As if in response to my column on Hispanic voting in today’s Washington Examiner, which seems to have sparked many comments, the Pew Research Center has come out with a report on Latino voters and the midterm elections, which includes the Hispanic percentage of eligible voters for each state and each congressional district.
Nationwide the percentage is 10.7 percent, a little higher than the 10 percent of the votes cast by Hispanics in the 2012 presidential election according to exit polls; Hispanics are expected to cast about that or a little lower percentage in this November. Obviously, many Hispanic residents are ineligible to vote because they are not citizens, and so Pew’s numbers are based on estimates and subject to error. But Pew’s work has been pretty rigorous, and these are almost surely the best numbers available.
As I wrote in my column, Hispanics are only small parts of the electorate in the most seriously contested Senate races, with the exception of Colorado. Pew’s percentages are as follows for each of these states:
| State | Percentage of eligible voters who are Hispanic |
| Alaska | 4.8 |
| Arkansas | 2.9 |
| Colorado | 14.2 |
| Georgia | 4.0 |
| Iowa | 2.7 |
| Kansas | 6.0 |
| Kentucky | 1.6 |
| Louisiana | 2.8 |
| Montana | 2.5 |
| New Hampshire | 2.0 |
| North Carolina | 3.1 |
| South Dakota | 1.8 |
| West Virginia | 0.9 |
You may have read articles reporting that Hispanic populations of states like North Carolina increased by more than 100 percent between 2000 and 2010, which is true. But the absolute numbers are relatively small, and many of the newcomers are not citizens; hence the low percentages.
In fact, only nine of the 50 states have above-national-average percentages of Hispanics in their electorates: New Mexico (40.1), California (26.9), Arizona (20.3), Nevada (15.9) and Colorado (14.2) in the West; Texas (27.4) and Florida (17.1) in the South; and New York (13.2) and New Jersey (12.8) in the Northeast. Only slightly below the national average are Connecticut (10.3) and Illinois (9.5); there’s something of a drop to the next highest states, Rhode Island (7.8) and Massachusetts (7.0).
Note that a higher-than-average Hispanic percentage doesn’t automatically make a state Democratic: Texas and Arizona have been staunchly Republican in recently elections, and Colorado, Florida and Nevada have been closely divided. If, as my column suggests, Hispanics can’t be assumed to remain a hugely one-sided Democratic bloc in the future, that casts into some doubt the dreams of some Democrats (and nightmares of some Republicans) that Texas, Florida and Arizona are destined (or doomed) to turn solidly Democratic.
The concentration of Hispanics in relatively few states, some of them with very high populations, means that Hispanic voters have relatively little leverage in the U.S. Senate. Even so, three Hispanics serve there now, Democrat Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas.
Hispanic leverage is also limited in the House of Representatives because of the heavy clustering of Hispanics in certain metropolitan areas plus New Mexico, the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and the Central Valley of California. Only 149 of the 435 congressional districts have Hispanic percentages of eligible voters above the national average of 10.7 percent. Most of these are in just two states, California (49) and Texas (33). Indeed, all but four of California districts are above average here; the exceptions are three districts in the interior north of Sacramento and Henry Waxman’s district in coastal Los Angeles County. There are 13 such districts in Florida, 12 in New York, 8 in Arizona, 6 each in Illinois and Colorado, 4 each in Nevada and New Jersey, 3 each in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Mexico, 2 in Pennsylvania and 1 each in Indiana, Virginia and Washington.
Do the above-average-Hispanic-percentage districts produce a lopsided number of seats for Democrats in the House of Representatives? It depends on what you considered lopsided. Of these 149 districts, 49 are currently represented by Republicans, 100 by Democrats. Of those 100 Democratic districts, I classify 12 as marginal, a number that others might reasonably quibble with.
And in a more Democratic-leaning year, some of those Republican districts would look pretty marginal, too; one of them, California-31, seems sure to turn Democratic because under California’s jungle primary law, two Republicans faced each other in the 2012 general election in a district that voted 57 percent for President Obama. This year, the incumbent retired, and the Democrats have a candidate in November who seems pretty sure to win.
Over the years, it has been apparent that Hispanics are not a single unified voting bloc across the country — much less part of a uniform “people of color” bloc that respond uniformly in all political contests. Rather, Hispanics tend to vote quite differently, depending somewhat on where they are from and probably more on where they have chosen to make their way.
Even more important, there is no guarantee that they are going to forever vote 71 percent to 27 percent Democratic, as they did in the 2012 presidential election — and indeed they don’t seem likely to vote that way this year. Demographics is destiny, but parties and politicians have ways of responding to new groups and, even more, important members of new groups have various ways of responding to parties and politicians.
