Friday, Feb. 18, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Democrats are losing their apparent grip over the Latino vote, as recent elections and polls suggest a growing shift by Hispanics toward the GOP. A Wall Street Journal poll released last month even showed that in a potential rematch between Donald Trump and President Joe Biden in 2024, 43% of Hispanics would vote for Trump, while 44% would support Biden.
This dramatic change in voter preference demonstrates that the Hispanic electorate has become more independent, increasingly open to conservative ideas and less likely to be swayed by the identity politics of the left.
It’s true that, until recently, Democrats have dominated the Hispanic vote at the national level by a margin of 2 to 1. Some of the top Latino strategists and progressive groups were convinced that this pattern would remain constant. They argued that a “pan-ethnic consciousness” had emerged, binding together voters of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Latin American origin into a large Latino block, inherently liberal and not jumping any time soon to the Republican Party. In pushing this wishful narrative, they missed the fact that Hispanics, rather than moving toward group identity, are actually moving away from it.
This doesn’t mean that Latinos don’t continue to cherish their common Hispanic heritage — they do. But there is no denying that, like other ethnic and immigrant communities from America’s past, Latinos are assimilating and are beginning to define their political views more individually, and less influenced by the generalized perceptions of the ethnic group to which they belong.
Clearly, a significant number of Hispanics are becoming swing voters. They want to be persuaded by ideas and policy proposals on specific issues, not by generalized appeals to identity. A major postmortem of the Latino vote in the 2020 elections conducted by EQUIS Research, a leading Democratic polling firm of Latino opinion, showed that Hispanic voters prioritized the economy and COVID-19 over Hispanic identity and even immigration, which has historically been promoted as a “Latino issue” by the left.
This is why Trump was able to make inroads with Hispanics in 2020. According to the EQUIS study, Hispanics were supportive of Trump’s policies and views on rapid vaccine development (74%), middle-class tax cuts (69%), reopening the economy (66%), COVID policy being set by states (62%), getting tough on China (60%) and living without fear of COVID (55%).
Even on immigration, Hispanics agreed with some of Trump’s signature policies — including more border spending (55%) and limiting refugees and asylees (51%) — demonstrating that their views on this issue have also become more nuanced and diverse. In a shot across the bow to conventional wisdom, 39% said they were supportive of the border wall.
Moreover, contrary to what progressive pollsters had argued, Latinos are not showing that they are to the left of the average American voter. Many are turned off by the extremism they see in today’s Democratic Party. They dislike efforts to expand public control of health care, impose vaccine mandates and business shutdowns, defund the police, curtail parents’ authority over their children and allow transgender women to participate in female sports.
They recognize in some of these Democratic policies the socialist philosophy that prevails in many of the countries where they came from and which motivated them, or their parents or grandparents, to migrate to America in the first place.
Not surprisingly, when the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, said he “doesn’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” Hispanics turned on him and likely gave the majority of their vote to his opponent, Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Hispanics similarly are repelled by the left’s agenda of racial confrontation and victimhood. They are coming here seeking the American dream and don’t want to hear that they won’t be able to achieve it because the country’s institutions and culture are racist. They know that despite its faults and past mistakes, America is a land of fairness and opportunity where they can succeed if they work hard. Accordingly, a January 2020 Pew study showed that 83% of Latinos believe that they have a better opportunity to get ahead in the U.S. than in the country of their ancestors.
It’s becoming apparent that there is no Latino “group think.” Hispanics are tired of being taken for granted by Democrats and, as they follow and engage in the battle of ideas, more and more are backing conservative policies and voting Republican. This trend is not the product of Republican “disinformation,” as some Democratic strategists in denial would have us believe, but the result of individual Hispanics thinking for themselves. They’ve come to appreciate that independence of thought is truly liberating.
Alfonso Aguilar is the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and former chief of the U.S. Office of Citizenship. He wrote this for the Miami Herald.
