What are you basing this off: the exit poll which understated Dem support or the standard off-year valley electorate which has horrible Hispanic turnout? Cause there's a trend in the precincts familiar to those who watch these things where turnout drops by a lot compared to 2020, and dem margins shoot back to pre-2020 levels.
Imperial County is right of the state at this election; also it seems likely the exit poll will probably end up fairly accurate once all the votes are counted.
It obviously doesn't mean a "total political realignment" since this map really isn't meaningfully different from 2016/2018.
Republicans in 2015: "Just because the Latino vote trended Democratic in 2008 and 2012 doesn't mean it will in the future. Latinos are not a monolith and we can't assume that a group full of different voting blocs will continue to uniformly trend toward one party. We saw what happened after 2004."
Republicans in 2021: "Latinos swung Republican in 2020, so that settles that, they'll continue uniformly trending Republican in every state/region indefinitely until voting like rural white voters."
Another argument against Latinos trending Republican forever is that there's a strong element of "reversion to the mean" here, where the trend is back towards the 2000s equilibrium (which Republicans still haven't returned to) and only in very few extremely remote and rural places is the GOP exceeding their 2004 result. (2020 also had a correlation between Latino swing GOP and exposure to Spanish-language media, and given that immigration from Latin America actually fell off a cliff after 2005, Spanish-language media should matter less rather than more in the future).
