By 10 p.m. ET on election night, the narrative around the Latino vote had already begun to solidify. Early reports indicated that Cuban-American precincts in Miami-Dade County had swung heavily for President Donald Trump, and a number of predominantly Mexican-American counties along the Rio Grande River delivered astonishingly good results for the Republican Party compared to just four years ago. It all led to a fair amount of hand-flapping that Joe Biden’s campaign had badly misunderstood the Latino electorate and potentially cost President-elect Biden both Florida and Texas as a consequence.
To some extent the stories were right. As I reported in October, the Trump administration, for all its race-baiting, made concerted efforts to win over the Latino community, and some of its arguments about jobs, economic opportunity, public safety, and the dangers of big government had found purchase with voters, particularly Latino men. Pre-election polls (if you can trust them) showed Trump consistently getting about a third of the Latino vote—figures higher than his vote share of 28% in 2016, and better than those of either Mitt Romney or John McCain.
It shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, then, that according to exit polls (if you can trust them), Trump ended up receiving about a third of the Latino vote. Still, the numbers were something of a wake-up call for Democrats who assumed things would swing their way in the Trump era. They also encouraged Republicans looking to expand their appeal as demographic trends whittle down their white, working-class base. As Marco Rubio tweeted shortly after the election, “#Florida & the Rio Grande Valley showed the future of the GOP. A party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.”
It’s certainly a more attractive view of the future than the party of disaffected working-class whites, but it’s a lot to put on a group you just lost by 33 points. In truth, while the numbers in 2020 appear to be modestly better for Republicans than in the last few presidential cycles, they’re still largely consistent with Latino voting patterns over the last 50 years, which have swung between a 60% and 75% vote share for the Democrats.
What changed this year was turnout. Historically, the voting rate of Latinos in presidential elections has been remarkably stable. In 1980, about 46% of eligible Latinos voted in the presidential election. Over the next nine presidential elections, the voting rate didn’t change much, hitting a high of 51.6% and a low of 44%; in 2016, it was at 47.6%. The vote was not only steady, it was low, averaging 12 percentage points less than the Black vote and nearly 18 points less than the white vote. There are a number of reasons for this low participation rate, including the relative youth of the Latino electorate, and its feeling of alienation from the political process. In places like Texas, targeted rules have hobbled voter-registration efforts, and the Latino vote has been intentionally diluted across multiple voting districts, leaving many Latinos with a sense of powerlessness and a feeling that voting is “a white man’s game,” as Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern and author of The Hispanic Republican, phrased it. Overall the low voting rate has been a major impediment to political power, even as the number of Latinos in the United States has grown from under 10 million in 1970 to just over 60 million in 2019.
This was a big year for turnout generally, but early figures suggest it was an astonishing year for Latinos—one that shattered four decades of voting patterns. According to early estimates from Cadava, Latino voting rates might have eclipsed 60%. If these numbers bear out, the increase in the Latino vote will be roughly twice the overall rate of increase for all voters in the 2020 cycle. This number is particularly impressive because many of the traditional tools to turn out voters—registration drives, block walks, door-to-door canvassing—were suspended due to the pandemic.
It’s possible that the burst of Latino participation is a short-term phenomenon spurred by the turnout machine that is Trump. Or it could represent the awakening of the Latino electorate, with extraordinary consequences. The potential impact is enormous, not just in places like Texas but across the entire country. Population growth for Latinos has been strong in all regions, but especially in the Midwest thanks to employment opportunities ranging from the dairy industry in Wisconsin to the energy industry in the Dakotas. The percentage of Latinos in these states is still low by national standards, but it’s large enough to play a decisive role in close elections, as might have happened in Wisconsin this year. Stephanie Valencia, cofounder of the progressive polling firm EquisLabs, told me that early voting in Wisconsin by Latinos was up by 300%, and a significant majority (57%) of those voters were women, who broke heavily for Biden. Valencia believes Trump would have held on to Wisconsin, and perhaps other swing states, but for the strong turnout.
Whether that surge is permanent hinges in part on both parties’ ability to keep Latino voters engaged. For Democrats that means not taking them for granted and actually investing in outreach. Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha estimated that only 2% of Democratic super PAC money went to Latino outreach this year, and there’s a consensus among strategists and experts that Republicans were more nuanced and committed in their outreach to Latino communities this election cycle.