ANALYSIS
Latino voters remain the key to victory
The possibility of a large-scale midterm shift to the GOP troubles Democrats.
Realignment is the great Republican hope — the forecast that millions of Latino voters, particularly blue-collar voters and young men, will switch allegiance to the GOP, much as many blue-collar white voters have done. That theory got a boost after the 2020 election, when former President Trump shocked many Democrats by significantly expanding the number of Latino votes he won, compared with his fairly poor showing in 2016.
With the midterm elections coming down to the final weeks and key elections appearing extremely close, the question of where Latino voters will land is once more at the forefront of both parties’ hopes and fears.
The possibility of a large-scale shift of Latino voters to the GOP has strong appeal to a triumphalist streak among many Republicans (“See, we really do represent the majority”), an apocalyptic streak among many Democrats (“We may be in power now, but doom lies just in front of us”) and a hyperbolic streak in the media (“Historic voter shift seen”).
For all that, however, the evidence remains equivocal.
“The party that wins the multi-ethnic working-class vote will be the dominant party in American politics,” says Mike Madrid, a longtime California-based Republican expert on Latino voting patterns.
“The Democratic Party has a problem with the working-class part,” he adds. “The Republican Party has a problem with the multi-ethnic part.”
Madrid’s line neatly encapsulates the challenges the two parties have faced over the last several elections.
Democrats have hoped for years that they could replicate nationally the dominance with Latino voters that they’ve achieved in California and, to a lesser extent, in Arizona.
In both states, years of Republican campaigns that attacked immigrants alienated a generation of Latino voters. In California, that has caused the Republican Party to dwindle to near irrelevance in statewide elections. In Arizona, Latino support was key to President Biden’s 2020 victory and is central to Sen. Mark Kelly’s hopes of defeating his Republican challenger, Blake Masters.
Outside those two states, however, the Democratic experience with Latino voters has been more complicated. Rather than a story of dominance, it’s part of the broader tale of the party’s struggle to hold on to working-class Americans even as it grows increasingly dependent on the support of college-educated white voters, whose economic interests sometimes diverge from those of the working class and whose interest in pocketbook issues often takes second place to issues of culture and identity.
Among blue-collar voters who are white, Democrats have steadily lost ground since the 1990s. That trend culminated in Trump’s victory in 2016, in which he took nearly two-thirds of non-college-educated white voters, allowing him to narrowly win Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — and the White House.
Another trend took place in that same period and also reached a peak with Trump’s 2016 campaign — a nativist shift in the GOP that saw its voters increasingly oppose immigration and, often, immigrants and their families.
President Reagan in 1986 signed a broad immigra- tion reform law that provided amnesty to millions of people who had entered the country illegally. President George W. Bush took strongly pro-immigration positions and proposed legislation that would have further rewritten the nation’s immigration laws. The defeat of that legislation in the Senate in June 2007 marked the first major victory of the immigration-restriction movement and displayed its growing strength among Republican conservatives.
Trump famously opened his 2016 campaign with a blast against Mexican immigrants, some of whom he labeled as rapists. He then started his presidency with a travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries and tried to hold on to his congressional majority in 2018 with dark warnings against immigrant “caravans.”
Voter attitudes toward race and immigration were the strongest predictors of who voted for Trump in 2016, and those issues have remained the ones that most strongly motivate core GOP voters, repeated studies have found.
Not surprisingly, that approach seriously dampened Republican efforts to appeal to immigrant voters or their children. In 2004, Bush won about 40% of Latino voters. In 2016, Trump won only 28%, according to a detailed study of the electorate by the Pew Research Center. Two years later, the Republican share of the Latino vote in the midterm election fell to 25%, Pew found.
Democrats rejoiced in the 2018 results, believing they were back on the path toward a durable majority coalition forged by combining overwhelming backing of voters of color with a majority of white college graduates — all groups that are expanding their share of the nation’s population.
The 2020 results put a damper on those hopes. Biden won, largely because he performed several percentage points better among blue-collar white voters than Hillary Clinton did four years earlier (33%, compared with 28%, according to Pew’s data), key to winning back Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But even in losing, Trump picked up ground among Latinos, winning nearly 4 in 10 of their votes.
Trump’s gains were especially impressive among blue-collar Latinos: Biden won that group, but by a far smaller margin (14 percentage points) than he did among Latino voters with a college degree (39 percentage points).
Analysis after the election by Equis Research, which specializes in studying Latino voters, suggested that many Latinos associated Trump with economic prosperity and Biden with COVID-related shutdowns.
Trump also significantly shifted his rhetoric, switching from the anti-immigration message of 2016 to a law-and-order one in 2020 that focused the attention of his mostly white backers on Black protesters, rather than Mexicans. That shift may have removed a barrier that had kept more conservative Latino voters from siding with the GOP.
The rebound in Latino support in 2020 helped Republicans capture a number of congressional seats, including several in California, and left Democrats with a much smaller majority than they had hoped. And it led some Republican strategists to proclaim that the GOP was on the verge of turning into a broad-based working-class, populist party, despite the reality that the party’s voters remained 85% white, compared with just over 60% for the Democrats.
And now?
“We have a lot of Latino voters who are on the fence,” said Carlos Odio, the co-founder of Equis. “They’re in flux.”
Polling so far doesn’t show continued GOP gains beyond what the party achieved in 2020, but neither does it show a Democratic resurgence, Odio said.
The uncertain voters tend to be strongly motivated by economic concerns. “They’re ideologically more conservative” than other Latino voters, “but they have not seen themselves in the Republican Party. They believe the Democrats care more about people, but they want to be reassured that Democrats share their values around respect for work.”
Even if they may agree with Democratic positions on issues such as gun regulation or abortion, “they want to hear that Democrats are going to prioritize economic concerns” and “lowering the cost of living,” he said.
“Latinos are Americans, and Americans are split,” he said.
“There’s a large chunk of the Latino electorate that is conservative and would be Republicans, but the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot,” he added. If that stops, “you could see them make some serious gains.”
