Trump’s Latino support more widespread than thought
Even as Latino voters played a meaningful role in tipping the Senate and the presidency to the Democrats last year, former President Donald Trump succeeded in peeling away significant amounts of Latino support, and not just in conservative-leaning geographic areas, according to a post-mortem analysis of the election that was released Friday.
Conducted by the Democratically aligned research firm Equis Labs, the report found that certain demographics within the Latino electorate had proved increasingly willing to embrace Trump as the 2020 campaign went on, including conservative Latinas and those with a relatively low level of political engagement.
Using data from Equis Labs’ polls in a number of swing states, as well as focus groups, the study found that within those groups, there was a shift toward Trump across the country, not solely in areas like Miami or the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where the growth in Trump’s Latino support has been widely reported.
“In 2020, a segment of Latino voters demonstrated that they are more ‘swing’ than commonly assumed,” the report stated.
Ultimately, Trump outperformed his 2016 showing among Latino voters, earning the support of about 1 in 3 nationwide, even as President Joe Biden won those voters by a roughly 2-1 margin overall, according to exit polls.
All told, close to 17 million Latino voters turned out in the general election, according to a separate analysis published in January by the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative. That represented an uptick of more than 30% from 2016 — and the highest level of Latino participation in history.
With the coronavirus pandemic and the related economic downturn taking center stage on the campaign trail, Equis Labs found that many Latino voters — particularly conservatives — had focused more heavily on economic issues than they had four years earlier. This helped Trump by putting the spotlight on an issue that was seen as one of his strong suits and by drawing some attention away from his anti-immigrant language.
In focus groups, Equis Labs’ interviewers noticed that Trump’s history as a businessman was seen as a positive attribute by many Latino voters, who viewed him as well positioned to guide the economy through the pandemic-driven recession. Partly as a result, the analysis found, many conservative Latino voters who had been hanging back at the start of the campaign came around to supporting him.
Driving up turnout among low-propensity voters — something that Sen. Bernie Sanders had sought to do during his campaign for the Democratic nomination — did not necessarily translate into gains for Democrats in the general election, the study found. People who were likely to vote generally grew more negative on Trump’s job performance over the course of 2020, but among those who reported being less likely to participate in the election, his job approval rose.
This finding is likely to fuel hand-wringing among Democratic strategists who worried that Biden had not done enough to court skeptical Latino voters before November.
The movement toward Trump appeared mostly “to be among those with the lowest partisan formation,” the analysts wrote. “We know enough to say these look like true swing voters. Neither party should assume that a Hispanic voter who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 is locked in as a Republican going forward. Nor can we assume this shift was exclusive to Trump and will revert back on its own.”
Chuck Coughlin, a Republican pollster in Arizona, said he was unsurprised by the results of the Equis Labs report, given what he said had been a concerted effort by the Trump campaign to win Latino support.