power poles, a visually celebratory pyrotechnic that represented the crumbling infrastructure and power outages that Puerto Ricans suffer as the rich get richer and political scandals endlessly rock the territory.

Every last bit of it was a message that would have — should have — resonated with the people living in forgotten swaths of rural America, watching a show they were extolled to watch by people who continually stoke their resentment and use them. The irony in all of it is that these are the values purportedly being celebrated at the alternative/MAGA show, and Hegseth himself alluded to them in his introduction. I think most Democrats and the “woke” left were so busy talking about categories and Liam that they missed this, just like they miss why they are losing elections in general. It’s not because Latinos prefer “strongmen” as president.

Data from the Economic Innovation Group shows that since 2020 the most “blue” states and cities in the U.S. are hemorrhaging young families at unsustainable rates. Admittedly, the COVID pandemic dealt a blow to cities and their prospects, but data in more recent years shows that the trend of population decline — particularly decline in the population of young families — has reversed for most major metros, but not for the most reliably “blue” ones. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles have seen declines from 9% to 15%. Sociologists describe a decline in the population of young families in a community of 10% or more as “seismic” in terms of the long term impact. My own city of Saint Paul, MN has seen the population of young families decline by 12%. New York City’s own figures aren’t so much seismic as apocalyptic, losing over 20% of their young family population.

The go-to explanation for Leftists and Democrats is that it’s simply housing costs and affordability that are driving in-country migration trends. This position is simultaneously an admission of policy failure — which should carry electoral consequences — and a head-in-the-sand refusal to grapple with the data. For starters, if it is simply about housing costs, since Democrats have enjoyed clear majorities in government in those cities for decades, perhaps they should have done something about it. Second, cities with housing costs equal to St. Paul and others, like Atlanta and Dallas, are where people are moving to. Additionally, declines in the population of young family simply doesn’t track with affordability, but correlates strongly with Democratic majorities. St. Paul — a relatively affordable city — is as bad as Los Angeles — which is notoriously expensive. The two cities have similar electoral composition though. In a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, Democrats and the “woke” left are simply inhospitable to young families, and those families are voting with their feet to live elsewhere.

A map of internal migration and population shifts looks like an electoral “heat map”, as does the projection from the Brennan center of Electoral College votes and Congressional seats projected to be gained and lost in the 2030 census. If the 2030 Electoral College projections were applied to the 2024 election, there are scenarios in which Vice President Harris holds on to part of the “Blue Wall” and still loses the election. If demographics are, indeed, destiny, then at this point the projections are pointing to a destiny of continued Republican dominance of government.

What’s more, in the 2024 election, Trump saw his biggest gains in the counties that Harris won, a result that can be attributed partially to migration trends, but also to antipathy among voters to prolonged Democratic governance. More specifically, some of the largest gains in New York City (and across the country) were among Latino voters, despite more than a decade of Progressive genuflecting before the altar of identity, which prompted a lot of racist Progressive Google searches. It might still be about the economy, but progressive and urbanist governments have tokenized and fetishized those brown voters with all the evangelical virtue-signaling they could muster, and delivered nothing of value. The woke/progressive fixation with race and identity can often feel as alienating in its own way as many of Mr. Trump’s own statements about Latinos, Asians and more. The class and education “grievance politics” of the Trump campaign might be lamentable and even ugly, but woke identity politics are also grievance politics, no matter how many soft PR terms or how much positive affirmation language they are dressed up in. People, I think, feel that class and education grievances have a solution somewhere, but identity grievances are stratifying and forever.

The irony of all of it is that, at least in 2024, Republicans had built the kind of multi-ethnic, multi-class voting coalition that Democrats had dreamed about for decades.

We saw in the MAGA protest show that the right is lost in its own delusions, specifically claiming that the Bad Bunny performance was proof of some sort of “woke-capture” of the NFL, evidence of an ongoing assault on “real” Americans. As in many things, one must simply follow the numbers. The fact is that the NFL aspires to be a global brand. They found the biggest streaming artist in the world, one with a huge global audience, and booked him to perform at halftime in advance of a season in which they plan to play more games in Latin American countries. The numbers don’t lie; after the performance, online engagement in places where the NFL hopes to expand was up exponentially. Say what you will about American football, but the NFL knows how to generate interest and make a profit. Equating NFL corporate expansion with some social project of man-bun sporting woke-sters is a stretch.

Fundamentally, what I saw in “woke”/Leftist reactions to the Bad Bunny halftime show was an encapsulation of all the political, social, personal, and cultural failings of the Left. I think most white liberals missed the point — again — which in this case was to enjoy the show for what it was, not as a representation of a category. My worry is that the thoughts and concepts that dominate the Democratic party base, at present, are the same that have failed so badly over the past decade. At present, Democratic electoral prospects hinge on the ruination and suffering of millions under Trump, as opposed to the appeal of their own ideas.

My hope is that a lot of Americans who voted for Trump decided to ignore the bloviating of right-wing MAGA commentators and “influencers” who described the show in advance as “divisive” and “provocative” and, rather than slink off to a YouTube feed to hide, stuck around to watch a show in which even someone who doesn’t understand Spanish can understand the struggles, hard work, and joys of everyday families.

And don’t forget the hot girls and limonadas, because we’re having fun too.