Neither party should feel confident about how this bloc is going to vote in 2024.
T he last election’s most unexpected twist is framing one of the most urgent questions confronting both parties today: What explains Donald Trump’s improved performance among Latino voters? The president who began his first national campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists,” drug smugglers, and criminals; who labored to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border; who separated undocumented children from their parents; who sought in court to end the “Dreamers” program; who maneuvered to reduce virtually every form of legal immigration; and who told Democratic women of color in the House of Representatives to “go back” to where they came from— that president won a higher share of Latino voters in 2020 than he did four years earlier, according to every major exit poll and precinct-level analysis of last year’s results. Still, election observers and Latino-vote experts disagree about what, exactly, those results mean—in particular whether they represent a reversion to Latinos’ traditional level of support for Republicans, or whether they’re the beginning of a lasting GOP improvement that could reshape the electoral landscape in 2022 and 2024. “That’s the big question everybody is trying to answer right now, and I don’t know that we have a definitive answer,” the Democratic pollster Stephanie Valencia, the co-founder and president of EquisLabs, told me. Trump’s gains were most dramatic in two places: South Florida, with its large population of Latinos from Cuba and Central and South America; and South Texas, where Trump posted head-turning improvement in rural and small-town communities throughout the Rio Grande Valley that are mostly Mexican American. But all the principal data sources on the 2020 results also showed Trump advancing with Latinos across a wide range of states. “There was this baseline shift all across the country,” Valencia said. “It did not just happen in Texas and Florida.” Democrats have long considered Latinos a cornerstone of what I’ve called their “coalition of transformation,” and assumed that more of these voters in the electorate translates to a widening advantage for their party. Trump’s performance has introduced slivers of doubt that the equation is that simple. In the near term, some of the key factors that lifted Trump among Latinos could help Biden if he runs again in 2024. But a close examination of last year’s results suggests that neither party should be entirely confident about the direction of this huge, but still dimly understood, voting bloc. O ne reason for the uncertainty about the meaning of Trump’s gains: The major data sources (which range from network exit polls to the Pew Research Center’s “validated voters” study) conflict over exactly how well he performed with Latinos both last year and in 2016. “There’s no official number, and we are never going to have one,” says Sergio Garcia-Rios, the director of polling and data at Univision and a government and Latino-studies professor at Cornell University. Generally speaking, the sources showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump among Latinos by nearly 40 percentage points in 2016. In 2020, they showed Joe Biden beating Trump by around 30 percentage points. The Democratic polling firm Latino Decisions has long argued that the exit polls understate Democratic strength among Latinos (because, it says, pollsters don’t interview enough Spanish speakers, who lean more toward the party). But even its benchmark national poll last year, conducted on the eve of the election, showed a big gain for Trump that reduced his deficit with Latinos by nearly one-third compared to 2016. Although Trump’s advances were real, he still faced big deficits among Latinos in most places. The exit polls showed Biden winning about 60 percent of the Latino vote in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. In precincts where Latinos constitute a large majority of the population, Biden won about three-fourths of the votes in Arizona, Nevada, New York, and Wisconsin; nearly two-thirds in Texas; and about three-fifths in Georgia and Florida (outside of Miami-Dade County), according to an analysis from UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative. If Trump won about one-third of Latino voters nationally (the figure most analysts agree on), that’s roughly the same share won by several previous Republican nominees, including John McCain in 2008, George W. Bush in 2000, George H. W. Bush in 1988, and Ronald Reagan during his two races in the 1980s. (George W. Bush did better than that in 2004.) Given this history, Rodrigo Domínguez-Villegas, the research director at the UCLA center, says he views Trump’s 2020 performance with Latinos mostly as a reversion to the mean after a low ebb in 2016. “It was going back to the historic numbers for the Republican Party,” he told me. “Latino voters still prefer the Democratic candidates by pretty large margins. In some places, [there were] smaller margins than 2016, but nothing out of the ordinary.” Garcia-Rios takes a similar view. “Because Trump came along, we were expecting Latinos to immediately become 100 percent Democrat. And that’s unrealistic,” he says. “For the most part, Latinos are Democratic, but we shouldn’t be that surprised that 20 or 30 percent voted for Republicans.” However, other analysts aren’t nearly as sanguine. “Were it any other conventional Republican incumbent president, it might not be so shocking,” Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster, told me. “But Trump staked out such a hard-core white-supremacist type of rhetoric [and] anti-immigrant, anti-Latino framing that it was shocking, really, to me.” Biden’s showing not only slipped from Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s numbers in 2016 and 2012, respectively, but also continued a Democratic erosion among Latinos that was evident in some states during the 2018 midterms, other alarmed Democrats point out. In its private briefings to Democratic groups, Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm that examines individual voters’ history, has stressed the continuity between the GOP’s gains among Latinos from 2016 to 2018 and Trump’s further advance in 2020. Analysts have proposed multiple theories to explain Trump’s improved showing, but upon close inspection, most of those explanations appear inadequate to fully explain the shift. These theories, which center on different demographic fault lines running through the Latino community, are worth examining in turn. One holds that the Democrats’ problem was uniquely among Latino men, and indeed both the exit polls and a competing measure from AP/VoteCast showed Biden winning just 59 percent of them. In the history of the exit polls, the only other Democratic nominees to fall short of 60 percent among Latino men were John Kerry in 2004 and Jimmy Carter in 1980. Two oft-cited reasons for Trump’s gains (as I’ll discuss more below) are that men are more receptive than women to Republicans’ cultural arguments, and that they might have been more responsive to Trump’s emphasis on reopening the economy over protecting public health during the pandemic. But many analysts I’ve spoken with also agree that some Latino men responded to Trump’s swaggering and belligerent persona. “The authoritative nature of Trump does appeal to certain members of the Latino community, especially males, and so it’s nothing that you can ignore,” Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona told me. But Trump’s appeal among Latino men can’t be the full story. The major data sources show that while Biden won two-thirds or more of Latino women, Trump also improved among them relative to 2016. By historic standards, the Latino gender gap recorded in the exit polls was large, but not nearly the largest seen in the past 40 years. More was involved than just a localized problem with men. A similar pattern emerges when examining another key division in the Latino community: religion. In election years when Republican presidential candidates perform well with Latinos overall, they typically perform very well with Protestant Latinos—many of whom are culturally conservative evangelical Christians. George W. Bush, for instance, won a majority of Latino Protestants in 2004, according to the exit polls. Last November was no exception: VoteCast showed Trump taking a clear majority of these voters, while the exit polls gave him nearly half of all Latino Christians who don’t identify as Catholics—a big jump from 2016. But again, that doesn’t seem to be the entire story. Although the exit poll showed little change among Latino Catholics, the VoteCast poll suggests a small Trump gain—a conclusion seconded by the research Valencia’s EquisLabs has done so far.
