Everyone makes bad predictions from time to time. I've made plenty. The important thing is owning it and understanding what you got wrong. I get that it's tempting for Republicans to think that the R trend among Latinos will continue, and while I don't think the Clinton/Trump or No vote '16/Trump voters are going to all come back to the Democrats in 2022/2024, I don't think there's clear evidence of a large number of Biden/Republican '24 Latino voters.
You raise solid points, though I don’t fully agree with everything.
As for the Hispanic thing:
1) This is a special election with lower turnout, it may not be wise to judge trends based on this.
2) Hispanics in California are historically liberal just like Cubans in Florida lean conservative, so either way these aren’t the greatest barometer for that demographic in general. Also Hispanics aren’t monolithic at all, which both Republicans and Democrats seem to misunderstand.
3) We haven’t even gotten the full results yet, so I won’t judge any trends until we do. If you were to go based on the data released so far, it indicates that Newsom basically did similarly among coastal Hispanics in places like the Bay, LA, and OC, but likely regressed among inland Hispanics (SB, Riverside, Fresno and Staninlaus/Merced).
Right, my point is that the evidence isn't really there that there
will be a big R swing going forward (not that it's impossible, but we'd need to see more evidence to conclude that) and I don't think we're going to see a universal swing among all Latinos either way. We'll have to see what happens in 2022 (keeping in mind the national environment), but I could see an increasing split among urban/rural Latinos. You did predict a collapse in SoCal, and that doesn't seem to have happened, since it looks like he'll get pretty typical numbers for a Democrat there, so it might be good to recognize that.
