Democrats’ problems with Hispanic voters have not gone away
Democrats’ problems with Hispanic voters have not gone away
New analyses show that these voters may be up for grabs in 2024
As I have written previously in this space, Hispanic voters, long considered a staple of the Democratic Party’s coalition, have become a little less reliable for the party in recent years. In the past month, two new studies have come out that shed light on how this influential (and fast-growing) population voted in the 2022 midterm election—and what it might mean for next year’s presidential election. The first study, from the Democratic data firm Catalist, looked at macro-level trends, including how various demographic groups voted nationally. The second, from the firm Equis Research, took a deep dive into what motivated Hispanic voters, specifically.
The topline takeaway from these studies was this: Democrats performed about as well with Hispanics in the midterms as they did in the 2020 presidential election, but they did not make up the ground that they lost from 2016 to 2020. Catalist’s data shows that after Hillary Clinton won Hispanics nationally by 42 points, Joe Biden only won them by 24 points four years later. In the national U.S. House vote in 2022, Democratic candidates matched Biden’s margin, largely standing pat in key swing states (though notably losing significant ground in Florida).
The Equis report adds some rich context to these results, and it indicates that while Democrats held steady with Hispanic voters last year, it may not last. Some of the most insightful takeaways from their report were about voters who didn’t show up for the midterms but who may turn out for the presidential election next year. For instance, the firm’s post-election polling found that Hispanics for whom the economy and cost-of-living were the most important issues in 2022 were far less likely to have voted in the midterms than those who prioritized other issues like abortion and anti-extremism (where Democrats had an advantage).
This may help explain, at least in part, why Democrats won highly contested races in states like Arizona and Nevada, both of which are home to large Hispanic populations and hosted close races for governor and U.S. Senate, respectively. Had these non-voters shown up and backed Republicans at the same rate (nearly two to one) as all voters who prioritized those economic issues, the GOP may have won at least a couple more contests.
Equis also looked ahead to 2024 with these non-voters, breaking them down into two groups: “super-voters” (those who voted in 2018 and 2020 but not 2022) and “prez voters” (those who voted in the 2020 presidential election but neither midterm). Respondents in each group were asked whom they preferred in the 2024 presidential election: President Biden or a generic Republican.
The super-voters, who composed 41% of these 2022 non-voters, were the more pro-Biden of the two, but they only favored him by seven points, 52–45%. The prez voters, on the other hand, favored the generic Republican over Biden by a margin of 20 points and constituted a larger share (49%) of the non-voters.1
As if that weren’t worrisome enough, though, Hispanics who did vote in 2022—recall that they broke for Democrats by about 24 points—were evenly divided on the question of whether they would support Biden (47%) or his Republican opponent (48%).
Of course, Biden won’t face a “generic Republican” next year but an actual candidate. However, that doesn’t change things very much. According to Equis, Hispanic voters in battleground states would favor Biden over Trump by eight points in a rematch, 51–43%. While that may sound decent for Biden, it would represent a regression from 2020, when he won these voters over Trump by 15 points (and this would also come after he already underperformed Clinton’s 2016 margins with Hispanics).
So, if these non-voters show up to vote next year—and if there is no meaningful change in the national political environment in Democrats’ favor—they could give the GOP a boost in key places, especially in states like Arizona and Nevada but perhaps even beyond.
One other thought on the Equis study is about the “why” question: why have Hispanics been moving away from Democrats and toward Republicans? There are a couple of things to consider here.
Equis notes that a major reason why Hispanics have backed Democrats for so long is because of the immigration issue—namely, its salience and the two parties’ positions on it. Hispanic voters broke heavily for President Obama in both 2008 and 2012 in no small part due to immigration, though their relationship with him grew notably testier later in his presidency.
Still, Hispanic voters stuck with Democrats in 2016 and backed Clinton in large part because of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. As Equis explains:
In 2016, the volume on Latino identity was turned up. Some Latinos who we might predict would vote Republican, based on their demographics and ideology, were held back from supporting Trump by (a) opposition to his hardline immigration positions and (b) the importance of their Hispanic identity.
However, by 2020, Trump had dialed down his attacks on immigrants, and by then the country was facing a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that had shuttered many Hispanic businesses. Equis continues:
In the 2020 election, the identity knob had been turned down. The economy and COVID had become Latino voters’ top priorities during the cycle—at the expense of either immigration or “voting to support the Latino community.”
In their post-mortem of the 2020 election, Equis noted that this shift in the salience of the immigration issue gave some Hispanics a “permission structure” to break from their group and vote for Trump anyway.
As the attacks on immigration from the right waned, something else was happening as well. Many Hispanic voters who had long supported Democrats in the hope that the party was more welcoming to immigrants and would thus work to pass comprehensive immigration reform began growing disillusioned at a perceived lack of progress on that front. Nearly half of Hispanics who voted in the 2022 midterms said they believed Democrats had failed to keep their promises on immigration reform. In their report, Equis warned that the party no longer “owns” this issue.
In light of these developments, immigration seems to have become less salient for many Hispanics—a problem for Democrats who have relied on it over the past decade-and-a-half to keep these voters in their corner. And if Hispanic voters are no longer making immigration a top voting priority, it means they may begin increasingly voting on other issues, offering the GOP an opening in coming elections.
One might think of Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley as an example of these voters. The region, which swung toward Trump from 2016 to 2020, moved back toward Democrats in 2022 as it experienced a significant drop-off in votes. These could be infrequent voters who showed up to support Trump and then stayed home last year. If they come back out in 2024, the region could swing back toward Republicans.