Sonoma County Latinos ponder the 29% vote that went to Trump

Herman G. Hernandez, a political activist and Sonoma County school board trustee, said he was stunned by the ?29 percent national Latino vote for Donald Trump, the Republican who repeatedly bashed Latinos and undocumented immigrants during his brash campaign for the White House.

“That’s pretty amazing,” he said.

Herman J. Hernandez, his father, who heads Los Cien, the county’s largest Latino leadership group, said he expected Clinton to capture at least 75 percent of the Latino vote, while the exit polls put her at 65 percent.

The result “blew me away,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

But at the same time, the younger Hernandez said it was a “flawed assumption” to think Latinos would vote in any kind of cohesive bloc.

“There are a lot of conservative Latinos,” said Omar Medina, president of the North Bay Organizing Project, which conducted a vigorous pre-election effort to get local Latinos to the polls last week.

The results of that campaign - focused on precincts with a high percentage of renters and low voter turnout in past elections - won’t be known until Sonoma County officials release voting data at the precinct level, he said.

Medina also noted that Clinton topped Trump by more than 2 to 1, an “overwhelming majority” of the expanding Latino vote.

In California, there were more than 1.1 million newly registered Latinos between January and Oct. 1 this year, representing 31 percent of the state’s new voters, according to Political Data Inc., a nonpartisan political campaign consulting firm.

Sonoma County does not track voter registration by race or ethnicity, local election officials said.

Medina said he saw little difference between Trump’s 29 percent of the vote and the 27 percent support garnered in 2012 by Mitt Romney, without disparaging Mexican immigrants as rapists and promising to build a wall along the Mexican border, as Trump did.

Terry Price, a Santa Rosa political consultant, said he was perplexed by the Latino vote for Trump, considering it a “vote against themselves.”

But Medina said that some of Trump’s racially-tinged rhetoric “didn’t relate” to local Latinos. Calling immigrants criminals, for example, could be discounted because it is “not specific to them,” he said.

The five Republican presidential candidates before Trump - from Romney in 2012 back to Bob Dole in 1996 - got an average of 32 percent Latino support. George W. Bush topped the GOP candidates with ?44 percent in beating John Kerry in 2004, more than twice the 21 percent Latino vote Dole had while losing to Bill Clinton in 1996.

Much was made prior to Nov. 8 of the so-called Latino “firewall” that was supposed to assure Hillary Clinton’s victory two decades later. Two factors - the diversity of Latino political leanings and the uneven distribution of the Latino population - could have blunted Clinton’s alleged advantage.

A Pew Research Center survey released Oct. 11, about a month before the election, showed that 58 percent of Latino registered voters said they would vote for Clinton while 19 percent said they would support Trump, a number far lower than the exit polling figure of 29 percent.

A Washington Post election eve poll, however, indicated that Trump received only 18 percent of the Latino vote, which the newspaper described as “the lowest level on record for any presidential candidate.”

Analysts also noted that more than half (52 percent) of Latino eligible voters live in states where the outcome is essentially predetermined: Democrat-dominated California and New York, along with consistently Republican Texas.

Out of seven competitive states, Latinos have a significant presence in three: Arizona and Florida, which went for Trump, and Nevada, where Clinton prevailed. Latinos make up 5 percent or fewer of eligible voters in the other four battleground states: Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio, which all went for Trump, the Pew Center reported.

Latinos could have made a difference in Florida, where Trump edged Clinton by 1 point, but Medina said that population is primarily Cuban, a group considered fairly conservative.

He also doubted that the Latino vote could have made a difference in the rust belt states, where working-class whites helped propel Trump to victory.

And it’s a mistake to consider Latinos of one mind, the junior Hernandez said.

“I think the issues transcend racial boundaries,” he said.

In 2012, a Pew Center survey of Latinos found that 32 percent described their political view as “very conservative” or “conservative,” nearly matching 34 percent of all adults who said the same thing.

However, 30 percent of Latino adults described their views as liberal, compared to only 21 percent of the general population.

On the divisive issue of abortion, the survey found 51 percent of Latinos think it should be illegal in all or most cases, while 43 percent think it should be legal in all or most cases.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.