Douthat: How Hispanics became swing voters
The chart that should frighten Democratic strategists appears in the 23rd slide of a newly released report from Equis Research, which tries to explain the Hispanic shift toward the Republican Party in the 2020 election. It shows how favorably Hispanic voters responded to a variety of Donald Trump’s positions and policies, on COVID and the economy and immigration — more favorably, in many cases, than many liberals would have expected.
Some responses aren’t all that surprising: 77% favorability for pandemic stimulus, 74% favorability for “rapid vaccine development,” 69% for middle-class tax cuts (who could be against middle-class tax cuts?). Some of them offer interesting evidence that Trump’s COVID insouciance, his attempt to prioritize economic reopening over precaution, was popular with Hispanic voters: “reopen economy” at 66%, “COVID policy set by states” at 62%, “living without fear of COVID” at 55%.
But it’s the numbers on immigration and border policy that are particularly notable. Trump’s family-separation policy, not surprisingly, polls at 28%. But “more border spending” gets 55% approval, “limiting refugees/asylum” receives 51% and even “reducing legal immigration” gets 49%.
At the same time, “more deportations” and “build the wall” poll lower, at 42% and 39%. But then recall that Trump got only 38% of the Hispanic vote overall. Which means that in an important sense, despite overperforming expectations, he arguably underperformed his potential with Hispanics. He didn’t even consolidate the full share of voters who favored building his border wall, let alone the share that supported other forms of immigration restriction, let alone the share that agreed with his COVID response.
Or as the report puts it, “Absent any context, the numbers might even suggest that the incumbent should have done better than he did.”
This is just one survey, but it’s congruent with a lot of different data sources suggesting that Trump’s improvement with Hispanics in 2020, rather than an outlier that other Republicans won’t hit, represents a foundation on which the GOP could potentially build further gains. Ruy Teixeira, the analyst whose famous “emerging Democratic majority” thesis (shared with John Judis) was welcomed and then misinterpreted by Democrats banking on the inevitable march of demographic change, has been particularly aggressive in warning about this scenario. In a recent post, he rattled off several polling results suggesting that Republicans could be moving close to parity in the Hispanic vote — a true political earthquake if it ever happened.
In the long-ago days of the George W. Bush presidency there was a lot of talk from pro-immigration Republicans about how Hispanics were “natural Republicans” — meaning family-oriented, religious, hardworking, in love with the American dream. But as the political parties were aligned in those days Hispanics fit pretty comfortably in the Democratic coalition. Even if they were more culturally conservative than white Democrats, they prioritized issues like health care and jobs and education and generally trusted the Democratic Party more on a range of domestic policy questions.
The Republican elites who imagined that they could make inroads with Hispanics by passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill weren’t completely out of touch, since there was often strong Hispanic support for that kind of measure. But the Republican Party’s core obstacle was always economic policy. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” probably helped him to a relatively strong showing with Hispanics in 2004, although one overstated by flawed exit polls (he probably got about 39%, not the oft-quoted 44%). But thereafter the party moved right on economics, and the sequence of Bush’s push for Social Security privatization, the tea party’s anti-spending zeal and then the Romney-Ryan ticket’s promise of entitlement cuts all made the Republicans too economically libertarian to appeal to most Hispanics.
Since then, though, three crucial things have changed. First, the shape of immigration is different: Both legal and illegal immigration have become less Latin American and more global, with a new pattern of rushes to the border by asylum-seekers who are more likely to come from Central America than Mexico. A simple story in which American Hispanics effectively saw themselves in every subsequent wave of migrants never quite fit reality, but for, say, a second-generation Mexican American in Texas it fits the reality of 2021 less than the reality of 15 years ago.
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