In the 2020 presidential race, an election advertisement about Democrats taking Latino voters for granted was the hook for one of former President Donald Trump’s most popular ads.
Featuring UFC fighter Jorge Masvidal, the nearly two-minute video showed then-candidate Joe Biden at a Hispanic Heritage Month event one month earlier playing “Despacito” on his cellphone. “To pander to us,” said Masvidal, a Miami native of Cuban and Peruvian descent. “Hell no.”
“The Democrats just think that they’re entitled to the Latino vote,” Masvidal said at the start. “They think that we just have to hand it over to them. That’s right. We sure as hell don’t.” The ad garnered more than 34 million views online.
That year, Latino voters surged to the polls in Florida, helping Trump outperform his 2016 margins.
But it’s not just Florida where Democrats lost purchase with Hispanic voters. An analysis by Catalist, a political data trust for Democratic candidates, found that Latino voters nationally swung 8 points toward Trump compared with 2016 in the two-party vote. The number of votes cast by Latinos surged by 31% from 2016 to 2020. After four years, Trump left office more popular with Hispanic voters.
Masvidal’s message, that Democrats take Hispanic voters for granted, is not going away. In a survey this year by Equis Research, a firm that specializes in research on the Latino electorate, key majorities in 11 battleground states agreed with the statement that “Democrats take Hispanics for granted. They want our votes but forget about us when it comes time to deliver.”
Fifty-four percent of all registered voters found the statement convincing, while 57% of middle-class voters agreed. It resonated most with voters for whom immigration was a top priority, at 69%.
The poll was conducted in August with a sample of 1800 registered voters.
In Virginia, where Latino voters make up nearly one-tenth of the state’s population and are the state’s fastest-growing ethnic group, AP-NORC VoteCast exit polling after November’s gubernatorial race showed how Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, made inroads with Latino voters in the state up against Democrat and former governor Terry McAuliffe, scoring a 12 percentage-point lead. One year earlier, exit polls showed Trump’s share of the Latino vote from 2016 to 2020 grew by six points.
Surveys, including a comprehensive study of the last presidential race by Equis Research, showed Democrats losing ground, especially with less partisan Latinos, who said they were focused on the economy and moving beyond COVID-19.
So far, President Joe Biden has failed to stanch the bleeding. While he easily won Hispanic voters in 2020, with 63% of the vote, polls taken in recent months show support for the president cratering to the low forties, at 43%, with a net disapproval rating of 46%.
And in a hypothetical face-off against Trump in 2024, Latino voters were evenly split, with 44% supporting Biden and 43% backing Trump, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll.
Long seen as a reliable left-leaning voting bloc, Hispanic voters are not “the emerging Democratic majority” that Democrats once hoped. Ruy Teixeira, who with John Judis coined the term in 2002, wrote this month that the party has failed to reckon with the scale of the shift underway, warning that the prospect of political parity among Hispanic voters will undermine Democrats’ most salient coalition-building case.
Others agree.
“They can expect a good old-fashioned beatdown if they don’t get it together and acknowledge that the Hispanic trends in other states will mimic that of the Hispanics in Florida,” said Sasha Tirador, a Democratic consultant in the state, where more than one-sixth of registered voters are Latino.
Stumped by the challenge of talking to a diverse Hispanic electorate, which includes conservative-leaning voters in South Florida, Tirador said Democrats were ceding the path to Republicans by writing off the state.
“They aren’t ‘Latinos’ from California, they are ‘Hispanics’ from Florida,” she said. In other words, messaging that resonates with recent immigrants to the United States from Mexico or northern triangle countries may not resonate in a Miami Cuban-American enclave. “Big difference,” she said.
Former Hialeah Mayor Julio Gonzalez, a Republican and Trump surrogate, said criticism of Biden’s long record in government with little to show resonated with his onetime constituents.
“We have a lot of good Democrats. We have a lot of good Republicans, but they don’t trust Joe Biden,” Gonzalez told the Washington Examiner. He also said he hopes to see Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lead a Republican ticket in 2024.
Democrats are already bracing for losses in Congress next year, with support from Latino voters unlikely to provide much of a boost. If the 2022 midterm elections were held today, 37% of Hispanic voters said they would support the Republican congressional candidate, while 37% said they would favor the Democrat, according to the Wall Street Journal poll. Twenty-two percent were undecided. By contrast, Latino voters last year gave Democratic House members 60% of their vote.
Tirador believes some top officials are waiting for the demographics to shift and, in the meantime, have “discarded Florida completely and are focusing on other states.”
She added, “Democrats are counting on the fact that eventually, the strong Cuban American conservative elderly vote will one day no longer be an issue because they will begin to pass on.”
But younger Hispanic voters aren’t moving away from concerns about socialism. Instead, this group is moving in the opposite direction, voicing increasing worry with each successive generation, according to polling conducted by Equis Research. In a report this month, 45% of immigrants said they were more concerned by socialism than fascism, compared to 49% of immigrant children, 54% of immigrant grandchildren, and 59% of fourth-generation members.
The report said that among Hispanic voters who back the Democratic Party, some 35% fear socialism more than fascism, with the feeling not necessarily tied to earlier generations’ experiences with Latin American socialist regimes.
The Latino shift to Trump in 2020 included not just Florida and Texas but also Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Arizona by double digits, and Georgia just below, all states where Democrats face competitive races next year.
An analysis of the Hispanic shift toward Trump in New York City by Matthew Thomas showed the change was also true in reliably blue enclaves. In Queens, Trump garnered the best results of a Republican in 16 years.
“Precincts where at least 50% of residents are Hispanic swung toward Trump by 18 points, with a quarter of voters … backing him for reelection,” Thomas wrote. “The shift was even more pronounced in precincts where at least 75% of residents are Hispanic, which had a swing of 25 points toward Trump.”
Biden faces an uphill battle if his party hopes to sway these voters.
In a post-election survey by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, more than 70% of Hispanic voters said jobs, the economy, and the coronavirus were “very important” issues. Over 60% said the same for crime and education.
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Recent polling shows the president is struggling with voters on these issues.
Latinos said they had a negative outlook on the economy, with 63% believing it was headed in the wrong direction, compared to 25% who had a favorable view, a gap of 38 percentage points, according to the Wall Street Journal’s recent poll. They viewed Republicans as best prepared to handle economic issues, including inflation, and reining in the federal deficit. Border security issues also favored Biden’s opponents amid a surge in illegal migration into southern U.S. states.
