Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | ‘Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?’
Opinion | ‘Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?’
04/03/2019
The future success of the Democratic Party depends on the crucial — but unsettled — allegiance of the nation’s growing Hispanic electorate.
Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and podcast host based in Miami, addressed the party’s Latino quandary in a December interview with The Associated Press:
The question is not are Democrats winning the Hispanic vote — it’s why aren’t Democrats winning the Hispanic vote 80-20 or 90-10 the way they are winning black voters?
In an interview earlier this week, Amandi told me that Democrats “want and hope for this magical osmosis to happen but that’s not how politics works.”
In the 2018 midterms, Democrats showed gains among Hispanic voters in most states, compared with 2014. Party operatives are concerned, however, about the slow rate of growth of these improved Democratic margins. They are equally worried about turnout — at a time when many thought that President Trump’s rhetoric and policies would produce impressive gains among Latino voters for the Democratic Party.
Take turnout. Hispanics are one of the fastest growing ethnic constituencies in the United States, but their level of political participation is not keeping pace with their overall population numbers.
As the accompanying Pew chart demonstrates, the number of Hispanic voters in midterm elections has grown steadily, from 2.9 million in 1986 to 6.8 million in 2014. At the same time, however, turnout — measured as a percentage of total eligible adult citizens 18 and over — has experienced a relative decline.
The Growth of the Latino Bloc
30 MILLION
25.1
Eligible
Hispanic voters
20
Hispanic voters
in midterm elections
10
7.5
6.8
2.9
1986
’90
’94
’98
’02
’06
’10
’14
30 MILLION
25.1
Eligible
Hispanic voters
20
Hispanic voters in
midterm elections
10
7.5
6.8
2.9
1986
’90
’94
’98
’02
’06
’10
’14
By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center
In 1986, the Latino turnout rate was 38.7 percent; in 2014, that rate fell to 27.1 percent. If the 2014 turnout rate had been as high as it was in 1986, Hispanics would have cast 9.7 million ballots instead of 6.8 million. (Complete numbers for 2018 are still being compiled.)
In a preliminary analysis of Hispanic voter turnout last year, Catalist, a Democratic firm that builds voter lists, found significant increases in turnout of three to five percent, comparing 2018 with the 2014 midterms. Texas, Nevada and California saw five percent increases, Florida four percent, New Mexico and New York three percent.
Turnout rates and levels of support are two key (but quite different) political measures. While Latinos had a turnout rate of 27.1 percent in 2014, their support for Democratic House candidates that year was 62 percent. Their support for Republican House candidates was 36 percent, according to exit polls.
While Democratic support among Hispanics has improved over the past decade, from the low 60s to the high 60s, there is evidence suggesting that those gains cannot be relied upon in future elections.
In the midterm elections, Florida became the prime example of such unreliability, as Republicans demonstrated they could buck state and national trends to make substantial gains among Hispanics.
Republicans won two close statewide races in Florida in 2018, one for senate and one for governor — despite the gradual erosion of Republican support among Cuban-Americans in the state and despite the continuing influx of pro-Democratic Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, formerly the New Democrat Network, a pro-Democratic think tank, wrote, “In All Important Florida, Democrats Lose Ground With Hispanic Voters” a month after the 2018 election:
In an election where Democrats had one of their best years ever with Hispanic voters across the country, Florida Democrats saw their Hispanic numbers decline. Nationally, Democrats went from 62-36 (26 pts) in 2014 to 69-29 (40 pts) this election. In Florida, Democrats went from 58-38 (20 pts) in 2014 to 54-44 (10 pts) this year.
As Rosenberg pointed out, this shift occurred despite the fact that Trump did everything possible to alienate Latinos, along with undercutting Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, the winning Republican candidates for Senate and governor.
Rosenberg noted that Trump had
relentlessly attacked immigrants and Hispanics in particular. He grossly mismanaged the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, sending hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans fleeing to Central Florida. He revoked the temporary status of many immigrants in Florida. Given all this, one would have imagined the environment for Democrats to make gains among Hispanics was present in Florida this year, gains which were made elsewhere. Yet we fell back.
By all accounts, Scott and DeSantis campaigned almost daily in Hispanic precincts, while their Democratic opponents, Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum, took the Hispanic vote for granted.
“We had no infrastructure,” Christian Ulvert, Gillum’s director for Spanish-language media, told Politico:
And honestly, Democrats have been playing catch-up on Hispanic outreach for two decades, because Republicans have invested in it. You can’t close that gap overnight.
Politico described Nelson’s bid for a fourth term as “a uniquely lazy campaign that made laughably ineffectual attempts to engage with Hispanics.”
Melissa Michelson, a political scientist at Menlo College in California and president of the Latino caucus of the American Political Science Association, described in an email the changing political orientation of Florida’s Cuban-Americans.
In a 1989-90 survey, Michelson wrote, 68.8 percent of Cuban-Americans identified with Republicans. Since then there have been significant changes: Over the years, she continued, Pew has documented a steady decline in Cuban-Americans’ Republican identification, from 64 percent in 2002 to 56 percent in 2006 to 47 percent in 2013.
Despite the decline in Republican support among Cuban-Americans, Michelson emphasized that
There has always been a contingent of Latinos who identify as Republican and are more interested in Republican/conservative (or anti-Communist) policies than in immigration issues or racism. Recall that 40 percent of Latinos voted for Bush in 2004. Reagan also enjoyed considerable Latino support. I think many Democrats are continually perplexed by this — that there could be Latino voters who are willing to support a president (or candidate) like Trump whose rhetoric and policies are so clearly anti-Latino and racist.
While Scott and DeSantis revived Cuban-American willingness to support Republicans, two of the three Florida House seats that had been represented by Cuban-American Republicans switched parties in 2018.
Revealing a contrast to Florida, Matt A. Barreto, a political scientist at U.C.L.A. and a co-founder of Latino Decisions, analyzed turnout and voting patterns in Texas. In a March report, Barreto described a huge pro-Democratic turnout increase there, ranging from 105 to 125 percent in eight counties where Hispanics make up more than 90 percent of the population. There were significant gains in counties with white majorities of 83 to 91 percent too, but these upturns were smaller, in the 35 to 55 percent range.
The ability of two conservative Florida Republicans to make such inroads simply by campaigning diligently suggests that the Democratic hold on Latinos is less firm than many believed.
So where do Latinos stand politically?
The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll surveyed 918 Hispanics during 2018 and found that Trump’s job approval rating was a relatively dismal 30 percent, 21 points below his 51 percent favorability rating among whites, but 18 points higher than his 12 percent approval rate among African-Americans.
The data, provided to The Times by Public Opinion Strategies, one of the two firms that conducted the survey, found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics was highest among men and among the affluent — 40 percent for both — and among men without college degrees, at 39 percent.
A 2018 Pew report, “Key takeaways about Latino voters in the 2018 midterm elections,” found that Hispanics cast a decisive majority of votes for Democratic congressional candidates (69-29), a smaller percentage of votes, however, than African-Americans (90-9) and Asian-Americans (77-23). Whites backed Republicans, 54 to 44.
In a state-by-state breakdown, Pew found that in the Texas Senate race, Latinos backed Democrat Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz by nearly two to one, 64-35, while Greg Abbott, the incumbent Republican governor, lost the Hispanic vote to Democratic challenger Lupe Valdez, 53-42.
In Florida, Democrats Gillum and Nelson won the Hispanic vote by nearly equal percentages (54-44 and 54-45) — but in both cases by margins that were inadequate to produce overall victory.
The Democratic winner in the Nevada Senate race, Jacky Rosen, did far better among Hispanics, who backed her over Dean Heller, the Republican incumbent, 67-30.
While many Democrats expected Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, especially the family separation debacle, to produce a decisive shift to the left among Hispanics, that has not proved to be the case.
An October 2018 Pew report found that almost
half of Latinos (48 percent) believe there is about the right amount of immigrants living in the U.S., while a quarter say there are too many immigrants and 14 percent say there are too few.
Three quarters of Hispanics opposed Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border, while one in five favors construction.
In an email, Barreto, of Latino Decisions, argued that Democratic support among Hispanics remains solid:
I do not see anything since November 2018 to suggest Dems are losing any support at all. Trump continues on the same path of bashing immigrants and bashing Latinos without evidence and this only further decreases his favorability among Latinos.
Asked about the declining share of eligible Hispanics turning out on Election Day, Barreto countered that the growing numbers of eligible Latinos are
almost entirely driven by U.S. born young Latinos turning 18 and entering the eligible voter pool.
In a common pattern, Barreto pointed out, “young people have very low rates of voter registration and voter turnout — especially in midterm elections.”
Because of that, Barreto said that in order to get a better picture, the data should be age-adjusted so that turnout levels of older voters of different races and ethnicities could be compared.
Barreto is also sharply critical of most polling of Hispanics and of exit polls in particular, arguing that the lack of Spanish-speaking interviewers results in an undercount of Hispanic turnout as well as inaccurate estimates of Republican and Democratic votes.
In addition, candidates and political parties have to make a much stronger case to young Hispanics that their vote matters, according to Barreto:
Otherwise, you will only get incremental growth each year — which still puts Latinos as a larger and larger share of the electorate, but perhaps not as large as we could be.
Rosenberg, of NDN, argues that the Democratic Party did not start targeting the Hispanic electorate “with modern campaign tactics and communications” until the 2006-8 period. Those efforts immediately bore fruit, Rosenberg contended in an email:
Remember that in 2004 Bush won Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Now Colorado and New Mexico are no longer really competitive at the presidential level, Nevada is slipping away from the Republicans, and Democrats elected a Senator in 2018 in Arizona.
Texas, according to Rosenberg, “is about to hit a tipping point,” in large part because of the Hispanic vote.
What conclusions and what questions remain in the wake of these complex and sometimes conflicting trends in the Hispanic electorate?
First and foremost, Latinos remain a decisively Democratic constituency, with important caveats.
Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts and co-principal researcher at the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, wrote in an email that nationally, Hispanic support for Democrats has been relatively consistent.
Schaffner provided the accompanying graph, which shows the level of voting for Democrats in House contests in the six elections from 2008 to 2018 for whites, blacks, Asian-Americans and Hispanics. The Hispanic Democratic vote shows a significant 8.6 point increase from 2014 to 2016 and a 13.6-point increase from 2014 to 2018 — call it the Trump jump — although the increase in the percentage of Asian-Americans voting for Democrats was even larger at 20.2 points.
Who Votes for Democrats
Of votes for the two major-party candidates in House races, the share that went to Democrats.
Change since 2008
(percentage points)
100%
94
Black
93
–1
72
+5
75%
70
+9
67
Asian
61
Hispanic
47
50%
46
–1
White
25%
2008
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
100%
Black
94
93
–1
Change since 2008
(percentage points)
72
+5
75%
70
+9
67
Asian
61
Hispanic
50%
47
46
–1
White
25%
2008
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
By The New York Times | Source: analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study by Brian Schaffner, Tufts University
Latinos’ partisan loyalties are much less hard and fast than, say, those of either African-Americans or white evangelicals. The results in Florida demonstrate that Democrats risk defeat if they fail to campaign heavily in Hispanic communities, and Republicans stand to gain at the margins if they are prepared to invest time, money and energy.
The major question mark going into 2020, assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, is whether Hispanic opposition to his presidency will prevent a recurrence of the Florida 2018 phenomenon. Will Trump’s presence so nationalize the election that down-ballot Republicans will face a brick wall when they try to make modest inroads among Hispanics?
To date, Trump has shown every intention of turning the election into a referendum on himself, and all the baggage he carries, with no regard for the political survival of fellow Republicans.
If anything, he appears determined to drive up hostility to him among Latinos. For the past two days, for example, the president has ranted on Twitter, attacking Puerto Rico and its political leaders.
On Monday, he told his Twitter followers:
Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can’t do anything right, the place is a mess — nothing works.
On Tuesday, he was still at it:
All their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA.
Behaving this way, Trump may succeed in driving up support among “his people,” as he likes to call his voters. But if he keeps it up, he will be doing both his Democratic opponent and the Democratic Party as a whole a huge favor as far as the Latino vote goes.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | ‘Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?’
Opinion | ‘Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?’
The future success of the Democratic Party depends on the crucial — but unsettled — allegiance of the nation’s growing Hispanic electorate.
Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and podcast host based in Miami, addressed the party’s Latino quandary in a December interview with The Associated Press:
The question is not are Democrats winning the Hispanic vote — it’s why aren’t Democrats winning the Hispanic vote 80-20 or 90-10 the way they are winning black voters?
In an interview earlier this week, Amandi told me that Democrats “want and hope for this magical osmosis to happen but that’s not how politics works.”
In the 2018 midterms, Democrats showed gains among Hispanic voters in most states, compared with 2014. Party operatives are concerned, however, about the slow rate of growth of these improved Democratic margins. They are equally worried about turnout — at a time when many thought that President Trump’s rhetoric and policies would produce impressive gains among Latino voters for the Democratic Party.
Take turnout. Hispanics are one of the fastest growing ethnic constituencies in the United States, but their level of political participation is not keeping pace with their overall population numbers.
As the accompanying Pew chart demonstrates, the number of Hispanic voters in midterm elections has grown steadily, from 2.9 million in 1986 to 6.8 million in 2014. At the same time, however, turnout — measured as a percentage of total eligible adult citizens 18 and over — has experienced a relative decline.
The Growth of the Latino Bloc
30 MILLION
25.1
Eligible
Hispanic voters
20
Hispanic voters
in midterm elections
10
7.5
6.8
2.9
1986
’90
’94
’98
’02
’06
’10
’14
30 MILLION
25.1
Eligible
Hispanic voters
20
Hispanic voters in
midterm elections
10
7.5
6.8
2.9
1986
’90
’94
’98
’02
’06
’10
’14
By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center
In 1986, the Latino turnout rate was 38.7 percent; in 2014, that rate fell to 27.1 percent. If the 2014 turnout rate had been as high as it was in 1986, Hispanics would have cast 9.7 million ballots instead of 6.8 million. (Complete numbers for 2018 are still being compiled.)
In a preliminary analysis of Hispanic voter turnout last year, Catalist, a Democratic firm that builds voter lists, found significant increases in turnout of three to five percent, comparing 2018 with the 2014 midterms. Texas, Nevada and California saw five percent increases, Florida four percent, New Mexico and New York three percent.
Turnout rates and levels of support are two key (but quite different) political measures. While Latinos had a turnout rate of 27.1 percent in 2014, their support for Democratic House candidates that year was 62 percent. Their support for Republican House candidates was 36 percent, according to exit polls.
While Democratic support among Hispanics has improved over the past decade, from the low 60s to the high 60s, there is evidence suggesting that those gains cannot be relied upon in future elections.
In the midterm elections, Florida became the prime example of such unreliability, as Republicans demonstrated they could buck state and national trends to make substantial gains among Hispanics.
Republicans won two close statewide races in Florida in 2018, one for senate and one for governor — despite the gradual erosion of Republican support among Cuban-Americans in the state and despite the continuing influx of pro-Democratic Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, formerly the New Democrat Network, a pro-Democratic think tank, wrote, “In All Important Florida, Democrats Lose Ground With Hispanic Voters” a month after the 2018 election:
In an election where Democrats had one of their best years ever with Hispanic voters across the country, Florida Democrats saw their Hispanic numbers decline. Nationally, Democrats went from 62-36 (26 pts) in 2014 to 69-29 (40 pts) this election. In Florida, Democrats went from 58-38 (20 pts) in 2014 to 54-44 (10 pts) this year.
As Rosenberg pointed out, this shift occurred despite the fact that Trump did everything possible to alienate Latinos, along with undercutting Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, the winning Republican candidates for Senate and governor.
Rosenberg noted that Trump had
relentlessly attacked immigrants and Hispanics in particular. He grossly mismanaged the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, sending hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans fleeing to Central Florida. He revoked the temporary status of many immigrants in Florida. Given all this, one would have imagined the environment for Democrats to make gains among Hispanics was present in Florida this year, gains which were made elsewhere. Yet we fell back.
By all accounts, Scott and DeSantis campaigned almost daily in Hispanic precincts, while their Democratic opponents, Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum, took the Hispanic vote for granted.
“We had no infrastructure,” Christian Ulvert, Gillum’s director for Spanish-language media, told Politico:
And honestly, Democrats have been playing catch-up on Hispanic outreach for two decades, because Republicans have invested in it. You can’t close that gap overnight.
Politico described Nelson’s bid for a fourth term as “a uniquely lazy campaign that made laughably ineffectual attempts to engage with Hispanics.”
Melissa Michelson, a political scientist at Menlo College in California and president of the Latino caucus of the American Political Science Association, described in an email the changing political orientation of Florida’s Cuban-Americans.
In a 1989-90 survey, Michelson wrote, 68.8 percent of Cuban-Americans identified with Republicans. Since then there have been significant changes: Over the years, she continued, Pew has documented a steady decline in Cuban-Americans’ Republican identification, from 64 percent in 2002 to 56 percent in 2006 to 47 percent in 2013.
Despite the decline in Republican support among Cuban-Americans, Michelson emphasized that
There has always been a contingent of Latinos who identify as Republican and are more interested in Republican/conservative (or anti-Communist) policies than in immigration issues or racism. Recall that 40 percent of Latinos voted for Bush in 2004. Reagan also enjoyed considerable Latino support. I think many Democrats are continually perplexed by this — that there could be Latino voters who are willing to support a president (or candidate) like Trump whose rhetoric and policies are so clearly anti-Latino and racist.
While Scott and DeSantis revived Cuban-American willingness to support Republicans, two of the three Florida House seats that had been represented by Cuban-American Republicans switched parties in 2018.
Revealing a contrast to Florida, Matt A. Barreto, a political scientist at U.C.L.A. and a co-founder of Latino Decisions, analyzed turnout and voting patterns in Texas. In a March report, Barreto described a huge pro-Democratic turnout increase there, ranging from 105 to 125 percent in eight counties where Hispanics make up more than 90 percent of the population. There were significant gains in counties with white majorities of 83 to 91 percent too, but these upturns were smaller, in the 35 to 55 percent range.
The ability of two conservative Florida Republicans to make such inroads simply by campaigning diligently suggests that the Democratic hold on Latinos is less firm than many believed.
So where do Latinos stand politically?
The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll surveyed 918 Hispanics during 2018 and found that Trump’s job approval rating was a relatively dismal 30 percent, 21 points below his 51 percent favorability rating among whites, but 18 points higher than his 12 percent approval rate among African-Americans.
The data, provided to The Times by Public Opinion Strategies, one of the two firms that conducted the survey, found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics was highest among men and among the affluent — 40 percent for both — and among men without college degrees, at 39 percent.
A 2018 Pew report, “Key takeaways about Latino voters in the 2018 midterm elections,” found that Hispanics cast a decisive majority of votes for Democratic congressional candidates (69-29), a smaller percentage of votes, however, than African-Americans (90-9) and Asian-Americans (77-23). Whites backed Republicans, 54 to 44.
In a state-by-state breakdown, Pew found that in the Texas Senate race, Latinos backed Democrat Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz by nearly two to one, 64-35, while Greg Abbott, the incumbent Republican governor, lost the Hispanic vote to Democratic challenger Lupe Valdez, 53-42.
In Florida, Democrats Gillum and Nelson won the Hispanic vote by nearly equal percentages (54-44 and 54-45) — but in both cases by margins that were inadequate to produce overall victory.
The Democratic winner in the Nevada Senate race, Jacky Rosen, did far better among Hispanics, who backed her over Dean Heller, the Republican incumbent, 67-30.
While many Democrats expected Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, especially the family separation debacle, to produce a decisive shift to the left among Hispanics, that has not proved to be the case.
An October 2018 Pew report found that almost
half of Latinos (48 percent) believe there is about the right amount of immigrants living in the U.S., while a quarter say there are too many immigrants and 14 percent say there are too few.
Three quarters of Hispanics opposed Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border, while one in five favors construction.
In an email, Barreto, of Latino Decisions, argued that Democratic support among Hispanics remains solid:
I do not see anything since November 2018 to suggest Dems are losing any support at all. Trump continues on the same path of bashing immigrants and bashing Latinos without evidence and this only further decreases his favorability among Latinos.
Asked about the declining share of eligible Hispanics turning out on Election Day, Barreto countered that the growing numbers of eligible Latinos are
almost entirely driven by U.S. born young Latinos turning 18 and entering the eligible voter pool.
In a common pattern, Barreto pointed out, “young people have very low rates of voter registration and voter turnout — especially in midterm elections.”
Because of that, Barreto said that in order to get a better picture, the data should be age-adjusted so that turnout levels of older voters of different races and ethnicities could be compared.
Barreto is also sharply critical of most polling of Hispanics and of exit polls in particular, arguing that the lack of Spanish-speaking interviewers results in an undercount of Hispanic turnout as well as inaccurate estimates of Republican and Democratic votes.
In addition, candidates and political parties have to make a much stronger case to young Hispanics that their vote matters, according to Barreto:
Otherwise, you will only get incremental growth each year — which still puts Latinos as a larger and larger share of the electorate, but perhaps not as large as we could be.
Rosenberg, of NDN, argues that the Democratic Party did not start targeting the Hispanic electorate “with modern campaign tactics and communications” until the 2006-8 period. Those efforts immediately bore fruit, Rosenberg contended in an email:
Remember that in 2004 Bush won Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Now Colorado and New Mexico are no longer really competitive at the presidential level, Nevada is slipping away from the Republicans, and Democrats elected a Senator in 2018 in Arizona.
Texas, according to Rosenberg, “is about to hit a tipping point,” in large part because of the Hispanic vote.
What conclusions and what questions remain in the wake of these complex and sometimes conflicting trends in the Hispanic electorate?
First and foremost, Latinos remain a decisively Democratic constituency, with important caveats.
Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts and co-principal researcher at the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, wrote in an email that nationally, Hispanic support for Democrats has been relatively consistent.
Schaffner provided the accompanying graph, which shows the level of voting for Democrats in House contests in the six elections from 2008 to 2018 for whites, blacks, Asian-Americans and Hispanics. The Hispanic Democratic vote shows a significant 8.6 point increase from 2014 to 2016 and a 13.6-point increase from 2014 to 2018 — call it the Trump jump — although the increase in the percentage of Asian-Americans voting for Democrats was even larger at 20.2 points.
Who Votes for Democrats
Of votes for the two major-party candidates in House races, the share that went to Democrats.
Change since 2008
(percentage points)
100%
94
Black
93
–1
72
+5
75%
70
+9
67
Asian
61
Hispanic
47
50%
46
–1
White
25%
2008
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
100%
Black
94
93
–1
Change since 2008
(percentage points)
72
+5
75%
70
+9
67
Asian
61
Hispanic
50%
47
46
–1
White
25%
2008
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
By The New York Times | Source: analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study by Brian Schaffner, Tufts University
Latinos’ partisan loyalties are much less hard and fast than, say, those of either African-Americans or white evangelicals. The results in Florida demonstrate that Democrats risk defeat if they fail to campaign heavily in Hispanic communities, and Republicans stand to gain at the margins if they are prepared to invest time, money and energy.
The major question mark going into 2020, assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, is whether Hispanic opposition to his presidency will prevent a recurrence of the Florida 2018 phenomenon. Will Trump’s presence so nationalize the election that down-ballot Republicans will face a brick wall when they try to make modest inroads among Hispanics?
To date, Trump has shown every intention of turning the election into a referendum on himself, and all the baggage he carries, with no regard for the political survival of fellow Republicans.
If anything, he appears determined to drive up hostility to him among Latinos. For the past two days, for example, the president has ranted on Twitter, attacking Puerto Rico and its political leaders.
On Monday, he told his Twitter followers:
Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can’t do anything right, the place is a mess — nothing works.
On Tuesday, he was still at it:
All their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA.
Behaving this way, Trump may succeed in driving up support among “his people,” as he likes to call his voters. But if he keeps it up, he will be doing both his Democratic opponent and the Democratic Party as a whole a huge favor as far as the Latino vote goes.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall
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