The Left's Growing Hispanic Voter Problem

Hispanic Voters are Swaying Red, and That's Not All

We all saw Donald Trump decend the gold escalator in 2015 when he first decided to run. Upon announcing his candidacy for President, he went on this rant:

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best. They're not sending you, they're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems,…They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they're telling us what we're getting."

Democrats scoffed. Didn’t Trump realize that Hispanics were one of the largest growing voting blocs in the country? They singularly could swing states like Texas, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and others into the Democratic column. According to Pew, in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton ended up getting 66% of Latino voters on election day. Democrats rejoiced.

They should have looked closer at the numbers. This was actually less than what Obama got in 2012, when he won 71% of the Latino vote. Likewise, Democrats talked more about multiculturalism and “people of color” grouping all of these constituencies into a single group; in reality, these are all distinguishable groups whose voting patterns do not always align. In 2020, the county in Texas with the highest percentage of Hispanic adult citizens (Starr County) backed now-President Joe Biden by 5 points in 2020, after voting for Hillary Clinton by 60 points four years earlier. (That’s not a misprint. It really was a 55-point swing.)¹ As the Democratic Party has become a further progressive, college-educated, white collar oriented party, Hispanic voters are leaving the party in droves. So much so, that in a recent CNN/SSRS poll Biden led Trump, yes, the guy who called Mexicans “rapists,” by a single point among Hispanic voters.

A few recent articles should be ringing alarm bells among the Democrats about their Hispanic voter problem. The first, was the recent CNN/SSRS poll which confirmed a previous poll showing Biden’s erosion among young and working class voters. One of the biggest shifts was with Hispanic voters who make up a growing share of the working class. The second, was this piece by Ruy Teixeira at the Liberal Patriot, who has been sounding the alarm about Democrats’ Blue Collar and Hispanic voting problems for years now. The article is a laundry list demonstrating the problem; among those mentioned:

• A recent 538 analysis of aggregated poll data shows that, while Biden has lost support among all racial groups in the last 9 months, the decline has been sharpest among Hispanics.

• In the 2020 election, Hispanics, after four years of Trump, gave him substantially more support than they did in 2016. According to Catalist, in 2020 Latinos had an amazingly large 16 point margin shift toward Trump. Among Latinos, Cubans did have the largest shifts toward Trump (26 points), but those of Mexican origin also had a 12 point shift and even Puerto Ricans moved toward Trump by 18 points.

• Latino shifts toward Trump were widely dispersed geographically. Hispanic shifts toward Trump were not confined to Florida (28 points) and Texas (18 points) but also included states like Wisconsin (20 points), Nevada (18 points), Pennsylvania (12 points), Arizona (10 points) and Georgia (8 points).

• Pew validated voter data indicate particularly poor performance for Biden among working class (noncollege) Hispanics, with these voters giving Trump a remarkable 41 percent of their vote in 2020(!!!!). A strong working class Hispanic shift is consistent with detailed precinct-level analysis of the 2020 vote in Hispanic (and Asian) neighborhoods released by the New York Times last December. These data assume special significance in light of the unusually heavy working class character of the Hispanic vote (around 80 percent).

• It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with “people of color” and assuming they embraced the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer. This was a flawed assumption. The reality of the Hispanic population is that they are, broadly speaking, an overwhelmingly working class, economically progressive, socially moderate constituency that cares above all, about jobs, the economy and health care, not the social justice issues progressives advocate strongly.

I’ll add that the use of the term “Latinx” was both a condescending and arrogant term that showed no empathy with Hispanic culture or tradition. The more this consultant term was used, the more dismissive Hispanics were of the Democratic Party. In addition, much of Latin America maintains a very dedicated Roman Catholic tradition. As progressives move away from organized religion generally, many Hispanic voters find themselves more sympathetic to cultural conservatism, and feel more culturally aligned with Republicans.

The other story, from Tim Miller covering for J.V. Last on the Triad at The Bulwark, was a real doozy. It related to how a Mexican Telecommunications Merger (involving the most watched Spanish Language channel in America, Univision) led to more favorable coverage of Trump and more dismissive coverage of Biden. From Miller:

On top of that, ads that Biden’s campaign bought on Univision to air in PA, NV, AZ and FL during Trump’s recent interview were axed by Univision.

So as the left has been talking about and neglecting these voters, Trump and the Republicans have been effectively courting and through business leveraging relationships to expand their reach. Unless Democrats do something to right this course, they are in deep trouble.

There is just simply no way the Democrats can win a majority of the Electoral College with the erosion of Hispanic voters that we have been seeing in these numbers. Democrats need to appeal back to their working class roots and soften their cultural rhetoric if they have any plans on winning in 2024 and beyond.

PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner

Part of the problem is that Democrats do group Hispanics in with other non-white constituencies, which is completely wrong. They need to approach these voters where they are, how they live and appeal to the issues that matter specifically to them, some of which conflict with other Dem constituencies. From Ruy Teixeira again:

For example, in the post-election wave of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group (VSG) panel survey, well over 70 percent of Hispanic voters rated jobs, the economy, health care and the coronavirus as issues that were “very important” to them. No other issues even came close to this level. Crime as an issue rated higher with these voters than immigration or racial equality, two issues that Democrats assumed would clear the path to big gains among Hispanic voters.

Consistent with this, Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. In VSG data, despite showing support for some specific policing reforms, Hispanics opposed defunding the police, decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more. The findings about relatively positive Hispanic attitudes toward police have been confirmed by poll after poll, as concern about crime in their communities has spiked.

An important thing to remember about the Hispanic population is that they are heavily oriented toward upward mobility and see themselves as being able to benefit from available opportunities to attain that. Three-fifths of Latinos in the national exit poll said they believed life would be better for the next generation of Americans.

They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the VSG survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works. These findings on patriotism are confirmed by results from the 2020 More in Common Identity and Belonging study, where the views of Hispanics contrasted starkly with the negative views of progressive activists.

Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns. Democrats will either learn to focus on that or they will continue to lose ground among this vital group of voters.

If you want to win elections in the future, those are the issues you have to appeal to to win.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

From Tim Miller’s article above, this one made me puke in my mouth:

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

Queridos amigos: reconsideren su apoyo a Trump. Es una persona horrible que arruinará a Estados Unidos y todo lo que amas de él. Puede que no ames a Biden, pero él se preocupa por ti, por este país y por nuestro futuro compartido.

Atentamente, PurpleAmerica

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/05/politics/democrats-hispanics-republicans-texas/index.html