The New Swing Voters
The 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 the uncertainty about the meaning of Trump’s gains: The major 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.
