Are Democrats really “losing” Latino voters?

Will 2024 become the year that finally disproves the idea that demographics are destiny? For roughly the first two decades of this century, the idea of a rising, permanent liberal Democratic majority buoyed the hopes of liberal politicians, Democratic strategists, and progressive activists. A younger, diversifying electorate, the eroding power of white voters, the rise in college education and growth of cities, and integration of nonwhite immigrants into the electorate would make it all but impossible for a conservative, nativist, elite Republican Party to hold on to power. Barack Obama’s victories proved as much — and if it weren’t for the Electoral College, Hillary Clinton might have too. These assumptions remained widely accepted on the left, despite warnings from some, until November 3, 2020 — when Florida was quickly called for Donald Trump. Hispanic-dominant parts of the state were swinging right, as were overwhelmingly Hispanic counties in Texas, and Democratic congressional candidates were faring worse than expected in diverse counties. The nation, it seemed, was on the verge of a racial realignment. Trump would end up significantly improving on his margins with Latino voters that year, and Republican candidates would hold on to those gains during the 2022 midterms. If the polls are right in tracking trends this cycle, Trump stands to either hold onto that level of support or grow it even more in less than a month. But what’s driving this shift? In political and media circles, it’s often framed as a question of Democrats “losing” Latinos. More specifically, commentators ask whether the party has taken positions or endorsed policies that have driven Latinos away, while strategists wonder if a better messaging or campaign strategy can bring them back. That Trump seems to be narrowing margins and increasing vote share as he demonizes migrants — particularly Hispanic ones — makes this a particularly vexing question. There’s certainly some merit to this line of thinking. Indeed, the Democratic Party has changed since Trump’s rise, and some of those shifts may have alienated Latino voters. And Trump himself, despite overt racism, does seem to have struck a chord with some Latino voters. But asking what Democrats have done to “lose” Latino voters and what Republicans have done to “win” them comes with an unspoken assumption: that it’s primarily the parties that are changing, rather than Latinos themselves. And it’s possible, even likely, that that blindspot obscures a deeper trend: Hispanic and Latino Americans are becoming more mainstream; they’re diversifying and changing the nation; and in that decades-long process, the nation may also be changing them. It may turn out that the “Hispanic challenge” that worried conservatives two decades ago is not all that real. Nor is the progressive hope that diversity would lead to surefire ideological or political victory. Hispanic and Latino Americans may simply be following the trends of previous waves of immigrant communities: assimilating, diffusing across the country, and becoming as ideologically and politically diverse as native-born and white Americans are. Yes, the diversification of America’s Latinos poses challenges for progressives and liberals in electoral politics, but it also raises the specter that Latino identity may not be preordained to last forever. America’s immigrant communities have been here before Exact historical parallels are difficult to draw, but the most common comparisons to the waves of Hispanic immigration the country has received come from the Irish and Italian American experiences: groups that saw large and concentrated waves of immigration into big cities, faced discrimination, voted loyally for one party, but eventually became part of the mainstream. Before the Hispanic challenge, there were the Irish and Italian challenges. Both ethnic groups were the subject of differing levels of suspicion, prejudice, and worry about integration. Though white, they weren’t viewed as equals to Anglo-Saxon Americans. Their accents and native languages differentiated them from those living in the United States. Their Roman Catholic faith raised concerns about foreign or dual loyalties to the Pope. Though settling in a new country, they remained attached to traditions and their homelands — some Italian immigrants would return to Europe seasonally when work dried up in the winter. And their working-class identities and economic aspirations placed them in competition with native-born Americans while opening them up to accusations of draining the nation’s resources of social welfare. Yet both ethnic groups organized and attained political power by slowly working their way into the mainstream. They formed political organizations and advocacy groups in cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and allied with local party machines to attain electoral influence and exert political power, as New York’s Tammany Hall did in the 1850s for Irish immigrants. They’d eventually become powerful voting blocs within East Coast cities and states and key constituencies for winning national coalitions. Over time, as they grew in number and reach across the country, they would also experience political realignments at the national level that made them less cohesive. For much of the early half of the 20th century, these groups behaved as unified voting blocs, bound by a cohesive social identity. At varying points, they formed key parts to national Democratic winning coalitions. But over time, that cohesion faded. By the 1980s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Italian and Irish American voters were no longer a bedrock Democratic constituency — and by the 2000s and in recent elections, their voting preferences more closely matched those of white voters in general. Suburbanization and geographic spread were major contributors to this shift — these populations were bigger, no longer concentrated within major East Coast urban centers subject to blatant party machine politics, and were expanding into suburbs and towns. They moved beyond the Northeast, until people with either Italian or Irish ancestry made it to every part of the nation — whether red, blue, or purple. “The Irish vote has become not, unfortunately, the lockup of the Democratic Party,” a leader of an Irish American democratic PAC told the New York Times in 2020. “But it is one of the few swing votes, along with the Catholic vote, left in the United States, and you can see various patterns back and forth where the Irish in particular have gone one way or another.” The changing Latino future Trends within the country’s Latino and Hispanic population suggest that these Americans may be in the midst of a similar transition, a social and cultural shift that will have political impacts. Like the Reagan years did for Irish and Italian American voters, it may turn out that the Trump years accelerated the assimilation and political changes that Hispanic and Latino Americans were likely going to experience at some point in time. To be sure, there are differences between the waves of Irish and Italian American migration and Hispanic and Latino immigrants and their descendants: they aren’t all from one nation, nor do they all identify as the same race. But there is some evidence and important social markers that suggest they may be on a similar trajectory. First, Hispanic and Latino Americans now have a much more significant role than ever to play in both shaping national identity and influencing national elections. Hispanics account for one in five Americans today, numbering about 65 million in the US. Though they’ve traditionally been concentrated in a handful of states (California, Texas, and Florida), their numbers are rising at a faster rate in unexpected places: North Dakota and South Dakota have seen some of the sharpest Hispanic population growth rates between 2010 and 2020. As these populations have grown, they’ve also moved to places beyond the traditional immigrant enclaves and diverse coastal communities that were the landing point for the first waves of Hispanic migrants. That brings them into contact with white and non-Hispanic Americans, as well as voters with differing ideologies that may be advancing this shift in their politics. There’s some polling evidence of this: As recently as 2022, Latino voters in rural and suburban areas were more likely to say they’d vote for a Republican than those in urban settings. They were also more likely to approve of the overturning of Roe v. Wade than those in (more liberal) urban environments. At the same time, more Hispanic and Latino Americans are eligible to vote than ever before: In 2000, just 7.4 percent of eligible voters were Hispanic or Latino. In 2024, that share has doubled. This growth is no longer coming from new immigrants naturalizing — it’s being driven by the birth of new generations of Latino and Hispanic Americans who are becoming further removed from the immigrant experience and, in turn, becoming assimilated and acculturated to the American experience. This diffusion across the country, slowdown in immigration, and rise in US-born Hispanic populations all mask a series of important developments among all Hispanics over the last few decades that suggest that assimilation is working a lot quicker than expected, Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center, told me. For one, Hispanic families increasingly contain people who aren’t Hispanic. Intermarriage rates have sharply increased since the 1980s and remained higher than other ethnic groups. In 2022, for example, 30 percent of Hispanic newlyweds were married to someone who wasn’t Hispanic. That’s up from 26 percent in 1980 — a higher rate than for Black or white Americans. In 2022 and 2023, at least one in five Hispanics were married to or partnered to a non-Hispanic person. And those rates were higher for US-born Latinos than they were for immigrants. Similarly, Hispanic intermarriage may have the effect of weakening a sense of distinct Hispanic or Latino identity as multiracial identity rises and diverse families grow, Lopez told me. Similar to Italian-Americans, Hispanic and Latino Americans are also gradually dropping their Spanish-language preferences, especially by the second or third generation. English proficiency is on the rise — and the trend is most noticeable among the majority of Latinos who were born in the US. Back in 1980, 72 percent of US-born Latinos spoke English proficiently, while 67 percent said they preferred to speak Spanish primarily at home. By 2019, 91 percent spoke English proficiently, and the share who would opt to speak in Spanish at home had dropped to 57 percent. This aligns with Pew’s findings that though Spanish-language use is still seen as an important marker of heritage, it’s not viewed as a necessary aspect to being considered or identifying as Latino or Hispanic. The notion of a distinct Hispanic and Latino identity has also been gradually shrinking. One of the most striking findings Lopez and his team at Pew tracked in the lead-up to Trump’s election in 2016 was the way different generations of Americans of Hispanic descent identified. Those closest to the immigrant experience were essentially guaranteed to identify as “Hispanic” or “Latino.” But this identity faded with subsequent generations. Second-generation Hispanic Americans were still likely to use one of those labels. But by the third generation, about a quarter opted not to, and by the fourth generation, Americans with Hispanic ancestry were about equally likely to identify as Hispanic or not. “Among adults who say they have Hispanic ancestors (a parent, grandparent, great grandparent or earlier ancestor) but do not self-identify as Hispanic, the vast majority — 81% — say they have never thought of themselves as Hispanic,” Lopez and his team reported in that 2017 survey. “When asked why this is the case in an open-ended follow-up question, the single most common response (27%) was that their Hispanic ancestry is too far back or their background is mixed.” While these social and cultural changes have been happening over the last few decades, we may only now, in the 2020s, be seeing what kind of political and electoral effects they will have on the rest of the nation. The 2020 election, and whatever happens in November, may just be the first indications of a long-term realignment, or they may just be Trump-specific disruptions that will settle down as a younger, more progressive-minded Latino electorate rises. Lopez and others are wary about calling a historical trend so early. “It’s helpful to draw the thread from Italian and Irish assimilation, but we’re looking at something new,” sociology and American studies professor Manuel Pastor told me. “You wouldn’t be seeing the simultaneous shift right and a shift left among younger Latinx otherwise. There’s a lot that’s new and different in this particular moment in history for a group as complex and heterogenous.” All this churn suggests that demographics were never destiny. But that doesn’t mean there’s any simple explanation for what’s driving Latino voters’ to the right. The parties, their strategies, and their candidates all surely play a role. Yet to focus just on that risks missing the bigger picture: As immigrants change the profile of their new country, the country also changes them.

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Are Democrats really “losing” Latino voters?