In a recent article at The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein takes a sharp look at recent assertions (mostly by conservative observers) that non-college-educated Latino voters are making a sharp and lasting shift from the Democrats to the GOP. Parsing recent polls and other data, he demonstrates that while there’s strong evidence that the partisan loyalties of some Latinos may well be in flux, there’s equally strong evidence that this massive and growing group is not suddenly and decisively turning to the GOP; Brownstein archly notes that such claims are “at best, wildly premature.” For me, the larger takeaway of his piece is that discussions of this complex and diverse voting block conceal various blind spots among many strategists about how politics actually works, including the relative ability of the GOP versus the Democrats to make good faith and effective appeals to Latino voters.
As Brownstein notes, there have been a spate of articles in recent months predicting that Latino voters are beginning to move into the GOP column, away from backing for Democrats that has reached higher than two-thirds support in recent years. A central exhibit is Donald Trump’s improved performance with Latino voters in 2020 in comparison with both his 2016 run and Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign; in 2016, Trump lost the Latino vote by around 40 points, while in 2020 he lost it by around 30 points. Alongside Trump’s increased share, observers also point to President Biden’s and Democrats’ current lackluster support among Latino voters; the president, for example, lies between 40% and 50% approval ratings in recent polls.
Various conservative commentators have asserted that working-class Latinos (who constitute 85% of the Latino voting population) possess an underlying cultural affinity for the conservatism of the GOP, and are simultaneously being alienated by ideas like police defunding and terms like “Latinx” among Democrats. But when they move on to assertions that the GOP has become a multi-racial working class party, bullshit detectors should go off all the way from Anchorage to Ashtabula.
While there are certainly polls that show Latinos in strong disagreement with ideas like defunding the police (a position, it should always be noted, that is held by a vanishingly small percentage of Democratic politicians), Brownstein points to other research that actually shows quite strong Latino agreement with core Democratic positions, and an accompanying rejection of GOP cultural shibboleths. On issues like abortion, gun control, and immigration, Latino voters are strongly aligned with mainstream Democratic positions — areas of far more salience and endurance, Brownstein suggests, than hot-button issues like “defund the police.”
But I’d argue there are even broader affinities between Latino voters and the Democratic Party, as well as points of contention between them and Republicans, that single-issue polls don’t really get at; that there is a big picture here that we ignore at our analytical peril. The Democratic Party, in various interrelated ways, has acted as America’s party of racial equality for many decades now. From the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s to more recent compassion for immigrants no matter the color of their skin, Democratic priorities on race have broadly advanced the interests of the Latino community. Conversely, the GOP has long been a party that prioritized the interests of white Americans above others, an identity that has only hardened during the presidency of Donald Trump and its aftermath, so that it is now no exaggeration to call the GOP a white supremacist party — for what better characterization can we ascribe to a political institution that gerrymanders political districts to promote the power of white people, bases its political appeal on inciting fear and hatred of demographic change that is seeing a browning of America, and continues to have as its de facto leader a man who started his presidential campaign by slurring Latinos as sexual predators?
Now, this isn’t to say that Trump’s increased share of the Latino vote in 2020, or President Biden’s deflated support, aren’t phenomena worth exploring, or aren’t suggestive of possible profound shifts. For me, though, the biggest question is how Trump and the GOP have been able to counteract the party’s increasingly explicit self-identification as a white supremacist party and actually make some gains among Latinos and other non-white voters.
As a possible answer, Brownstein surveys evidence that economic concerns were big drivers among Latino voters in 2020, and are now playing an outsized role in Biden’s depressed approval numbers (as, indeed, economic concerns are hurting him among other voting groups as well). This data strikes me as persuasive for explaining the small but significant shifts we saw in 2020 and that we see today, even as they don’t necessarily portend a larger, decisive break in line with the arguments of those who say that cultural reasons are the primary factor driving reduced support for Democrats.
But just as the state of the economy exerts an enormous gravitational pull on all voters, and may have added weight with Latino voters, the two parties’ respective identifications as the party of racial equality and the party of white supremacy exert an enormous pull on non-white voter sentiment as well. While it is entirely conceivable that some cultural factors might shave away Latino support for Democrats — an increase in fundamentalist religious observance, say, or shifts in socio-economic identification so that increasingly wealthy Latinos identify their interests with the plutocratic GOP — basic common sense says that the GOP has a tough road ahead in significantly increasing its share of the Latino vote, much less ever becoming the preference of a majority.
Ruy Texeira, who has analyzed demographic trends for decades, largely sides with those saying cultural issues are sending Latinos into the GOP camp, and he tells Brownstein that Democrats should talk less about things like gender and race. But I think this misses the forest for the trees, for issues of race, and racism, are central to the Democrats’ currently powerful lead among Latino voters. Even if Latino voters do have strong preferences for Democratic positions on central issues like abortion and gun control, and are hardly single-issue voters, the Democrats’ role as the party of racial equality, alongside Republicans’ role as the party of racial inequality, is a powerful cement for ensuring this block’s strong support for Democrats. And if this is the case, then it seems obvious that it is very much in the Democrats’ interest to talk about the GOP’s white supremacist core, and about how the Republican Party views Latinos as less American than white people, even as it seeks Latinos’ votes. Concrete demonstrations of the GOP’s actual contempt for Latinos are legion, from opposition to the DREAM Act giving citizenship to young immigrants, to gerrymanders in states like Texas explicitly designed to suppress their political clout.
The GOP and the right-wing media that support it have increasingly staked the party’s political future on supercharging the votes it receives from working-class white Americans who constitute an ever-dwindling proportion of the overall electorate. To do so, they incite racist hatred among these voters, telling them again and again that they are being replaced by non-whites, and that the Democrats care only about minorities. To put it mildly, this is a very weak position from which to then claim to be the supporter of the very same values that most Latinos hold. White supremacism is the elephant in the room, rendering moot more superficial GOP appeals to minority voters. In this context, the Democrats have a great incentive to make unambiguous not only their role as the party of racial equality, but the Republican Party’s embrace of white supremacism as its guiding spirit. One has to wonder whether a stronger Democratic indictment of GOP white supremacism in 2020 might have stanched some of the drop-off in Latino support that occurred.
In other words, it would be foolish for Democrats themselves to buy into any shallow talk about the fickle preferences of Latino voters. If anything, recent Democratic weaknesses with Latino voters should lead the party to hew even more strongly to the party’s racially egalitarian principles, and not allow the GOP to get away with white-washing its white supremacism and lying to Latino voters about sharing their most basic values.