Hispanic Voters Now Evenly Split Between Parties, WSJ Poll Finds - WSJ
The poll and article note that the swing is most pronounced among men and strongest about economic issues.
My own personal observation is that Hispanics have a pretty high percentage of small business owners (and workers) relative to other ethnic groups. And small business owners are the bedrock of support for the Republican Party. I did not see that mentioned, but I would have to think that’s a big part of it.
Hispanic voter here. I’m a lifelong Democratic voter* and plan to be for the foreseeable future. IMHO the biggest reason for the shift is Hispanics that are 3rd or 4th generation who now see themselves as white people who happen to have last names like Garcia or Rodriguez, and who also happen to be conservative by nature. Also of note, the shift is most pronounced in southern Florida and my own area of south Texas. Those happen to both be areas in which Hispanics are in the majority, not just numerically, but also in local leadership positions like mayor, city council, school board, top positions in the police and sheriff departments, etc. as well as being a large part of the small business ownership as you note. The result of having that power means that those particular Hispanics have no reason to see themselves as oppressed minorities, and thus no need to vote like one.
*. I only voted Republican once. I took the Republican ballot in the 2016 primary and voted for Trump, thinking he had no chance against Hillary. That’s the worst mistake on my voting record, and one I’ll always regret. In retrospect, the fact that people (not just me) were thinking Hillary needed a weak opponent in order to be assured of a win should have been setting off all kinds of warning bells.
Maybe it’s just from growing up in New Mexico, but I’ve always known lots of white people with last names like Garcia or Rodriguez (or Sanchez or Martinez or Chavez or Lopez or…well you get the point.) There’s this take from some on the Left of “Hispanics thinking of themselves as white” which just seems incredibly racist to me.
Not trying to downplat the democrats issues which are real, but if latino voters broke 60-something to 30-something for democrats and theres a singular poll that says they’re 37-38 with a lot of undecideds I’m not sure how much you can really take away from that. There’s going to be a lot of variability in one poll, and we expect all demos to be down to sone degree from where they were a year ago given Biden’s approval rating.
I think generally the dems need to prepare for a reality where they won’t be able to enact their legislative agenda after next election in the short term.
Long-term it seems like they have already lost their hold on lower-middle class / non-college educated workers for the foreseeable future and the 2020 results alone were a bad sign for their racial coalition esp latino voters.
50 lashes
Interesting. Where I live there’s a large Hispanic population, consisting mostly of first generation immigrants and their children. I always thought the small business tendency was a result of this very demographic. Immigrants tend to be entreprenuerial in general, but there’s also a built-in constituency for Hispanic owned and run businesses due to language and cultural gaps. If you’re a Hispanic person opening a taxi service or restaurant or bodega or such, with employees who speak Spanish, then that’s going to be much more appealing to a Hispanic constituency than a similar business opened by someone from another culture. The same goes for employees. If a big percentage of the employees in the building trades and landscaping etc. business are Spanish speaking, then a Hispanic guy opening a drywall business or such is going to have an edge in recruiting such employees.
But the truth is that this is a longer term trend than the recent polls. Trump got more Hispanic support than Romney, and Trump 2020 got more Hispanic support than Trump 2016. The recent polls show an especially dramatic move and might be overstating things, but they need to be viewed in the context of the overall trends over the past 15 years or so.
And let’s remember, in the census form “Hispanic” is under the separate ethnic identity question instead of under the race question. As late as 2000 over 3/4 of the people in Puerto Rico marked straight out “white” under race, and Hispanic-Puerto Rican under ethnicity. This, because they were still using our culture’s (rather expansive) definition of “white”. (Plus I’m sure bit of defensive “my great-grandparents were blonde Gaels from North Spain, who are these gringos to define me as non-white?”). With generational change by now more people in the Island have grokked the connotation of the identifier “white” in an American document so the “other” and “combined” choices have skyrocketed. But still 59% is “White alone or in combination”.
But, yeah, as the Hispanic group melds into the common mainstream and becomes part of the Establishment, the conservative part of the culture will assert itself.
Yeah I think the 2020 results are the more worrying data point and I mentioned that in my post.
One thing that Democratic politicians may wish to do to is avoid use of the term “LatinX.” A recent poll found that only 2% of Hispanic voters chose the term ‘LatinX’ to describe their ethnic background instead of Hispanic or Latino/Latina. The poll also found that if a politician or political organization were to us the term LatinX when discussing the Hispanic or Latina(o) community it wouldn’t make a difference to half of respondent, but 30% would be less likely to support the politician and only 15% would be more likely to support him/her.
Yeah, this is a long-term trend that we’ve discussed before. Religious and/or socially conservative Latino voters are a natural part of the pre-Trump GOP constituency, and Republicans have been making gains among them since at least the two Bush administrations. The extreme xenophobic hostility erupting in large parts of the Trump GOP slowed or reversed some of that shift temporarily, but there’s no reason to expect that the underlying trend won’t continue.
Well, as a Hispanic voter myself I can tell you what my own observations are, FWIW. There are a few issues. One is, ironically, illegal immigration. Even people who were themselves, illegal immigrants, at one time (such as my own family 
), are opposed to more illegals coming in. Which swings them a bit towards the Republicans. At least that’s been my take talking to folks in my family and friends who are Hispanic. Another is more religious-related. A lot of Hispanics aren’t big fans of things like abortion, and a lot of the older ones aren’t too keen on anything to do with homosexual or transexual type behavior…which, again, tends to swing them more towards Republicans.
There are tons of other things that might swing smaller groups of Hispanics (and here we get into…what type of Hispanic are we talking here? Cuban descendants? Those from Spain or Europe? Caribean Hispanics? Those from Central America? South America? Mexico? etc etc). Each has different issues that might take a percentage of them towards Republicans (several of my uncles, for instance, and my folks, even though my family has always been pretty close to the Democrats overall). The riots haven’t made a lot of them too happy, especially the perceived Democrat response. Some resent sort of being a second thought to the Democrats wrt being a minority, and also that a lot of times Hispanics are just assumed to be in the Dems pocket. Then there are economic differences…if you are in the barrio and just scraping by you are going to have a different outlook than if you are a successful professional or business owner.
So, IMHO anyway there are a lot of reasons, and different groups within the overall broad Hispanic label have different reasons. Really, I think that a lot of successful Hispanics feel like we, as a (ridiculously broad) ethnic group have ‘made it’ in America, are respected members of our communities and not looked down on (as much), and that we, as a group, don’t have to be tied to one political party anymore, as our parents and their parents did. JMHO FWIW and all that.
Do you have any numbers which back up this claim?
Yes, for example this study of Hispanic voters in the 2018 midterms, which showed an increase of turnout and engagement among them along with a strong Democratic majority.
The percentage of Republican voters among Hispanic Americans also grew during the Trump administration, but AFAICT it was substantially outweighed in absolute numbers by the increased engagement and turnout among Hispanic Democrats repulsed by Trumpian xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Now that the Republicans aren’t so obviously tied to the “bad hombres” xenophobic rhetoric of Trump, as I said, I expect the general trend of increasing “conservatization” of Hispanic/Latino voters to continue.
XT makes a good point, there are a lot of Hispanic voters who believe that they’ll be seen as one of the “good ones” if they virtue signal as conservative.
So you’re admitting that Hispanic support for Republicans was higher, on a percentage basis, in 2018 than in 2016. As your own source says “The Democratic Party has lost ground since 2016 among Latino registered voters”.
Any “increased engagement and turnout among Hispanic Democrats” in 2018 was more than countered by a combination of increased engagement and turnout among Hispanic Republicans and a higher percentage of support for Republicans among Hispanics.
Bottom line is that your claim that “The extreme xenophobic hostility erupting in large parts of the Trump GOP slowed or reversed some of that shift temporarily” appears to have no valid basis and is inconsistent with the numbers that you yourself provided.
Or…my point was, Dems shouldn’t take us for granted, as they have been, and basically ignore us until they need to win an election. Really, my point was nothing like what you said here, as I think the whole ‘virtual signal as a conservative’ thingy is, really, your thing…and, perhaps a left-wing Dem thing to excuse why you are losing this formerly faithful minority voting block.
ETA: Ironically, I’ve voted Democrat in the last 5 elections wrt presidential elections (however many since Bush I, which was the last time I voted Republican, and I voted for Clinton in his second term attempt). 
I’m bucking the trend.
I don’t believe in a Hispanic voting bloc. It never existed, and the moving of some subset of voters to conservatives is not something I’m concerned about because I believe people should vote for who and what they want, not what some dopey white liberal or conservative think tank thinks.
I don’t think this is quite right. It’s more like that in areas where Hispanics form a large majority of the population, they aren’t worried about being seen as one of the “good ones.” It’s more like they’re the ones doing the seeing. In other words, the one Hispanic guy in a town full of white people might do that. But when the mayor, the city council, the school board, most of the cops, most of the business owners, most of the teachers, etc. are all Hispanic, that type of thinking no longer even enters into consideration.
On the contrary, that’s when it ironically matters even more. Hispanic people aren’t immune to creating social hierarchies based on race and class.