I am about to hit the send button of an email with this column. It is 4:30 p.m. on the Friday of election week. And what a week it has been! CNN and MSNBC have Joe Biden ahead in four of six yet-to-be-called states (Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada). Victory is imminent for the Biden/Harris ticket, but overcautious news organizations want to avoid "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" headlines.

Unlike the 2016 election, when Donald Trump's win surprised almost everyone, even his own campaign, this week's electoral results have been mostly in line with preelection polls. The most notable exception is the fact that Latino support for Biden's candidacy was weaker than anticipated and proportionately slimmer than it had been for Hillary Clinton four years before.

In the aftermath of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's 2012 defeat, the Republican National Committee conducted a thorough self-evaluation, an autopsy of sorts. "We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans," concluded the coroner's report, "and demonstrate we care about them, too."

The imminently victorious Democratic Party needs no national autopsy — it is neither dead nor agonizing — but the disappointing level of Latino support calls for a battery of tests, including regularly scheduled biopsies, and second and third opinions.

It also needs to demonstrate that it cares about Latinos, not as who party activists and many progressives want us to be but as who we are: a 61 million-strong, diverse group (in class, ideology, race, gender, age, religion, language and national origin) whose individual members are entitled to varied points of view and vote the way they see it fit.

Largely responsible for the misunderstanding and mischaracterization of America's Latinos are many of our own activist and intellectual leaders, I count myself among them, who often fancy ourselves as politically correct and have our own classist and elitist version of "deplorables": "los deplorables" who do not conform to the stereotype or embrace the full premanufactured progressive package.

As for this week's electoral results, this is what we know so far. A larger number of Latinos voted for Trump than four years ago; Trump's percentage of the Latino vote increased from 28 to 32; Biden has commanded the group's majority vote, but at a substantially lower rate than Hillary Clinton in 2016.

This is particularly evident in the two battleground states that remained red, Florida and Texas, where Latinos constitute 20% and 30% of the electorate, respectively.

Most political analysts and pundits have taken the easiest route to explain Trump's increasing popularity among Florida Latinos. Trump's anti-Cuban regime rhetoric and policies, the simplistic argument goes, lured hundreds of thousands of Cuban voters in his direction. According to Miami-Dade exit polls reported by NBC News, that was not the case. Fifty-five percent of the county's Cuban-American electorate cast votes for Trump, only one percentage more than statewide Cubans in 2016.

So, we have to look for explanations elsewhere: the famous Interstate 4 corridor. Osceola County, south of Orlando, is a heavily Puerto Rican enclave. In 2016, Clinton carried Osceola by 25 points, but Biden's victory margin is under 14. This suggests that Puerto Rican turnout was lower than expected and, as a group, Puerto Ricans were unenthusiastic about Biden, Trump's paper-towel-tossing spectacle notwithstanding.

In Texas, CNN exit polls tell us, 40% of Hispanics voted for Trump, 6 points more than in 2016. Particularly striking was Trump's strong performance along several Rio Grande Valley counties. Shockingly enough, he won Zapata County, where 85% of the population is Hispanic, with 52% of the vote, thousands of immigrant children in cages notwithstanding.

The Democratic Party could have done much better among Latinos. May the election results be a "despierta Biden" message. Latinos were part of the Democratic Party winning coalition. We deserve a fair slice of the celebration cake and seats at the grown-ups table — figuratively and literally (i.e., the Cabinet table).

The Democratic Party and its allies need to hear second and third opinions as to who Latinos are; to go beyond the usual activist and progressive interlocutors; to learn that not all Latinos listen to NPR or read the New Yorker; that only 3% self-describe as Latinx; that most go to church on Sunday (Catholic or Evangelical); that most do not drink Patron-brand tequila; that some have the right to be anti-communist; and above all, that voting Republican does not mean that they are alienated — to use Marxist lingo — nor dropped from outer space.

Readers can reach Luis Martinez-Fernandez at [email protected]. To find out more about Luis Martinez-Fernandez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.