No uniformity seen in ethnic voting blocs

Old approach to constituency too broad

Even with a winner undeclared the morning after the polls closed, one early conclusion of the U.S. election was that Latino voters were a key part of the stronger than expected showing for incumbent President Donald Trump.

As a voting demographic, Hispanic Americans seem to have been an especially important contributor to Trump taking the 29 Electoral College votes in Florida, thanks in part to major gains in the Miami area, where Democrat challenger Joe Biden had an unexpectedly poor tally compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Texas was also regarded by Democrats as a possible state to flip blue, but Biden similarly underperformed Clinton and Texas stayed in the Republican column.

This prompts the tough insight, for Democrats especially, that ethnic groups are not uniform voting blocs. Hispanics are not a safe Democrat constituency, and treating them as such can encourage the complacency that turns voters away.

Trump improved on his results among Hispanic Americans since 2016, according to CNN exit polls, which also showed the Democrat Latino vote strong in Arizona, but weaker in Georgia and Ohio.

This stood in contrast to pre-election polling, some of which suggested Hispanic voters were 74 per cent for Biden. In some areas that held true, but nationally Trump increased his support among Latino men to more than one in three, and among Latina women to 28 per cent, in both cases higher than in 2016, according to an Edison Exit Poll.

Curiously, that same poll showed Trump doing better with all major demographic ethnic and gender categories except for white men, among whom he dropped to 57 per cent in 2020 from 62 per cent in 2016.

African American voting patterns were much less of a shock, seeming to stay closer to the projected split of being nearly 90 per cent for Biden, and with men more likely than women to support Trump.

Trump's success with the Hispanic demographic is also Joe Biden's failure, as some of his fellow Democrats concede.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic US Representative from New York, for example, said on Twitter she would not comment on general results “as they are evolving and ongoing, but I will say we've been sounding the alarm about Dem(ocrat) vulnerabilities w/ Latinos for a long, long time. There is a strategy and a path, but the necessary effort simply hasn't been put in.”

Partly this Republican shift of the Latino vote reflects a natural ideological alliance with white evangelical Christians, such that the Evangelicals for Trump event in Florida became Latinos for Trump.

Partly it is a general cultural conservatism, even apart from religion, such that the Trump campaign's emphasis on law and order was an appealing message.

Many Latino voters also have experience of life under Latin American socialist dictatorships, which was a key part of the anti-Biden messaging, claiming he was in the pocket of a radical left wing socialist conspiracy and likely to support socialist strongmen like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

“The Cuban community in Miami has been through a communist regime,” said Marti Mees, a Cuban immigrant and Republican activist, in an interview with Daily Telegraph reporter Rozina Sabur about why those voters came out in force behind Trump. “We believe in law and order, we believe in family values and we believe in freedom. That's what President Trump offers.”

NBC News exit polls had Trump taking 55 per cent of Florida's Cuban American vote.

There is also a demographic shift at play. Pew Research projected this was the first election in which Hispanic voters are the largest ethnic minority group, narrowly overtaking Black Americans in the range of 12 to 13 per cent.

All of this is against the backdrop of Trump's frequent comments about Mexican rapists, drug dealers, gangsters and criminals, and his Mexican border wall. His administration also pursued a policy of discouraging Latin American refugees and separating children from their parents when apprehended at the border.

But Biden had no good reply. Like any ethnic group, Hispanic Americans have internal diversity despite the broad patters. There are Puerto Ricans in New York and Mexicans in California, who are more likely to vote Democrat than Cubans

WE'VE BEEN SOUNDING THE ALARM ... FOR A LONG, LONG TIME.

or Venezuelans in Florida. There are others whose ancestry is in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, other Central and South American countries.

The concern for the Democrats is that the old way of approaching this constituency is too broad. The fear is that Democrats might have been fooling themselves by relying on polls that show, as Pew Research did in October, an increase in Hispanic voter confidence in Biden's ability to manage important issues like the pandemic, compared to an unchanged negative view of Trump.