A series of recent polls indicate that Latino voters, long a reliably Democratic bloc, are turning more Republican ahead of November’s midterm elections.
A Republican Senate aide announced the numbers of a Marist last week’s survey showing 52% support for the Republican Party among Latinos and just 39% support for Democrats, while a progressive writer expressed skepticism on the results of just one poll.
And while it’s a good rule of thumb to look at aggregate polling data rather than just one survey — especially one like the Marist poll, which has a huge margin of error and a small sample size — the numbers are generally in line with a larger change: Latino voters are moving away from Democrats.
“If you look at things like the local elections in Texas, the elections in New Jersey, the elections in Nassau County, the elections in Virginia, they all point to Hispanics not only not responding, but continuing to become more Republican in relative terms of what they were before,” said David Shor, a leading political data analyst on the left, in a recent panel hosted by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
Shor was reporting on the different electoral contests that have occurred since the 2020 presidential contest, when Hispanic support for Joe Biden was 8 points lower than it had been for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, at 63%, compared to 71% four years earlier.
That trend continues, said Mike Madrid, a California Republican consultant who worked for the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Madrid told Yahoo News that “there is absolutely a shift to the right” among Hispanic voters.
“I watched this very, very closely. The change has been happening for some time,” said Madrid. He said Hispanic voters in California and Arizona have resisted this trend, but it shows up in every other part of the country.
And, he said, it’s as much a class issue as anything else.
“The biggest divide in America is the educational divide. Democrats are quickly consolidating college-educated voters and Republicans are consolidating non-college-educated voters,” Madrid said.
“Democrats are not helping their case. The problem is that they are becoming an out-of-touch elite party. …Republicans are winning by default. They discovered nothing. They are focusing on their non-college-educated white base and are gradually winning over Latino voters.”
Shor echoed that point in his opening comments at the panel in California. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two groups of people we’ve really lost ground with are white working-class voters over the last six years and Hispanic voters,” he said.
Shor argued that “the Democratic Party has become much more liberal” since 2012 and “in the last four or five years, liberals have become, for the first time, the dominant faction in the Democratic Party.” From 2012 to 2019, the Pew Research Center found that the share of Democratic voters who identified as liberal went from 37% to 47%, and the share of Democrats who identified as moderate or conservative went from 57% to 49%.
Among other commonalities, white working-class voters and Hispanic voters tend to be more religious and less likely to identify as liberal, Shor said.
The growing alienation of Hispanic voters from the Democratic Party stems from several factors, according to those who have studied the issue.
Inflation is a top concern for many Hispanics, according to a March survey from Axios/Ipsos and Marist Research showed a 2 to 1 advantage among Latinos to Republicans over Democrats over who can best handle rising prices. Americans also generally give the edge to Republicans when asked which party can improve the economy and reduce crime.
In 2020, Hispanics warmed to then-President Donald Trump based on his push to reopen the economy during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study done in late 2021 by Equis Research, a three-year-old research and research organization focused on Hispanic Americans.
Equis also found that Democrats were not responding to attacks on their candidates in the Spanish-language media, especially in places like Miami and South Texas. Republican ads calling Democrats “socialists” were particularly effective.
“Republicans didn’t turn off Miami’s sound machine after 2016. They turned it up. They haven’t stopped talking about socialism,” said Stephanie Valencia, co-founder and president of Equis. “There is a media ecosystem of online media influencers, along with Spanish-language AM radio and some conservative television” that creates “an echo chamber of messages.”
Democrats ran $15 million worth of TV ads in the final month of the 2020 election, but they’re still not combating this echo chamber effect in Miami, Valencia told Yahoo News.
“There aren’t any voters in South Florida who remember any of those ads, but they’re probably still tuned into that radio station that suggests Joe Biden isn’t president,” she said, referring to the baseless Trump conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was illegitimate.
But working-class voters of all stripes have also been alienated by the language Democrats use, according to a recent study conducted by YouGov on behalf of Jacobin magazine, a socialist publication.
“Blue-collar workers are especially sensitive to candidates’ messages – and respond even more acutely to differences between populist language and ‘woke’ language,” says the study of 2,617 voters in five swing states. found. “Particularly blue-collar workers, compared to primarily white-collar workers, were even more attracted to candidates who emphasized common issues and avoided activist rhetoric.”
“Progressives don’t need to renounce social justice issues to win over working-class voters, but certain identity-centric rhetoric is a risk,” the YouGov/Jacobin study also concluded. “Potential Democratic working-class voters did not shy away from progressive candidates or candidates who strongly opposed racism. But candidates who framed this opposition in highly specialized, identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced populist or mainstream language.”
While the study did not specify the “specialized and identity-focused” language that is likely to turn off voters, strategists in both parties pointed to the phrase “defund the police,” which some Democrats adopted in 2020, and the use of the term “Latino .”
Progressives promoted the use of “Latinx” because “Latino” is a gendered word this technically only refers to Hispanic men. If only about 4% of Hispanics prefer the term, and even among Democrats, there has been a backlash against it. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., banned his employees to use the term.
Madrid said the use of “Latinx” perpetuates the impression among many Hispanics, especially those in the working class, that Democrats are out of touch with their concerns.
“It’s like gas is $6 a gallon in California, and what are you talking about?” he said.
