Hispanics Who Vote Republican

For John, BLUF:  Democrats may be counting on crushing President Trump in 2020, but they shouldn't count on sweeping the Hispanic vote, unless they are counting on all the illegal immigrants voting in the General Election.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Trump’s support among Hispanics and Latinos is real. Don’t assume it will fade.

From The Wash Post, by Data analyst and political columnist David Byler, 5 March 2019.

Here is the lede plus four:

Every few months, a strange thing happens in the news:  President Trump says something negative about Hispanics and Latinos or makes a new push for his border wall.  Someone then checks the polls and finds that his approval is well above zero percent with Hispanics and Latinos, and every journalist marvels that those numbers aren’t lower.  Then, before we have time to fully examine why Trump’s numbers with these voters are where they are, some other event bursts into the news cycle like the Kool-Aid Man and we all move on without figuring out this seeming conundrum.  A few months later, the pattern repeats.

We’re on the tail end of one of those loops right now.  Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency in an effort to get the wall built prompted some to dive into his numbers among Hispanics.  But other stories have started to crowd out wall news.  Before the mystery of Hispanic and Latino support recedes from the news cycle again, I decided to comb through the existing data and research on these voters’ decision-making to try to figure out how many of them support Trump and get a sense of why they do.

The data suggests that Republicans have a substantial, semi-soft floor with Hispanic and Latino voters and that Trump has basically hit it.  Moreover, this floor seems to built at least in part on identity and ideology, meaning that Democrats might not be able to eat into it by simply emphasizing immigration.

Finding the GOP’s floor

Trump often overstates his support among Hispanic and Latino voters — Democrats typically win the group by a wide margin, and Trump’s base among them isn’t huge.  But it is there.

Recent YouGov, Quinnipiac and Post-ABC News polls put his approval rating among Hispanics at 27 percent, 23 percent and 18 percent, respectively.  Those numbers average out to about 23 percent — that’s a substantial chunk, and it’s not so different from his 2016 vote share.  According to demographers Ruy Teixeira, Rob Griffin and John Halpin, Trump won 29 percent of the Latino vote against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

So, there is some fairly solid percentage of Hispanics who are conservative.  This is a surprise?

Here is the end of the take away last paragraph:

Trump’s standing with Hispanic and Latino voters ought to deliver a sharp wake-up call to Democratic strategists.  If a president who makes a border wall his signature and who demonizes immigrants from Latin American countries can still hold on to 30 percent of the voters most likely to be harmed by this rhetoric, Democrats are going to have to work harder to turn Hispanic and Latino voters into the base of their dreams.

As the analyst points out, the longer Hispanics living in America the more they identify as Americans, vice Hispanics.  This is not unlike immigrants from Europe.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff