Hispanics new to voting are trending more Republican, a good sign for all the 2024 GOP presidential candidates, even those not named Donald Trump.
A deep dive into Hispanic voting trends, while revealing that the group’s turnout can be troublingly poor, found that newer voters have an eagerness to pull switch for Republicans.
“The Latino trend is broader and more durable than Donald Trump, and that’s good news for Republicans whether or not he’s the nominee in 2024,” GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini said in analyzing new data from Equis Research’s post-mortem report on the 2022 result.
Equis said in its report that Republicans didn’t do much better with Latino voters in 2022 than in 2020, adding that more were driven to the polls by abortion policy than the economy.
Ruffini, in his Substack report The Intersection, said, “If we were watching a slow-motion collapse of Democrats with Latino voters, we might expect further erosion from the new 2020 baseline. And for Democrats worried about their Latino losses, this comes as a relief.”
But in a deeper look, he said there are significant positives for Republicans in future elections worth noting.
A key highlight of his report found that Hispanics who voted in 2022 have indicated even higher support for the 2024 generic Republican presidential candidate.
“Hispanics who only became engaged in 2020 or later have registered Republican in greater numbers than those who were registered before,” Ruffini said.
He also cited the strength of the pro-GOP vote among Florida Hispanics, and he gives credit to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL)and his 2022 reelection campaign and advertising spending.
“While Latinos elsewhere largely perceived Democrats to be making more of an effort to win their vote than in years past, the answers were markedly different in Florida,” he wrote.
“Partly, it was that Ron DeSantis and his allies crushed Charlie Crist and the Democrats on the Spanish-language airwaves,” he said. “It got results. DeSantis’s favorables among Spanish-dominant Hispanics likely to be consuming Telemundo and Univision moved from +7 to +34 from June through November.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The positive trend, he said, is that Trump’s ability to attract Hispanics to the Republican Party was expanded by DeSantis.
“Trump already has a track record with Hispanic voters, and the trends that first materialized during his reelection campaign are continuing,” Ruffini said. “And the report confirms DeSantis’s serious game with Hispanic voters in Florida, not only in terms of having an appealing message for them but actually being serious about the mechanics of winning Latino voters, devoting significant resources to Spanish-language advertising. The result was that he was able to exceed Trump’s 2020 performance, not just among voters overall but much more so among Hispanics.”
