Democrats are still trying to dismiss the importance of the Hispanic swing. The new line is that Hispanic voters like to vote for incumbent Presidents. People cite Bush’s 2004 run, which got 44% of the Hispanic vote, as a parallel. This could be true, but I have my doubts. 2004 was an election where the incumbent won, by a larger margin than in 2000; Whites also shifted towards Bush in 2004. 2020, in contrast, was an election in which the incumbent lost; Hispanics moved in the opposite direction to Whites. In any case, the “Hispanics like incumbents” theory is drawn from a very small sample, has no solid theory behind, is more than a bit patronizing, and in general smells like an ad-hoc self-serving piece of bullsh**t. It might be right, I guess, but Dems who embrace this explanation risk giving Republican operatives four more years to run wild with their
Hispanic outreach efforts. Not a smart move in my opinion.
OK, so if it’s not the incumbent advantage, what might it be? Various other theories include:
- A concern for law & order and a dislike of “defund the police”
- Annoyance with the term “Latinx”
- A greater-than-realized concern for border security and dislike of illegal immigration
- The macho culture of MAGA
- Fear of socialism due to personal or ancestral experience with leftist regimes in Latin America
- Hispanics assimilating into whiteness and acquiring the values of White voters
Any and all of these might be true. Or it might be, as David Shor says, that Hispanics are simply more conservative than we realize, and Trump’s performance is a kind of reversion to the mean.
But I think one big, powerful explanation has been sorely neglected: Economics.The boom of 2014-2019 — and it was a boom, even though we kind of ignored it — was good for everyone, but in percentage terms it was especially good for Hispanics:
Poll
