It’s 2016, and I’m listening as pundits, analysts, and armchair experts make assumptions about the “Latino vote.” It’s 2020, and I’m listening as pundits, analysts, and armchair experts make assumptions about the “Latino vote.” It’s 2024, and I’m — you get the point.
With every passing election, the “Latino vote” has become an almost mythical monolithic entity to pick apart and make predictions about rather than a massive voting block of roughly 36 million eligible voters with vastly different lived experiences.
I understand why eyes are on us. Roughly 1.4 million Latinos become eligible to vote each year, making us the second-fastest growing voting demographic behind Asian Americans. We make up nearly 40% of the population in California and Texas, the states with the largest number of electoral votes, and we account for about 30% of the population in battleground states like Arizona and Nevada.
The problem is that we’re largely absent from many of the newsrooms ceaselessly covering our community before, during, and after these elections. So when the numbers start trickling in, the story gets away from us, and misconceptions run rampant.
This year, the main takeaway is loud and clear: Donald Trump “won” Latino voters.
He actually didn’t.
According to exit polls, Latinos nationally favored Vice President Kamala Harris 52% to 46% for Trump, with Harris capturing 60% of Latinas’ votes compared to 43% of Latino men. Still, those figures point to historic gains for a Republican candidate and have stumped much of the pundit class, especially as they took in the results from parts of West and South Texas, where Trump won 14 of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border — a predominantly Latino, and historically blue, region.
But while everyone is focused on this year’s “red shift” among Latinos, I’d like to quickly travel back in time to the 2022 midterms, when experts were convinced that the minimal gains Trump had made with us in 2020 would help Republicans secure a massive “red wave” that would sweep the nation. Spoiler: It never made landfall. Instead, Latino support for Democrats remained consistent and played a significant role in allowing the party to maintain a majority in the Senate.
So why were so many experts wrong about 2022? And surprised again in 2024? And what can we all learn from it?
When It Comes to Latinos, National Exit Polls Are Flawed
This should come as a shock to absolutely no one who’s lived through the last three elections, but polling is an inexact science. And when it comes to representing the views of a community as large and varied as Latinos, traditional polling methods often miss the mark.
A fact that speaks volumes: Most national surveys are not even offered in Spanish. Gabriel R. Sanchez, a researcher focused on the Latino electorate and professor at the University of New Mexico, has argued that the exclusion of this demographic leads to skewed data on Latinos as a whole. In August, a poll from UnidosUS, the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the country, showed that support for Harris was 64% in Spanish-dominant households compared to 51% in English-dominant households.
Clarissa Martínez De Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, told The Barbed Wire she believes the accuracy of the more recent exit polls will be challenged, especially in regard to Trump’s gains with Latino men. “Folks are already making pronouncements about Latinos not wanting immigrants, or wanting to be white, and that’s why they’re voting for Trump, but you could argue that there’s a dissonance between those conclusions and the results elsewhere on the ballot,” she said. “There are issues that are aligned with the Democrats who are performing better among Latinos than the Democratic candidate for president, and that’s something they should be looking at. But by then, the stories will have already been written.”
That isn’t to say that there isn’t a real trend here. Republicans have been making headway with Latinos, and we’re seeing that play out in South Texas as well as in Florida. The problem is that not only does the polling data paint an incomplete picture, it’s also misleading.
The Messiness of Latino Identity
To understand what’s happening requires a level of nuance and understanding about what “Latino” even means. I’ll spare everyone the centuries of fraught history and jump to the fact that the term includes people from 33 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. In practice, it’s a label that groups together people who speak different languages (Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Indigenous languages like Quechua or Nahuatl) and who practice different religions; people who have been in the U.S. for five generations, as well as newly arrived immigrants; and, most importantly, because it’s an ethnicity, it includes people of all races.
Trying to spin narratives about a category of people that broad is bound to be imprecise. How helpful can it be to pull insights from a dataset that groups together a fourth-generation Mexican American in Texas with a first-generation Cuban American in Florida? And indeed, exit poll data from Americas Society/Council of the Americas (nonprofits focused on free trade), which broke down Latino voters by place of origin and heritage, told a different story: that 62% of Mexican Americans voted for Harris, compared to 40% of Cuban Americans. Even still, the analysis leaves a lot to be desired, given that it lumps together voters from South America, as well as voters from Central America.
Looking toward South Texas, many have scratched their heads about what would drive Latinos to vote for Trump — who promised mass deportations and called Mexicans criminals and rapists in his 2016 campaign launch. That rhetoric may have been unpopular among many Latinos in cities or states farther away from the border, but for some closer to the “frontlines,” there’s been a building resentment for newly arrived immigrants.
Earlier this year, a study from Public Opinion Quarterly found that a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment has bolstered support for Trump among some Latinos. They “feel like they’re suffering because they’re lumped in with immigrant Latinos, who are not highly valued in American society,” one of the study’s authors, Flavio Rogerio Hickel Jr., told Axios.
It’s impossible and irresponsible to disentangle these findings from the issue of race. While the U.S. has a long history of Latino discrimination, racism is also deeply embedded in Latino culture, and it contributes to the tensions we see driving support for xenophobic and restrictive immigration policies. In recent years, migration patterns at the border have shifted away from predominantly Mexican and Central American immigrants to growing numbers of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Chinese arrivals.
People often respond to data about Latinos voting for Trump by pointing out how his policies and rhetoric will negatively impact them, since he’s already driven up anti-Latino sentiments, plans to weaken the economy through deportations, and just chose a border czar who fathered family separation in Trump’s first term. It might seem contradictory, but the fact is in areas like South Texas, many Latino immigrants see themselves as “one of the good ones,” not the dangerous, criminal “other” that Trump is talking about. And as the majority of the population, many American-born Latinos in South Texas do not see themselves as Mexicans. They’re simply “Americans” or “Texans,” and any campaigning around identity doesn’t register the same way it might in other areas where Latinos are in the minority.
It’s a dynamic summed up by Texas Politics Project research director Joshua Blank in an interview with The Texas Tribune: Many Latinos “think of themselves as multiracial,” and live in areas where race and ethnicity “are not top of mind.” In places like Starr County and Maverick County, where the population is 97% Latino, Trump won roughly 58% of the vote, marking a sizable shift in counties that favored Biden by 52% and 54% respectively in 2020.
Working Class Messaging Resonates with Latino Voters
Martínez De Castro told The Barbed Wire that over the past several years, UnidosUS’ polling has repeatedly emphasized one clear narrative: “The No. 1, 2, and 3 issues we’ve seen Latinos concerned with all relate to the pocketbook: housing, cost of living, and health care.”
This isn’t to say Latinos are single-issue voters, but it does mean economic issues consistently rank higher within the demographic compared to immigration, gun control, or abortion access. “When people are unhappy with the economy, the party in power is usually the one who bears the brunt of that in the voting booth,” she said.
One of the prevailing narratives coming out of this year’s election has been the Dems’ struggle to connect with the working class, and that includes a large share of Latinos. “Democrats can argue the facts of how they’ve positively impacted that segment of the population, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re struggling to connect,” she said. “At the same time, the Republicans have been very successful at building the perception that if you’re concerned about the economy, they’re the horse you should bet on.”
Jose Colon-Uvalles, a community organizer and activist in Brownsville, has seen that line of thinking take root in Cameron County, where Trump won 52% of the vote. One factor, he told The Barbed Wire, is the changing demographics of the area, where Elon Musk’s SpaceX has brought more jobs but also an influx of people from outside of the region. “Because we’re such a disenfranchised community, a lot of our opportunities come in the form of jobs with Border Patrol, the government, or now SpaceX,” he said. “Folks see [SpaceX] as an opportunity to make good for themselves and their families, but that alignment with Elon and his politics played into why Cameron County turned red.”
Lack of Democratic Engagement
Back in 2020, I spent some time in Laredo covering the race between U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar and his primary challenger, Jessica Cisneros. Though Cuellar won the Democratic primary, it was a narrow victory for an incumbent who had been serving the district since 2005. Talking to voters in the area, I heard repeated complaints about Cuellar not having much of a presence in the district and being difficult to get a hold of. It’s a critique I’ve heard about Democrats in South Texas more broadly, particularly in areas that have recently turned red like Webb County, part of Cuellar’s district, which flipped last week for the first time in more than 100 years.
Colon-Uvalles said that any conclusions drawn from the election results should take into account how “abysmal” voter turnout was — and is — in South Texas. “It’s indicative of larger issues with the Democratic Party at the state and national level,” he said.
Both Colon-Uvalles and Martínez De Castro point to the fact that, after Democrats avoided a loss in 2022, they headed into 2024 with a business as usual approach. “Folks [in the Democratic Party] didn’t take the time to look at what was actually happening,” Colon-Uvalles said. “Republicans were building a community here for more centrist Democrats to engage with them. The Valley didn’t turn red in 2022, but the seeds were there for what we ended up seeing this year.”
Astead Herndon, in a now-viral clip from the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” spoke to this last week: “We’ve actually had a lot of evidence to say that the demographic destiny undertone is one that is a faulty premise. The fact that they are holding on to the Obama era is a racist assumption.” He added, “It’s lowercase racist. I would say there’s an assumption — there was a failure of imagination, that that couldn’t be true.”
For the unfamiliar, Dr. James J. Zogby of the Arab American Institute laid out the problem with “demographic destiny” in May: “After Barack Obama’s decisive victory in 2008, Democratic Party strategists fell under the sway of the notion that the future of their party’s dominance was [ensured] because, as they put it, ‘demographics are destiny.’” He added, “By viewing Black, Latino, and Asian American voters as monoliths, Democrats may be ignoring the complex composition of these groups.”
A tepid and late outreach from Democrats only solidified the disconnect and created more opportunities for Republicans to step in. “It just cemented this idea that folks in the party can just rely on us, but not actually engage with us,” he says. “There weren’t materials put out in Spanish, there was nothing about the platform, it was all very minimal.”
In response to their historic losses, Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa told The Texas Newsroom that their poor performance came down to which issues the party prioritized. “You have a choice as a party,” he said. “For example, you can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support.” The comments immediately sparked a backlash, and on Friday, Hinojosa announced that he would step down.
There is undoubtedly a culture of homophobia and transphobia among Latino communities, but, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, LGBTQ+ identification is also higher among Latinos compared to other groups. Colon-Uvalles, who is also known as drag performer “Kween Beatrix,” called Hinojosa’s comments inaccurate. In 2019, Colon-Uvalles helped create an LGBTQ Task Force in Brownsville, in part to address discrimination facing the community. Recently, the group unanimously passed a nondiscrimination ordinance.
“You can’t say that people here don’t care about those issues, because it’s not true for Brownsville, and it’s not true for Cameron County,” Colon-Uvalles told The Barbed Wire. “These people say they care about us and our community, but we don’t see them at all until it’s time for elections. Now, they didn’t get the results they wanted, and instead of reflecting, they want to use queer and trans people as a scapegoat. It’s embarrassing and it just shows that the Democratic leadership is out of touch.”
