For many years, pundits talked about how Republicans were losing women’s votes and racial-minority votes, and about how the GOP had to change its tune or else become permanent losers in U.S. politics. This talk was typically loudest during the George W. Bush and Obama era. The usual refrain was that Republicans needed to stop their rhetoric against illegal immigration, stop saying sexist and racist things, etc.
The strangest thing is that this talk happened when the Republicans were fielding candidates who, while flawed, were quite decent, nice and non-bigoted by GOP standards. George W. Bush was terribly foolish, but he said all the proper nice things. McCain was a very honorable guy. Romney was overall a decent guy. Yet, Republicans just kept falling further and further behind Democrats in terms of getting the votes of women and racial minorities.
But then here comes Donald Trump - who is a thousand times more a racist, bigot, sexist, fascist, dictator, more immature, embarrassing and horrific candidate that Bush, McCain or Romney could ever be - and he turns in the best Republican performance among women and racial minorities in recent history. He performed nearly equal with Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters, losing them by just 3% (it wasn’t long ago that the Republican would routinely lose the Hispanic vote by a margin of 20-40%.) He got 15% of the black vote, an unheard-of performance for a Republican in the modern era (McCain got only 3% of the black vote, Romney got 6%, and Bush got 9%.) 46% of women (of all races) voted for Trump.
Whatever the reason may be for these women and minorities voting for Trump would probably take a hundred-page thesis. But it does strongly suggest that the original formula that was touted in 2000-2015 for winning over these demographic - “Be a nice decent honorable guy that says nice decent honorable things” - misses the target. It doesn’t mean that being an asshole is good in itself, but it does suggest that minorities and many women are motivated to vote by factors that involve completely overlooking a candidate’s boorishness, horrific character and racism/sexism, and that those odious traits are actually much less important to voters than previously thought.
Any such analysis needs to account for the fact that a major fraction of Trump’s support comes from people who come out to vote for Trump specifically and only Trump, and would never vote otherwise.
If you don’t control for that, then any assertion that he is winning support away from other candidates is on shaky ground. In other words, he’s not converting former Dem voters, he’s bringing non-voters out of the woodwork.
In 2016, Latinos voted Clinton 66 to 28, so a 38 point margin.
In 2020, Latinos voted Biden 65 to 32, so a 33 point margin.
In 2024, Harris only won Latino votes by a 5 point margin, at 51 to 46.
I have no idea what was different about 2024, if it was the beginning of a new age or just a fluke. However Latinos did not prefer Trump in either 2020 or 2016. So I have no idea why the democrats won latinos by a 30-40 point margin the first 2 times Trump ran, but only won them by 5 points the third time Trump ran.
Whats odd is the racial demographics of voters changed. In 2016, about 11% of voters identified as latino. Then in 2020, it was 13%, then in 2024 it went back down to 11% of voters are latinos. Does thata mean a lot of latinos sat home and didn’t vote, or did it mean that more latinos think they are white and are voting accordingly? I have no idea. But if the second was the cause, then the ones who did identify as latino would still be voting GOP by large margins.
One thing Trump has proven is that the american voters do not care about competence, democracy, criminality, morality, America’s reputation, etc when they vote for president. At least the republicans and non-voters don’t care about those things.
I’m not sure why the latino vote has shifted so much in 2022 and 2024. I don’t know if its economics, or what exactly. I don’t know if this is a new trend, or a temporary thing.
Personally, I found the Latino shift very surprising (and a bit disconcerting) because they have to understand that the MAGA base sees them as “other” whether they’re legal residents or not. I found myself binging police bodycam videos a while back and any time there was a disagreement between a Latino and a MAGA chud, the phrase “probably an illegal” or “I’m not even sure they’re here legally” or something similar invariably comes out. That’s their default assumption.
“I think many people tried to run away from being lumped in with immigrants, particularly when Trump was obviously making an entire campaign around criminalizing immigrants,” Ramos said. “If you have a candidate that is spending his entire campaign in demonizing you, then you want to prove as much as you can that you don’t belong to that group. … [There’s also] the idea that once you’ve ‘made it’ in this country, you don’t want others to climb up the same ladder. That is a very real phenomenon.”
It’s almost a form of “negging” on the part of Republicans (and Trump in particular).
This is not what any Latino person I have met says.
I have heard that voting for Trump was a way to show that those who challenge Latino patriotism are wrong.
Most people like patriotism.
Trump’s literal wrapping of himself in the flag is not my style. But most people are strong national patriots, and Democrats have to lean into this. It should be easy, because it doesn’t require changing policies, only appearances.
I didn’t complain about it at the time, but, in retrospect, Biden should have been trying harder to show he was a patriot.
He should have been making a big deal about planning for the 250th anniversary of his nation’s founding. Where is the on-time infrastructure project for that?
Biden should also have made a splashy attack on The 1619 Project on grounds of the basis for our national pride being the founding in 1776.
That wouldn’t have required any serious policy shift, just a wrap-around-the-flag shift in messaging.
This also suggests that the Democrats should nominate a genuine heavy combat veteran, as I have been urging in another thread.
But what I don’t get is why didn’t it start showing up in polling until 2022? Latinos were democratic in 2016, 2018 and 2020.
Latinos were 69-29 democratic in 2018, so a 40 point margin.
The latino swing towards republicans didn’t start until 2022.
I agree that religion and misogyny play a role in latino support for republicans. I just don’t understand if that is the reason, why it didn’t show up in polling until 2022 and 2024.
Also there are a lot of black conservative christians who vote democratic. I feel its really only white christians who vote republicans. Maybe latinos are integrated enough that they feel white and feel comfortable voting for white supremacists now.
I can’t pinpoint the reason why either, but I do notice a big shift. Just using my own (minority-race) parents as an example: My mother was vehemently opposed to Trump in 2016, to the point of imploring random strangers in grocery stores not to vote for him - but then voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024.
So yes, something big shifted. I don’t know what. But that shift must have moved a big number of minority voters from anti-Trump to pro-Trump.
But it’s not; there are a great deal of Chinese, Hispanic, etc. Christians in Texas and elsewhere.
I think that how integrated Latinos feel is related to whether they think they are more like the Irish and Italians (Catholics), or more like African Americans. That will depend a lot on socio-economic status, cultural background and, of course, melanin level.
Percentage of Native American ancestry is a big factor also.
How the actions of the current administration and Stephan Miller affect this will be key to future trends.
Yeah, did it finally filter down that it no longer was something you would be shamed and shut up for? Is it that it took this long to translate the incel subculture into Spanish?
Also, it may have taken that long for the Hispanic equivalent of the Alt-Right mediaverse to really become as pervasive both in old and new media as it had in anglophone media (*) . Abuela and the primos were finally grabbed by the Latino RW podcasters and influencers like the Anglos’ grannies and cousins already had been. And besides going “OMG, communists! They want your boy to become a girl!!” these also helped propagate to this public Trumpism’s mainstreaming of performative machismo that greatly resonates with many in this community – hell, you see right there the loanword from Spanish.
( * that is, beyond the Metro-Miami Cuban space. There they have been for 60 years, and I suspect will remain for 60 more if it all lasts that long, convinced that we’re about to be overrun by communists tonight.)
This, is an important consideration. A whole damn lot of Latinos feel that yes they should be the “next” Irish/Italians/Poles on the way to becoming part of the mainstream.
As for the thinking of themselves as white, well yes daggummit, a whole bunch of us ARE “white”. Or if you will rather, a whole bunch of us are “blanco”. European descended, at-least-culturally-Christian, raised/educated in Western ways. So of course many in that cohort felt they should be candidates for the next round of admissions to the club.
Can we blame it on LatinX? I’m only partially joking here, but I do kind of see it as a way folks on the left were not successfully connecting with our Latino population.
I worry that given current tendencies, that southern Europeans will start to get lumped in with Hispanics as non-whites. There have been some disturbing instances of ICE acting indiscriminately against people who are only slightly brown.
We are in the first stages of that Martin Niemöller poem. And I really don’t know what to do about it.
Ironically, this is exactly the "melting pot’ concept that America was about, or is about, or should be. Although maybe in a bad way. It’s unfortunate that many Hispanics took the melting-pot concept to mean that they should vote for MAGA, but for Hispanics to think “we’re just as American as the whites” is, in theory, exactly what progressives ought to want.
And Callie Crossley, a fixture on one of our local NPR stations here (whose show I actually really enjoy) is STILL trying to make LatinX a thing. Literally non-hispanic liberals trying to tell hispanics what they should be called.
This stuff is a pet peeve of mine. LatinX is a prime example of the left engaging in a virtue signaling circle jerk.
Most mainstream Latinos in my environment just rolled their eyes at “LatinX” in an “in this episode of What the Grad School Kids Are Up To Today” kind of way. That some in the chattering class refuse to notice gets us shaking our heads. But nah, not really that influential outside those of us who were already “culture warriors”.
Except that the RW has been exquisitely effective for two generations now in selling that their version of America IS what being Real American is all about so that is what became the aspirarion for many.