Why Democrats Are Losing Their Grip on Hispanic Voters

• viable
• electorate
• bred (breed, synonym- rear: he is born and reared in NYC)
• complacency
• bloc
• bank on
• in earnest
• vitriolic statements
• inroad
• trail
• cultural lurch

Why Democrats Are Losing Their Grip on Latino Voters

The party’s lurch to the cultural left has hurt its standing with working-class Hispanics.

 

March 19, 2024 4:35 pm ET

 

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After George W. Bush won more than 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004 on his way to securing a second presidential term, the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me that his party had been caught unawares by the “extraordinarily sophisticated and competent” efforts of his Republican counterparts—such people as Karl Rove, Matthew Dowd and Ken Mehlman—to win over Latino voters.

Democrats “were taking the Hispanic vote for granted,” said Mr. Rosenberg, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. “They thought it was a base vote. But obviously it became one of the most viable swing votes in American politics.” It still is, and the share of the Hispanic electorate continues to grow. Yet 20 years later Democrats are in danger of making the same mistake.

Barack Obama carried Hispanic voters by 36 points in 2008 and 44 in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center. In a recent book, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” the liberal political analysts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira argue that Mr. Obama’s success bred Democratic complacency. The left saw the growing Hispanic electorate as a reliably Democratic voting bloc. What they failed to acknowledge is that Hispanics tended to put economic interests above their ethnic identity.

So long as Democrats were viewed as the party of the working class, they could bank on winning large Hispanic majorities. The problem Joe Biden and his party face this year is growing numbers of Hispanics and other nonwhite working-class voters view Democrats as out of touch. White voters without a college degree have been quitting the Democratic Party in earnest since the Obama presidency. Democrats didn’t expect to see Hispanics follow, but that’s what has happened. To the surprise of most political observers, the trend accelerated thanks to Donald Trump.

Democrats carried the Hispanic vote by 38 points in 2016. By 2020 that margin had shrunk to 21 points, and among Hispanic men it was down to 17 points. “In 2020, Democrats assumed that they would easily win the Hispanic vote against a president with a history of vitriolic statements against Mexico and Mexican Americans and hostility toward illegal immigration,” Mr. Judis and Mr. Teixeira write. Instead, Mr. Trump performed significantly better among Latinos than he had four years earlier.

 

Few predict that the GOP will win a majority of the Latino vote this November, but these inroads have smart Democrats terrified. Although Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, he managed to reduce the Democratic advantage among Latinos by 18 points in Wisconsin, 14 in Pennsylvania and 12 in Arizona—three battleground states that could be pivotal in choosing the next president. Mr. Biden continues to trail Mr. Trump in survey after survey, and his low job-approval rating among Hispanics isn’t helping matters.

Some conservatives are convinced that Mr. Biden has ignored border security to win more Hispanic votes. If that’s true, the strategy doesn’t appear to be working and may be having the opposite effect. “Polls show that Mr. Trump’s standing with Latino voters has grown since his defeat in 2020, with some surveys finding him winning more than 40 percent of those voters—a level not seen for a Republican in two decades,” the New York Times reported last week.

 

The former president’s rising support, the paper added, is coming from “Latinos who work in law enforcement along the Mexican border” and from “U.S.-born Latinos who are more likely to identify with and vote like their white peers.”

In an interview with the Journal’s “Potomac Watch” podcast, Mr. Teixeira pointed to recent experience as the most plausible explanation for why more Hispanics were eyeing the GOP in 2024. “Frankly, the Trump years prior to the pandemic were actually relatively better for working-class voters, including nonwhites, than the first three years of the Biden administration.” He speculated that the Democrats’ cultural lurch to the left since the Obama era has also hurt the party’s standing with Latinos. Democrats are preoccupied with the concerns of white college-educated elites, which explains the Biden administration’s inaction on illegal immigration as well as its progressive posturing on race, gender, sex education, policing and climate change.

Mr. Teixeira believes that Democratic activists have made a mistake in encouraging Latinos to see themselves as “brown people who are oppressed in the United States, who live in this dystopian hellhole” and suffer nonstop discrimination. “That’s not the way Hispanics—working-class people particularly—think about the world. They think about, ‘I’m here to get ahead in life. I’m here to make a good life for my family. I want communities with safe streets and plenty of opportunity. I’m an American.’ ”