President Trump significantly grew support in the Hispanic and Latino community, raising troubling questions and political calculations for Democrats heading into the 2022 midterm elections and beyond.
That’s a key takeaway from the Nov. 3 presidential race, from which Democratic nominee Joe Biden is the apparent president-elect, though the Trump campaign is contesting the outcome in several battleground states. But assuming Biden ends up in the White House on Jan. 20, Democrats’ slippage with Latino voters is a cause for concern among party members, considering it’s been a foundation of their nominees’ ability to win national elections.
Texas remained in the Republican ledger due, in part, to disappointing returns for Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley along the southern border. The Nevada race was close, with the protracted count still ongoing. And Trump’s quick dispatch of Biden in Florida confirmed party concerns that they’d failed to persuade and turn out many Hispanic and Latino voters.
Republican strategist Cesar Conda, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff, said Democrats’ problems with “Latinos” stemmed from the party treating them “as an aggrieved, homogeneous group, much the same way they treat blacks.”
“For example, Democrats believe amnesty for illegal immigrants is the best way to appeal to Hispanics,” he told the Washington Examiner. “But the issue is more important to Central Americans than it is for Cubans, who have more generous immigration pathways or Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens.”
Large swathes of Hispanic and Latino voters were more “culturally very conservative” than Democrats realized, according to Conda.
“The bottom line is that the Democrats’ agenda of socialism, defunding the police, and abortion on demand just doesn’t sell with Hispanics,” he said. “Most important of all, Hispanics want good jobs and good wages, which is exactly what President Trump delivered before the pandemic hit in March.”
Democrats’ problems with Hispanics and Latinos were magnified in Miami-Dade County, Florida’s most populous county.
Although a third of Florida’s counties trended toward the Democrats compared to the last presidential cycle, Biden couldn’t overcome half of the state’s counties becoming more Republican, including Miami-Dade, multiple exit polls found.
Biden underperformed in contrast to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in Miami-Dade, while Trump increased his vote share by almost 200,000 people. Biden won Miami-Dade County 53% to Trump’s 46%. Four years ago, Clinton thumped Trump, 63% to 34%.
Miami-Dade Cuban Americans, in particular, supported Trump at a rate of about 55%, earning him 120,000 more votes from the demographic than Biden.
Republican success in Florida has been attributed to the party’s long-term investment, specifically in Cuban Americans and voters of Colombian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan descent. Republicans constantly reminded the community of the Democrats’ flirtation with socialism through ads, even their churches, evoking their experiences with far-left dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. And a last-minute push by the Biden campaign and billionaire ex-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg couldn’t undo the political damage.
Gus West, chair of The Hispanic Institute’s board, said nationally Hispanic and Latino voters break for Democrats on average about 60-70% of the time, “and that’s where races are won and lost.” Last week, Biden matched Clinton in securing two-thirds of the bloc, yet Trump expanded his share from 28% to 32%.
“It dates back to the Bay of Pigs and possibly before that. The Republicans have always had a harder line on communism. They’re the Right and Democrats are the Left, and communists are the Left,” he said.
For West, Democrats should have better connected Trump to Russia, given the Kremlin’s links to the dictators. And Biden was hurt by his ties to former President Barack Obama’s record on deportations.
Some strategists argue the Democrats’ Hispanic and Latino outreach shouldn’t have simply relied on anti-Trump rhetoric. West contends, though, there should have been more outreach, period. Biden’s primary campaign didn’t depend on them and the primary season, more generally, provided the Trump team with the opportunity to mobilize without distraction.
“I’m sure within the Biden camp there was a sentiment that, ‘We need you. You didn’t really help us get here, but we need you now.’ So two wrongs don’t make a right,” the Nicaraguan immigrant said.
He encouraged Democrats to “spend time” with the community now as they may not have Trump to organize around in 2022, 2024, or beyond.
“And he certainly has to revoke all of the things that Stephen Miller and the White House have done. They’ve got to turn back all of that. They have really got to reset everything at Homeland Security to where it isn’t where you have this hostile indifference,” he said of Biden and Trump’s top immigrant policy adviser.
George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin suggested Democrats could reach out to Cuban Americans by reintroducing the “wet foot, dry foot” policy and protections that shield them from deportation.
“I wish that Biden had already promised to reverse that,” Somin said. “I hope that he might do so when he becomes president, which would be consistent with his broader agenda of being more open to immigrants than certainly Trump has been, but perhaps in some ways more open than Obama as well.”
“It would be a real signal that the Democrats are not actually supportive of the communist regime and are not socialists,” Somin said.
Democrats would have to adapt potentially to a post-Trump Republican Party, Somin continued. But they “obviously” need to evaluate their liberal positions because they didn’t seize control of the Senate and suffered losses in the House, with a few races still to be decided.
“Biden himself isn’t really a representative of that group, but that group is significant, it’s vocal. Biden did make some effort to distance himself from some aspects of their agenda, but maybe he didn’t do enough,” he said.
