Republicans are not doing well among Latino voters, but the problem is not simply immigration. Latinos lean leftward on a variety of issues such as the minimum wage, healthcare and national security, and they may be trending further in that direction.
Thus, while Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric may have damaged the GOP’s image among Latinos, the party still would likely lose the group by a substantial margin to the eventual Democratic candidate had the billionaire businessman and reality TV star never entered the race.
A poll of Latino voters by the Washington Post and Univision released Thursday found that 71 percent favor a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage and that 54 percent favor keeping Obamacare.
By a margin of 50-15 percent, Latinos favor the Democratic Party’s position on gay marriage. They also preferred the Democrats on handling the economy, 51-28 percent, and on handling terrorism, though by a smaller margin, 38-33 percent.
“They tend as a group to be more liberal,” said Richard Herrera, associate director of Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies. “Even among older Latinos, they are becoming more open to things like gay marriage.”
For all of the talk about the Latino vote and immigration, it is not their top issue. A large plurality, 33 percent, said it was jobs and the economy, according to the Post/Univision poll.
Immigration was the top issue of just 17 percent of Latinos. Another 16 percent said their top issue was education. Other polling groups, such as the Pew Hispanic Center, have found similar results in recent years.
“The majority default position is with the Democrats,” said Sylvia Manzano, a principal with the market research firm Latino Decisions. Two of the firm’s co-founders are doing research for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Manzano says Latinos are “soft partisans” rather than hardcore Democrats and therefore capable of being swayed. Immigration is a “gateway issue” for them. “People turn everything else off” if they don’t agree with a candidate on that issue, she said.
A 2013 report by the Republican National Committee, dubbed the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” took the same position: “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States … they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy.”
The problem for Republicans is that adopting pro-immigration policies serves mainly to remove the issue from the debate, allowing Latinos to vote based on other issues. And the Post-Univision poll indicates Republicans wouldn’t fare much better in that scenario.
“The Democrats would still get most of the vote,” Manzano said. While she said it was possible for Republicans to be genuinely competitive, it would likely take several election cycles of GOP outreach for that to happen.
The Latino voters’ overwhelming support for a $15 minimum wage, for example, puts them to the left of not just the Republicans, who generally oppose any increase, but of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, who is backing a $12 minimum wage.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, which favors restrictionist policies, counters that it is “easy to exaggerate” the role immigration plays in the Latino vote.
“They are Democrats not because of family identity reasons. They are Democrats because they support the party’s policy agenda,” he said.
Krikorian adds that the role of Latinos in determining presidential elections is offset by the fact that the population is largely concentrated in a few states, most notably California and Texas, neither of which are expected to be up for grabs. They make the most impact in Florida, a key swing state.
Republicans have lost the Latino vote to Democrats for decades. The best showing among GOP candidates in recent years was President George W. Bush, who got 40 percent when he ran for re-election in 2004. Bush was an advocate of immigration reform that would have legalized existing immigrants.
A claim that Bush received 44 percent has been widely debunked by pollsters. It nevertheless still sometimes turns up. The 2013 RNC report cited it twice.
2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who favored more restrictionist policies — he famously said he would push Latinos to “self-deport” — received only 27 percent of the Latino vote.
Romney’s poor showing compared to Bush is often cited by those calling on the party to support comprehensive reform. However, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the GOP’s 2008 nominee, received only 31 percent of the Latino vote, despite having immigration policies similar to Bush’s. McCain had even co-sponsored reform legislation with the late liberal icon Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., in 2007-8.
The closest any Republican presidential candidate has come to Bush’s 40 percent was Ronald Reagan in 1984, a landslide election where he won 49 out of 50 states. He nevertheless received only 37 percent of the Latino vote. In 1986, Reagan signed an immigration reform bill that provided amnesty to existing immigrants. It didn’t help the 1988 GOP candidate, George H.W. Bush, much, though. He got just 30 percent of the Latino vote that year.
Most assume Trump, should he get the nomination, will drive those numbers down further. “I cannot imagine him doing better than Romney,” Herrera said.
