HERALDED LATINO SHIFT TO REPUBLICANS SHORT TERM

By Dana Milbank

Opinion 

Washington Post

Is the Latino voter abandoning Democrats, as this year’s incessant media narrative would have it?

… It might be small comfort to Democrats if an erosion of the Latino vote costs them key races next month. 

But some correction is needed to the prevailing narrative that Hispanic voters are fleeing the Democratic Party en masse.
The source of the narrative is exit polling showing that Donald Trump gained among Latinos from 2016 to 2020, going from about 1 in 3 to roughly 2 in 5. 

Polling suggests this hasn’t rebounded, and has indeed worsened in places such as South Texas and South Florida. This has shaken the premise that demographics, in particular the fast-growing Hispanic population, inevitably favor Democrats in the long run.

But the long-term fear is overstated.

First, as Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz documented, Democratic presidential candidates’ winning margins among Latino voters have swung widely from election to election since 1984, from a high of 51 points in 1996 to a low of nine in 2004. 

By that measure, Joe Biden’s 33-point margin in 2020 was typical.

Second, Latinos are not shifting over time to vote the same way White Americans do. For example, polling in Texas by Equis Research finds that even Hispanic voters whose families have been in the United States for generations remain far more Democratic than their non-Hispanic neighbors.

The GOP could gain a 50 percent share of Hispanic voters over time, a leading Latino Democratic strategist told me, but that would require abandoning white-nationalist appeals – a welcome possibility not just for the Republican Party but for the nation.

Regional variations are driving the smaller, short-term shifts. Democrats are doing poorly in Florida (they’ll be lucky to get 50 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2022) because they’ve written off the state.

They’re seeing serious erosion in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, largely because Democrats had overperformed there in past years. Elsewhere, the situation is more stable, and it fluctuates with the economy.

Here in Nevada, Cortez Masto volunteers Imer Cespedes and Luis Melchor, both college students, have been knocking on doors, trying to persuade young Latinos to vote. 

The opponent they’re fighting isn’t the GOP, but inflation. “Everyone is complaining about gas prices,” Melchor says.That apathy could cost Democrats. But it’s not a tectonic realignment of American politics.