Latinas Drove Trump's Gains With Hispanic Voters in 2020

[brooklynite]

New York Magazine

On November 3 of last year, Miami-Dade County gave the Democratic Party a panic attack. Florida was the first major swing state to report its ballots in the 2020 election, and returns from overwhelmingly Hispanic — and, heretofore, overwhelmingly Democratic — precincts showed the incumbent president making massive gains with a demographic he’d spent five years disparaging. If the trend among Hispanic voters was remotely representative of the broader electorate’s mood, Donald Trump was about to win reelection in an Electoral College landslide.

Of course, that did not happen. Ultimately, the Democrats’ gains with college-educated white voters more than offset their losses with Hispanic ones. But those early returns from Miami-Dade still boast a prominent place in Democratic consultants’ nightmares.

And for good reason. Florida’s vote wasn’t a preview of the country’s. But the rightward shift of Hispanic voters in Florida was indicative of that identity group’s voting behavior nationwide. Despite the rich diversity among this catchall demographic category, all across the country, areas with large Hispanic populations moved sharply right in 2020, even as the broader electorate moved left.

For Democrats, the Hispanic shift doesn’t just represent a brush with electoral annihilation narrowly averted. Rather, the development raises doubts about the durability of the party’s majority coalition: Were Hispanic Americans to follow the same political trajectory as the “white ethnics” of yore, then it would become even harder for Democrats to overcome the geographic concentration of their core constituencies, and thus, remain competitive in the Senate and Electoral College.

For this reason, progressive number crunchers have spent much of the past few months trying to discern the cause of Trump’s gains with the demographic. In an interview with Intelligencer last month, Democratic data scientist David Shor outlined one account of the 2020 results. His story goes like this: Democrats have long relied on the backing of Hispanic voters who self-identify as “conservative.” Such conservatives often have left-of-center views on economic policy, but lean right on issues of crime and policing. In 2020, Hispanic conservatives began voting more like white ones, and this was especially true of those who espoused the most right-wing views on “law and order” in policy polls. Therefore, Shor surmises that the heightened salience of policing issues following the George Floyd protests — and the Democratic Party’s association with “defund the police” in some media coverage of those protests — played a major role in driving Hispanic defections.

[BSdetect]

1. No mention of our friends from Cambridge Anal (in their new guise) targeting Hispanics?

[uponit7771]

2. Most incumbent presidents gain in demographics the second time around

[Aristus]

3. Also known as feeding the hand that bites you.

[blm]

4. GOP spread conspiracy pamphlets throughout those communities

in the months before the election.

[MerryHolidays]

5. I got this from a pretty reliable source in Florida

The Rethuglicans heavily played the Socialist/Communist card against any D running in Florida. That, in particular, heavily resonated with the Cuban-Americans in FL, which helped heighten this to a fever pitch throughout Florida.

That, plus voter suppression and outright illegalities, goes a long way to "winning" elections.

[LizBeth]

6. The abused desperately wanting love from the abuser. Kinda like the white woman voting Republican.

[malaise]

7. Perfectly logical

The US has always provided visas and refugee status for the most right wing elements across the globe - as long as they support the US against the national interests of their own countries.