We Are Still Not Getting the Latino Vote Right

By Jorge González-Gallarza

Ceasing to treat Hispanics as a homogeneous voting bloc is only part of the answer. Coming up with a better framework to understand their voting attitudes is the harder bit.

Just as American democracy plunges into a confused mess of tribalism, siloed narratives and contested vote totals, one takeaway from the November 3rd election seems beyond contest—to tap into the growing Latino vote, both parties will need to reckon with its inner diversity. But graduating from the old received wisdom that saw Hispanics as a monolith doesn’t guarantee that it will be replaced by something better.

First, a recap of what happened. Owing to record turnout, both sides got higher absolute numbers of Latinos to vote for their candidate than in 2016, but surprisingly for most pundits, Joe Biden nearly underperformed Hillary Clinton’s share of the Latino vote while Trump’s unexpected gains allowed him to keep Florida and Texas red. Any election can be read as a tectonic shifting of electoral plaques, and this time the geography seems crystal clear. First-time Latino voters allowed Biden to swing Nevada and Arizona, but they were few and dispersed. Meanwhile, Trump’s national boost among Hispanics owes to a super-majority of South Floridians and a shock win in a number of Hispanic-majority counties along the Rio Grande. How could a President who marked his campaign launch four years ago with a speech that the media translated as demeaning Mexican immigrants pull off 47% of the vote in Zapata county?

Here’s where the raw numbers give way to partisan justifications. Democratic operatives resent Trump’s heavy messaging around Biden’s alleged socialist sympathies to exiled communities in South Florida, traditionally infused with Cuban-American activism but recently reinforced with refugee cohorts from Venezuela, Nicaragua and even Colombia. Their rationale is similarly deterministic for South Texas—communities with large numbers of border patrol officers, oil and gas industry workers and evangelicals were bound to give Trump a second chance, particularly when taking stock of another conservative outlier among Latinos and one of the race’s major surprises—Tejano culture.

Republicans instead will stress that South Floridians were shunning Democrats’ actual record, whether that be Obama’s thawing of relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba or his support of Colombia’s flawed 2016 peace deal at the expense of the much graver Venezuelan crisis. For every pro-Trump salsa hit and hogwash meme gone WhatsApp-viral, there’s a rational case that Trump’s platform was simply the better fit to the specific concerns of these exiled communities. As for why Trump has struck a chord with Tejanos, Republicans highlight that despite the shock of seeing migrant children in cages around the time of the immigration detention crisis in 2018, Democrats’ continued shift to the woke left on cultural and social issues wasted their opportunity to appear as the compassionate party, the one truly heeding the concerns of working Latino families—particularly as the better economic case lied squarely with Trump.

For both of these vastly different constituencies, there’s a reality that Democrats can no longer afford to ignore. In the ever-crucial state of Florida, anything remotely connoting socialism is a race-loser, even if spun out of the term’s original definition. For Democrats to shrug off these concerns—as Obama did in Miami-Dade a week before the vote—will be felt as a measure of their disconnect with these crucial, politically active communities. And why shouldn’t it be? When you’ve lost it all to real socialism, your room for compromise with those even remotely warm to the term narrows. As for Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics more broadly, the now popularized woke term “LatinX” has, for better or worse, proved another exemplar of that disconnect. Not that Latinos are somehow retrograde or that they can’t empathize with queer wellbeing—they simply resent left-leaning media and activist communities for insisting on calling them a label they overwhelmingly reject. To add insult to injury, Puerto Rican-born Floridians seem to have similarly penalized Democrats for being out of touch with the specific concerns of those displaced by Hurricane Maria.

It’s not as if the particular persuasions of each of these communities were somehow mystical a month ago—our disconnect with them has just erupted in broad daylight in a historically tight race. That Latinos were ever approached as an electoral monolith by the country’s media and political elites, after all, is our shared bipartisan culpability for that disconnect. Progressives may chalk this up to money in politics, blaming political consultants for spending millions on hyper-segmented electoral maps that barely exist outside their imagination. Conservatives may instead trace this to the activist-industrial complex that in the 1960s worked to apply the aggrieved minority mold to Hispanics, even as the particular sensibilities of immigrant communities echoed the aspirational ethos of all other Americans. Either way, even as the country wakes up to the epiphany that Hispanics are not a monolith, our electoral and social fabric—party machines, Spanish-speaking media and the demographic make-up of key counties—will likely remain the way it is beyond 2020, particularly as national races tighten and Latinos grow as a share of the overall population.

Yet if anything, Latinos’ demographic growth should in fact add further cause to fuse them indistinguishably into the American electorate. Granted, bilingualism, the immigrant experience and a shared appreciation of our Hispanic heritage matters, but it isn’t clear to most that it amounts to more than a fuzzy mystique with little repercussions on voting patterns. Like the rest of Americans, Hispanics want a humane and efficient immigration system that also protects border security and the rule of law. We value diversity and openness but remain markedly religious and culturally conservative—like our non-Hispanic neighbors and friends. In fact, the key issues for Hispanics and the rest of the country weren’t all that different in this race. Like everyone else, we care about healthcare and access to education but we want our economy to promote opportunity for all and reward the effort of all those who work to succeed in America—not degenerate into socialism.

Latinos live, love, breathe, work, worship and vote like Americans. It’s high time we treat them that way.

Jorge González-Gallarza (@JorgeGGallarza) is the co-host of the Uncommon Decency podcast (@UnDecencyPod) and an associate researcher at Fundación Civismo.